Creative Writing: Hawksmoor Review

A towering work of historical fiction, supernatural thriller, and examination of faith versus rationalism, of enlightenment versus mystery, and the passage of time itself, Hawksmoor is a delightfully scary, suspenseful, intriguing book by Peter Ackroyd.

The book contains two parallel narratives, that of Nicholas Dyer, an architect and pagan in the 1710s, who is commissioned to build seven churches, and that of Nicholas Hawksmoor, a detective in the 1980s, who is sent to investigate seven murders that happen in the same seven churches around London.

It's also one of Bowie's Top 100 Favourite Books.  Bowie himself mentioned the book in his short promotional film for his 2003 album Reality:

There's a writer in England called Peter Ackroyd who wrote a book called Hawksmoor, I think it was, about churches designed by an architect who was a pupil of Christopher Wren's.  But he was also a pagan, and he built them on gravesites throughout London so they form the shape - these five form the shape of a pentangle.  It was a very powerful book, and quite scary.  Leon Kossoff, the painter, must've been, absolutely thunderstruck by this book, because he left his home, which he very rarely does, and went and found this church, Christ Church in the East End of London, and started painting it obsessively. [x]

As to my opinion of the novel itself, I tried to read it twice before, but both times I tried to read it, I became too busy to focus on the book, not to mention I found it deeply disturbing and rather scary to read about.  It's quite spiritually dark, and the sense that the demonic spiritual forces within its pages are alive and well and living in London makes for a most unsettling reading experience.

The atmosphere Ackroyd builds is astonishingly vivid, his background as a professional historian serves him well as every dark detail he describes about the history of London and its churches feels like it has an authoritative weight behind it, an element of truth embedded within the story.  As Bowie himself remarked, Ackroyd, like himself, seemed to see London as a place with an churning darkness hidden under its facade, a place with a type of unrest that is due to the thousands of years of history, intrigue, and people that have made it.

Although truth itself is rather subjective in the story, as the narrative prefers to use history and time, via its parallel narratives, to illustrate our constantly shifting perspectives on everything from religion to politics to art to humanity itself.

The thematic work in this book is by far one of its most impressive features, aside from its fantastic atmosphere.  The tension Ackroyd draws between religion and paganism, enlightenment and mystery, God and man, the supernatural and the mundane, is an absolute delight to digest precisely because it brings up paradoxes and dualities that are rife in both true Christianity and what we find in life.

However, unlike Christianity, the book fails to offer any sort of hopeful reconciliation between these opposing concepts.  Instead, the novel offers a muddled, darker picture that perfectly captures the spiritual uncertainty in our postmodern world - where absolutes simply fade away with time, and patterns and purpose are merely part of the chaos which defines existence.  Yet for all of this bleak outlook, the novel's thread of spiritual reality (and a rather dark one at that) permeates the book to its core, making the message and the novel unsettling in the extreme.

Some personal favourite quotes of mine are as follows:

And yet in the way of that Philosophie much cryed up in London and elsewhere, there are those like Sir Chris. who speak only of what is Rational and what is Demonstrated, of Propriety and Plainness.  Religion Not Mysterious is their Motto, but if they would wish the Godhead to be Reasonable why was it that when Adam heard that Voice in the Garden he was afraid unto Death? The Mysteries must become easy and familiar, it is said, and it has now reached such a Pitch that there are those who wish to bring their mathematicall Calculations into Morality, viz. the Quantity of Publick Good produced by any Agent is a compound Ratio of his Benevolence and Abilities, and such like Excrement.  They build Edifices which they call Systems by laying their Foundacions in the Air and, when they think they are come to sollid Ground, the Building disappears and the Architects tumble down from the Clowds.  Men that are fixed upon matter, experiment, secondary causes and the like have forgot there is such a thing in the World which they cannot see nor touch nor measure: it is the Praecipice into which they will surely fall. 

'Nothing is impossible.  The impossible does not exist.  All we need is a new death, and then we can proceed from the beginning until we reach our end.'
'And what end is that, sir?'
'If I knew the end, I could begin, couldn't I? I can't have one without the other.'  And he smiled at Walter's evident perplexity.  'Don't worry, I know what I'm doing.  Just give me time.  All I need is time.' 

Walter was impatient to be gone.  'And so what do we do next?'
'We do nothing.  Think of it like a story: even if the beginning has not been understood, we have to go on reading it.  Just to see what happens next.'

As someone who received a strong education in the classics Western tradition, it was fascinating and disturbing to consider a perspective in which enlightenment and reason are hypocritical at best and comforting lies at worst, merely a way to pass the time that allows one to put their faith in Experience and Reason rather than anything remotely worthy of putting faith in (ie Christ).

Yet at the same time, although Dyer advocates for, what he calls, the "true religion" (the occult/paganism), I can't help but sympathise partially with his cause.  Obviously, I don't believe that the occult is the "true religion", but his belief that mystery, the ancients, and the unexplained are critical parts of reality is something that undeniably resonated with me.

I remember one class session getting into a debate with a professor over the fact that I wasn't bothered by the "mystery" of Christianity (specifically the fact that at some point, reason fails us for understanding God).  He was trained in hermeneutics, amongst other disciplines, and clearly manifested his faith in his love of philosophy and reason, being able to prove the rationality of God, etc.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this, but I also believe this is the standard method of worship in the western tradition, and that it could stand to be challenged.  The east has always been more in tune with mysticism, the supernatural, and the unexplained, and as a result, I believe that the east has an easier time accepting that which cannot be explained, the end of reason, as it were, as relating to faith.  Thus, the dichotomy presented in Hawksmoor was positively superb to see played out as I think that it illustrated a common problem in the western Christian tradition of rejecting the fantastic/mystical.

Overall, I found the book a fairly compelling one, and I would recommend it, although not as strongly as some of Bowie's other favourites.  Although, this could also be because I personally find that I lose interest in mystery books more than other genres, so this one was harder for me to get into.  That aside, it was extremely well-written - good character development, a solid plot, suspenseful and scary, with great structure and pacing.  If you enjoy mysteries, postmodernism, and historical fiction, this one really takes the cake.  3.5/5