A voice from the past
Francis King
HAWKSMOOR by Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton, £8.95
The epithet 'clever' has tended to become a pejorative among reviewers themselves obtuse. But however great my obtuseness about Peter Ackroyd's new novel in particular or about fiction in general, I intend it to be in no way pejorative when I describe his Hawksmoor as diabolically clever.
`Diabolically' is here as much the right adverb as 'clever' is the right adjective, since the central character of the novel, to whom the author ascribes most of the major architectural achievements of Nicholas Hawksmoor — with the addition of a Church of Little St Hugh in Moorgate, for which one will look in vain among Northgate House, Electra House and the Provident Mutual Life Assurance Building — but a far shorter life span (1654-c.1715 instead of 1661-1736) and a different name, is a secret adherent of the old pre-Christian religion of Britain and therefore, in ess- ence, a Manichean.
The name that Mr Ackroyd gives to this weird character is Nicholas Dyer. St Nicho- las is, of course, the patron saint not merely of sailors, pawnbrokers and Aber- deen but also of small boys. However, so far from protecting small boys — though the last of his churches, Little St Hugh, bears the name of a boy martyr — this character offers them up as human sacri- fices whenever he embarks on the raising of one of those edifices on which H. S. Goodheart-Rendel passed the verdict: 'He [Hawksmoor] was always inclined by tem- perament toward that which is sombre and awe-inspiring. . . . His art was invariably severe and cold, and to some it will even seem pitiably joyless.' The first-name Nicholas was therefore, one guesses, chosen by Mr Ackroyd because of its suggestion of Old Nick, the Devil. The words 'die', 'dead' and 'death' recur so frequently — there is scarcely a page on which at least one of them does not appear — that the surname Dyer no doubt also has a relevance to the grisly theme.
A few weeks ago, in his Diary in this journal, Christopher Booker commented amusingly on the 'creative nostalgia' — the craze for everything quaintly antiquated from sackbuts to corn-dollies, from steam fairs to jousting — that is such a puzzling feature of our times. That creative nostal- gia is increasingly taking over the English novel, with this autumn alone producing three possible Booker contenders, each of which is written in a deliberately archaic manner.
As could at once be perceived from his The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, Mr Ackroyd is the most adroit of pasticheurs. In consequence, much of the pleasure of this new novel derives from his extraordin- ary ability to speak through the thin lips of his Nicholas Dyer with total conviction. Inevitably, the pedantic will find occasion- al words and phrases either not in use in the early 18th century or else in use with meanings subtly different; but the sense that this unloving, unloveable, half- demented man of genius is truly speaking to one across a gap of some 350 years is uncanny.
At intervals through Dyer's self- revelations, Mr Ackroyd interpolates the story of how a present-day senior detective sets about investigating a series of murders of young boys around or under the chur- ches built by Dyer-Hawksmoor. This de- tective's name is, significantly, Nicholas Hawksmoor; and his side-kick and Dyer's side-kick share, again significantly surely, almost the same name: Walter Pyne in the first case, Walter Payne in the second. Increasingly, the detective — who, to the end, remains a dispiritingly lifeless and shadowy character — senses something supernatural about the murders, as though out of the labyrinthine tunnels under the sites of the churches there were seeping up some hallucinogenic miasma from a past stretching back to the Plague and the Great Fire that followed it. As Hawksmoor obsessively pursues this improbable hunch, his colleagues begin to whisper about his sanity — just as Dyer's colleagues, in the other narration, have begun to whisper about his.
In general, Mr Ackroyd is more success- ful with the obviously difficult than with the apparently easy — with Dyer more than with Hawksmoor, with the London of Wren and Vanbrugh more than with the London of Spence and Seifert. In the Dyer sections one finds oneself constantly gasp- ing with admiration at the way in which there emerges, as out of a swirling fog, a recreation of early 18th-century London in all its squalor, poverty and danger on the one hand and all its elegance, rationality and intellectual vigour on the other. Here is a fitting battle-ground for a contest between past and future, superstition and scepticism, darkness and light. The sec- tions set in a present-day London of gloomy lodging-houses, rancid doss-houses and playgrounds raucous with children possessed of the age-old wisdom of the slums, are less vivid in their observation, less arresting in their tone. Like a spiritual- ist medium, Mr Ackroyd seems best able to grip the attention when he is the instrument for a voice not his own.
Precisely what links Dyer the architect and Hawksmoor the detective to each other so ineluctably and so what knits together the alternating sections of the novel is something that, for the moment at least, remains obscure to me. In building his churches, Dyer's self-confessed aim has been to create a mystical 'Figure', an `everlasting Order', with the seven noble edifices representing the seven planets, the seven circles of heaven, the seven stars in Ursa Major and in the Pleiades, the seven marks of the martyrdom of Little St Hugh, and, above all, the seven demons. This aim has been apprehended by the detective Hawksmoor through no process of logic but through a revelation that flashes on him because of a mysterious affinity be- tween him and the revenant from the past.
At the close of the book, detective and mass-murderer find themselves seated side by side in 'the great square room' that is the Church of Little St Hugh (the one church that, significantly, has no existence in reality). Even though their eyes do not meet, each becomes the mirror-image of the other, each 'a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity'.
The scene, like so many others in the novel, is hauntingly written. Yet, some- how, it does not quite come off, leaving the reader like a child begging for elucidation on the threshold of comprehension. There is no doubt, as I have already said, that the book is a diabolically clever one; but it poses the question whether the obfuscation from which one struggles to emerge at the end is the fault of oneself or of an author who seems, essentially, to have conceived his book as a series of brilliant scenes rather than as an organic whole.
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