I picked up Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor as an entry on David Bowie’s essential top 100 books – and I am so glad I did. I have heard nothing about this author, and what a treat it was to read this obsessive mystery novel about poverty, history, murder, architecture, and how coded occultism and superstition, as well as the echoing curse of death, can inject itself so deeply and linger for centuries in the history of a city.
Ackroyd seems like one of those authors with a local flavour – particularly the European kind – that doesn’t always transcend the ocean to a career of distinction in the United States. This novel was a complicated one, after all, and the rest of Ackroyd’s catalog are biographical novels of the local variety. This book seems to reflect that as well, after all. But the treat of engagement with a subject I know little about, combined with a murder mystery and philosophical meanderings on the meaning of art, architecture, and existence, as well as parallel plots and narratives that rival the tight storytelling in Back To The Future,… man, is this a treat.
It is funny, well written, and the clockwork of the pacing is miraculously done. Questions about what the purpose is of religious institutions as buildings, but also potential mausoleums built on the blood of the innocent glorifying an angry god, and what the modern mind has no concept of in terms of intentions and outcomes. While very much historical fiction with many aspects clearly fabricated, Ackroyd has a penchant and talent for research-driven storytelling that is deeply trustworthy in its accuracy and confidence.
This was an excellent novel that deserves to be revisited in the 21st century. A great time for any fans of historical fiction, mystery, the occult and horror, and the humor in all of it.
Garrett Zecker 