Books: Double Time Hawksmoor

• Share

Terror, insists the protagonist of this ingeniously macabre novel, is the % lodestone of the architect's art. It is a bizarre aesthetic, but then, Nicholas Dyer is hardly your everyday architect. A brooding protege of the great Christopher Wren's, he is carrying out a commission to design seven new churches in the London of the early 18th century. Despite this service to Christianity, Dyer's true, secret faith is satanism. In his crazed vision, those seven churches are temples built to appease the demons of hell, and he sees to it that their stones are washed by the blood of human sacrifice.

Interspersed with this grisly tale, told in period prose, alternating chapters of the book unfold the somewhat grayer story of a 1980s police superintendent named Nicholas Hawksmoor. Another moody loner, Hawksmoor is investigating a series of murders at various 18th century churches, all built by Dyer (of whom he has never heard). The superintendent plunges into an intuitive pursuit in which he begins to identify with the killer. His prime suspect, often glimpsed around the churches, is the spectral figure of a derelict with a knack for drawing. Is it the ghost of Dyer? As Hawksmoor closes in, his overstrained mind and the novel's parallel narratives dissolve into a mystical blur without quite settling the question.

Unsatisfying as this may be for armchair detectives, it preserves the phantasmagoric mood essential to Hawksmoor's impact. Ackroyd, 36, a versatile English writer whose biography of T.S. Eliot was widely praised two years ago, has a gift for historical pastiche. His 18th century is a battleground where the rational temper of the modern world, championed by Wren, contends with the medieval occultism embraced by Dyer.

The best parts of Hawksmoor are the evocations of 18th century London street life, with its whores and beggars, its hordes of homeless, its "Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, allways tumbling or takeing Fire, with winding crooked passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch." In the eerie interplay between the earlier age and our own, Ackroyd has fashioned a fictional architecture that is vivid, provocative and as clever as, well, the devil.