Hawksmoor (1985) by Peter Ackroyd

I recently finished reading Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, a narrative woven around the figure of 18th-century architect Nicholas Hawksmoor and the very strange churches he built in the fast-growing London of the early 1700s. Poet Iain Sinclair had speculated ten years earlier that the Hawksmoor churches formed an occult pattern in the London landscape pointing to hidden and dark meanings. Peter Ackroyd took this idea and turned the historical Hawksmoor into Nicholas Dyer, secret Satanist intent on encoding his beliefs into the churches he was commissioned to build and consecrating each one with a blood sacrifice. Meanwhile, in our own time, the novel shows detective Nicholas Hawksmoor investigating a series of incomprehensible murders centred on those same churches and gradually becoming unhinged by his findings. Hawksmoor is an elusive, nightmare-like story in which nothing is really resolved, no answer provided for the mysterious interweaving and mirroring of times and events, and the only information we are provided with is that there is an unseen pattern behind the visible world which shapes what happens into recurring forms. The book is thin on plot, heavy on atmosphere, but moves compulsively towards a doom-laden conclusion. It reads very well, in a horrible way; a love-letter to Fate.