Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
"I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghil Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature."
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd (Hamish Hamilton, 1985)
More disruptive faffing around with time. This might become something of a theme. Or it perhaps it always has been a theme, there in the soil, there in the shadows, there in the cracks and the seams of the pavement, in the uncanny shadings of London's ancient holy places, the pinions of a city mortared with blood and fitful dreams…
One thing about psychogeography: it always seems like an awful lot of fun to write. And Peter Ackroyd is clearly having a great time here, at least in the Nicholas Dyer sections, which are all written in a heavily stylised eighteenth-century monologue. Scary monster speaks Super-Pepys.
So now I lye by Day and toss or rave by Night, since the ratling and perpetual Hum of the Town deny me rest: just as Madness and Phrensy are the vapours which rise from the lower faculties, so the Chaos of the Streets reaches up even to the very Closet here and I am whirl'd about by cries of Knives to Grind and Here are your Mouse-Traps.
Nicholas Dyer is a remixed and reimagined version of Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose weird architecture has been a potent source for writers looking to roll around in the pulsing London substrate. Ackroyd explicitly acknowledges Iain Sinclair's Lud Heat, "which first directed my attention to the stranger characteristics of the London churches", and the Hawksmoor churches also crop up in Alan Moore's From Hell ("A proper steeple shouldn't look like that!").
Dyer is building churches, seven in all, to complete a Great Work, a "Septilateral Figure" written across London; he conceals all manner of occult signifiers within the constructions, and he consecrates the foundations with fresh-spilled blood. And this violence somehow presses forward into or echoes back from contemporary London, where a detective called Nicholas Hawksmoor is trying to solve a loose collection of murders that make no apparent sense. No fingerprints. No weapons. Only the shadows of the churches, and tramps scribbling arcane symbols, and children singing songs that sound ancient and strange.
Another thing about psychogeography: it's a fun word. Fun in a kind of recursive way, in that both of its constituent parts have their own suggestions, pressing up against the unlovely compound. Psyche meant 'breath, life, soul', and then onto 'self', long before 'mind' barged its way into the conversation. And geo-graphy sits in interesting relationship to geo-logy: the latter a question of 'knowledge', but the former a much more flexible and interesting 'description', from graphein, which in turn comes from graphia, ‘to write’. To write the self of the earth, then.
That has the added bonus of sounding a bit like a joke about psychogeography enthusiast Will Self, which is handy, since he wrote the introduction to the 2010 Penguin reissue of Hawksmoor that I've just finished reading. As he puts it,
Ackroyd's aim is nothing if not ambitious: to expose the linear character of time as described by conventional narratives - whether real or invented - for the fabrication that it is, and to propel his readers into a zone of full temporal simultaneity.
Amusing, then, that Penguin republished it as part of their Decades series, pinning it firmly under a big label reading THE EIGHTIES. This mission even took up valuable blurb space on the back of the book.
The 1980s was the decade when Thatcher reigned and money talked. It was a time of boom and bust, yuppies, New Romantics, riots, miners' strikes, Live Aid and the Falklands, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Communism, and the triumph of shopping.
Unless I missed something, absolutely none of that stuff appears in the contemporary sections of Hawksmoor. Our detective is at one point sceptical as to the value of these new-fangled computers, but not a single victim is found strangled with their own leg warmers. Still, perhaps we can uncover a certain historical resonance. Here is Dyer, back in the eighteenth century, listening to Sir Christopher Wren chirruping on about exciting new developments in scientific technology.
Selenoscopes, Muscovy Glasses, Philosophical Scales, Circumferentors, Hydrostaticall Balances, and the rest … such vain Scrutinyes and Fruitless Labours are theirs, for they fondly beleeve that they can search out the Beginnings and Depths of Things. But Nature will not be so discover'd; it is better to essay to unwind the labyrinthine Thread than hope to puzzle out the Pattern of the World.
If we are to situate this book in the 80s, then, perhaps we need not to look to any of the decade's particulars but to something consonant: mordant doomspeaking in the face of relentless, horizon-scanning advancement. Here is our policeman, in a world where the post-war consensus is being dismantled and Thatcher's bright new future is being built, and all he can see is the shades of the past pushing through. A world trying to escape the past is being dragged back into it. By the neck.
Or perhaps that should be the other way around. After all, in the 80s London became a city rewritten by Thatcher, and that has continued through the post-Thatcher consensus: from the towers of Canary Wharf to the right-to-buy-to-let landlords, from the gutted municipal infrastructure to the privatised public squares, the capital is her diabolic Great Work, a grotesque, diabolic, churning hymn to the glories of the free market. "As the Fabrick takes its shape in front of you, alwaies keep the Structure intirely in Mind as you inscribe it…"
Has psychogeography rather fallen out of fashion these days? It feels like the word has, at least. Perhaps it's cashed in its London house and upsized to the countryside, swapped the dérive for Arthur Machen and 1970s public information films, and is now calling itself folk horror. Perhaps it's flirting with tweed. But I don't really know enough about enough to make that anything more than a joke, so I'll have to stop there.
Incidentally, Penguin picked five books for each of the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. For the 80s, alongside Hawksmoor, they republished William Boyd's An Ice-Cream War, Anita Brookner's Latecomers and John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed, none of which I've read; accordingly, I can't really comment on their fundamental eightiesishness. But the fifth was J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, which I have read, several times, for it is perfect.
It was published in 1980, and the film came out in 1987, so the technicalities are fine. But honestly it's hard to think of a less THE EIGHTIES novel: in setting, in vibe, and in the fact that it ends with one of those where-and-when notes from the author. "Stocken, Presteigne, September 1978". More delicious temporal simultaneity. Once you start looking for it, it’s everywhere.