[In the following review of Hawksmoor, Rykwert praises Ackroyd's literary skill, but finds flaws in the novel's historical details.]

Christchurch, Spitalfields: St George-in-the-East; St Anne’s, Limehouse; St Mary Woolnoth; St George, Bloomsbury; Little St Hugh, Moorfields—18th-century architecture buffs would expect the first five of these buildings to figure importantly in any book called Hawksmoor, but not the last one. The first five are among the masterpieces of Nicholas Hawksmoor (whom I think the greatest of all English architects). The last church is a fiction. In Peter Ackroyd’s book, it is the miniature crowning masterpiece not of Nicholas Hawksmoor, but of a quite different Nicholas—one Dyer, a supposed contemporary of the Hawksmoor of history, whose life, as told in this novel, bears great similarities to that of the great architect. Born in London a few years earlier than the real designer of the churches, Dyer (like Hawksmoor) is from early youth a clerk to Sir Christopher Wren and is employed in the Office of the King’s Works in Scotland Yard when he is killed by “gout of the stomach.” But the resemblance is limited. Dyer is a very different character from the historical Hawksmoor, and the key to the difference is given by that last, fictitious church.

The patron saint of Dyer’s last church is Little St Hugh of Lincoln (called “little” to distinguish him from the great bishop of Lincoln of the same name)—in other words, he is the ten-year-old boy whose alleged ritual murder launched a persecution of local Jews in 1255, and to whom very few churches anywhere were ever dedicated, though images of him were common enough before the Reformation. The plot of Ackroyd’s novel is at the end resolved (if that is the word) in that fictitious church. The story hangs on the similarities between Nicholas Dyer and the character who is in fact called Nicholas Hawksmoor in the novel—a contemporary detective whose 20th-century life runs parallel to that of the 18th-century Dyer: both work in Scotland Yard, both have ambitious assistants called Walter Pyne (each Walter thinks his superior is weird and old-fashioned), and both live in lodgings let to them by sentimental-lecherous landladies. What intertwines these two characters fatally is Dyer’s satanism, which leads him to perform a human sacrifice (preferably of an innocent, immature boy) at the foundation of every church he builds. These sacrifices are echoed in the 20th century by a series of murders carried out by some unknown agent, and Nicholas Hawksmoor is the detective assigned to the case.

The book is divided into two parts; in both, chapters alternate between the 18th and the 20th century. In the modern segments, the author-narrator tells the stories of the sacrificial victims for the first part and of Hawksmoor the detective for the second. Dyer himself narrates the 18th-century chapters of both parts and writes in a sustained 18th-century notation convincingly close to the actual epistolary manner of Hawksmoor the architect. But every now and then quirks of style may bring the reader up short, starting with the “And so let us beginne” of the first sentence. There is, for example, the irritating use of “rubbidge,” a word of which Dyer is very fond. “Rubbidge” was a Nottinghamshire dialect form for “rubbish” (which was the way Shakespeare spelled it). As a Londoner, the Dyer of the novel might be allowed “rubbage,” but nothing weirder. Then, too, Dyer spends too much time in seedy alehouses and on the close-stool for such a busy man. The main problem I have with Dyer, however, is that he is not a credible designer of the real Hawksmoor churches.

We know how the historical architect lived, and what he read: Descartes, Gassendi, Grotius—not (as Dyer does) almanacs and occultists. Perspective he would not have learnt from the tortured (and in England virtually unavailable) Wendel Dietterlin, as Ackroyd insists, but most probably from Solomon de Caus, well known as having worked with Inigo Jones, or perhaps from another popular master, the Jesuit Jean Dubreuil (whose book was familiarly referred to as “the Jesuit’s Perspective”) or even from Father Pozzo, two copies of whose book were in the architect Hawksmoor’s library at his death; if it had to be a Nüremberger, then the most likely perspective teacher was the most obvious one: Dürer, whose prints Hawksmoor avidly collected. Nor could the architect of such magnificent buildings have lived in squalid lodgings, feeding on meat brought in from the cook-house. Indeed, the historical Hawksmoor lived comfortably, almost opulently, had a large library, a sumptuous collection of paintings, prints and drawings, and worried about the fat buck that was his yearly due when they culled the deer at Woodstock (whence, perhaps, the gout!).

To such details one can add Ackroyd’s misconception of the whole business of making designs, and of seeing them built. Inevitably it follows that he has misinterpreted the very nature of Hawksmoor’s architecture, which is not melancholy, satanic and tortured, but clear, audacious, even strained in its use of antique precedent, and certainly never perverse or eccentric. In that sense Ackroyd does a positive disservice to the understanding of what all architecture is about—a misunderstanding compounded by the fact that it forms the foundation of his dense, brooding, almost hypnotic book.

On the other hand, even if an architect is half-hero of the book, architecture is not what Hawksmoor is about. It is, rather, a knowing meditation on universal themes: on death, time and recurrence. The novel is sustained by the parallels between Hawksmoor the detective and Dyer the architect, and its continuity is assured by prose enjambements, which carry the narrative not only over breaks between chapters and narrators, but also over the gap between 18th-century and modern English. A number of other heterogeneous elements have been welded into an almost “natural” unity in Ackroyd’s style—for instance, the recurrent nursery rhymes, which in several cases seem to come out of Iona and Peter Opie’s collections and which punctuate the narrative both in its 18th-century and its modern sections. Towards the end of the book, the prose at two points breaks into formal dramatic dialogue. In the modern section, this dramatized speech takes the form of a Beckett-like conversation between Detective Hawksmoor and a tramp from a doss-house (the detective’s assistant Walter sets down this exchange in a notebook). Whereas in the 18th century, it is a dialogue between Dyer and a “John Vanbrugghe: An Architect in Fashion.” The scene is an imitation Vanbrugh playlet. Here, too, the campy, frivolous Vanbrugh of Ackroyd’s book is very unlike the historical figure we know from his own letters and from historical documents such as the actual Hawksmoor’s accounts of him.

In the novel, the detective Hawksmoor and the architect Dyer (a two-headed hero) are both obsessive melancholics, one in the way he goes about his killings and the spilling of blood, the other in his gathering of minuscule clues—evidence which convinces him that a series of murders he is investigating, all neat stranglings, were committed by one person. Hawksmoor is made a (deliberately?) cliché figure—neurotic, shabbily dressed, a loner; like Dyer, he is obsessed with dust, is given to biting the inside of his mouth, and considers himself something of an intellectual. Yet it is not until the last three pages of the book that it occurs to Hawksmoor that the scenes of all the murders are churches designed by the same architect. A French, Italian, German, or an American detective would have tumbled straightaway, I think, and I wonder whether this fact alone says something about the place of architecture in English intellectual life.

The book’s narrative winds itself round the building sacrifices (which mark the turns in the maze of the 18th-century plot) and the 20th-century murders—their secular and even more sinister mirror-images. In the final resolution of the story, as Hawksmoor meets Dyer, his ghostly double, the sympathetic reader is tempted to suspect that the detective himself was the re-enactor of those 18th-century sacrifices, an unconscious murderer—and that there are yet more cryptic coincidences between Hawksmoor and Dyer than we already know.

As Frazer has noted, building sacrifices were once a universal phenomenon—so common that diabolism need not be invoked to explain them. In fact, I recall that a human building sacrifice was made as recently as the mid-19th century in Britain by a Whig landowner (I wish I remembered his name—I think I read about it in a DNB biography) who walled up “a very obnoxious person” in the pier of a bridge on his estate. The casting of horoscopes for building operations was also common enough in the 18th century; Christopher Wren, who stands for the enlightened man of reason in Ackroyd’s book, had them cast by the Astronomer-Royal, at least for St Paul’s and for Chelsea Hospital.

Is all this relevant to a work of fiction? Yes, if the work of fiction insinuates itself into a historical situation and draws on history for its interpretation. All narrative must be plotted, mis en trame, as it were, but the distinction between fiction and history is finally impassable. Thus, the very ambition of Ackroyd’s book puts the cautious if admiring reviewer on guard. Nevertheless, Hawksmoor is a brilliant exercise in the transformation of buildings into prose narration. The power of its writing as well as the continuity it maintains through all of its coruscating variations of surface and style justify one’s making the claim for this novel that it has the consistency of a prose poem—a status that few narrative fictional works achieve (Ulysses, of course, is the great exemplar). Whatever its blemishes, Ackroyd’s book must be considered as a high achievement of the storyteller’s art.