Is time speeding up and if so, when does it, like the banks, crash? Hawksmoor is set in the East End in 1714 and 1986. In the intervening years London changed quite a bit but not nearly a much as it’s changed since 1986. Hence the feeling of time accelerating. It isn’t that Hawksmoor is dated. It’s simply, and sadly, a doubly historical novel. In 1714 and 1986 London’s East End was populated by much the same people, hence the overlapping or circular time which is the book’s deceit. Spitalfields today? Limehouse? Not a poor vagrant or a cheeky cockney schoolboy or a boarded up terrace to be seen, just boozy City boys and girls and those who rush to Brick Lane on a Friday night because they smell money and think Bethnal Green’s happening and arty, positioned as it is at vortex centre. The vortex, that is, of n-billion £ regeneration into which unwealthy Londoners of every persuasion and race are being tossed, ending up where? Loughborough? Luton? Molten middle earth? Long may the low-rise council estates of Whitechapel continue to house the Bangladeshis who, since the 80s, have so helped raise the standard of cuisine Londonwide. With a crane on every inner street corner, otherwise known as the Boris skyline, London’s not burning nor plague infested but being scooped out by a regiment of JCBs.
Nicholas Dyer, architect, born 1654, is the anti-hero of Hawksmoor’s 1714 sections. Hawksmoor, a detective superintendent, is his 1986 doppelganger. Both work in Scotland Yard (the copper in New Scotland Yard), both say the wrong thing at the wrong time, both have an assistant called Walter and a nosey flirty landlady called Mrs West. Dyer, an undercover anti-enlightenment agent, is contracted to design six East End churches for Sir Chris. Wren, he who preaches the joys of science and rationality to the Royal Society. Nicholas, meanwhile, not least, you feel, because at the age of ten he saw his plague ridden mother turn into a stinking Thing, his father likewise, associates with other gods and devils and deposits sacrificial bodies, of young boys mainly, in the fabric of his six churches, starting with Christ Church, Spitalfields. The church, according to Wikipedia, was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Peter Ackroyd’s detective, whose brain is falling apart under the weight of the rationality which is detective work and of the six unsolved murders at the six Dyer churches, has the architect’s name. No wonder then, as the two characters’ alternate sections and narrative accelerate, that Hawksmoor and Dyer, sitting on a pew in the church of Little St Hugh (as far I can gather now St George–in-the-East in Cannon Street Road) fuse. Finally they speak with one voice, having been ditched by their respective bosses.
Ackroyd pulls off stylistic fusion by writing Dyer in high baroque with plenty of cap-initial abstract nouns and baroque spellings – terrour for terror – and writing Hawksmoor in uptight 20th century Brit-cop. The detective doesn’t do contracted auxiliary verbs – I am for I’m, he is for he’s, especially not when he’s speaking, and uses formal propositions of place – upon for on, beneath for under. ‘I know full well what you mean,’ he says on p192. He just about avoids Elstree comedy contagion by remaining firmly rooted in Ackroyd’s lovely prose, in this particular book rooted in Dyer’s baroque eloquence. ‘Terrour, I said softly, is the loadstone of our Art,’ p143 and ‘It [nature] does not yield, it devours. You cannot master or manage Nature.’ p144 is Dyer in conversation with the rationalist, superstition-busting Sir Chris. Savagely, ‘I [Sir Chris.] have long been of the Opinion … that the Fire was a vast Blessing and the Plaque likewise; it gave us the Occasion to understand the Secrets if Nature which otherwise might have overwhelm’d us.’ p143. Try saying that to someone who 40 years ago saw the plague turn their mother into a stinking Thing.
So here we have a fictional precursor of the Dionysus-Apollo duo, and the Romantic-Classical and the Arts-Sciences ones. Near the end of the book Ackroyd, through Dyer, offers a fabulous and true fusion of the duo: ‘Words must be plucked from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the instruments in the perfection of all work … If I were a writer now, I would wish to thicken the water of my Discourse so that it was no longer easy and familiar. I would chuse a huge lushious style! … I would imploy Phrases and fantasticall Terms, thus to restore Terrour, Reverence and Desire like wild lightning.’ p176. Timeless? Maybe. Time can stop? Maybe. But, Dyer tells us, time is circular. Hawksmoor from his end of time points out that experience is as different in the face of the same set of facts as individuals are different.
The best known symbol of circular time is ouroboros, the tail-biting serpent or dog of universal antiquity. Another way of describing circular time is eternity. Like Dyer, I’m persuaded I don’t need the science that spawned the big bang. Who needs it, time starting at some point and stopping at another, cranes sinking their hooks into London? Or will a London savagely destroyed regenerate itself, eternally? I don’t need that kind of mysticism either.
Judith Amanthis 