Hawksmoor (novel) - Reception and Awards

Reception and Awards

Hawksmoor won two of the most prestigious British literary awards: the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award. It was reviewed predominantly positively after publication, among others by:

• Joyce Carol Oates for The New York Times:

Hawksmoor is a witty and macabre work of the imagination, intricately plotted, obsessive in its much-reiterated concerns with mankind's fallen nature. (Half the novel—its most energetic half—is related by Dyer himself in the years 1711–1715. The other half belongs to Detective Hawksmoor, whose voice, like his imagination, is far less inspired.) By the end of the novel the reader is likely to concur with Dyer's conviction that there is "no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe," if simply because Dyer's voice is so skillfully done. There are numerous set pieces here, all of them well done: a description of London under the siege of the plague; an autopsy performed by, of all persons, Christopher Wren; an evening at a London theater. Dyer's "romantic" churches at Spitalfields, Wapping, Limehouse, Greenwich, Lombard Street, Bloomsbury and Moorfields are poetically vivid, as is his encounter, as a boy, with a group of druid devil worshipers who convert him to their beliefs. IF Hawksmoor is less than perfect as a mystery-suspense novel it is primarily because Detective Hawksmoor is no match for his mad 18th-century counterpart: he lacks Dyer's passion as well as his uncanny sensibility. But in all, Hawksmoor is an unfailingly intelligent work of the imagination, a worthy counterpart in fiction to Mr. Ackroyd's much-acclaimed biography of Eliot.

• Peter S. Prescott for Newsweek:

"a fascinating hybrid, a tale of terrors that does double duty as a novel of ideas"

• Patrick McGrath for BOMB magazine:

"Hawksmoor is best fiction to date. It is a dark, complex novel narrated in part in perfect 17th-century prose"

• Peter Lewis for the Daily Mail:

"The skill with which Ackroyd creates a style and tone of voice for his narrator and sustains it throughout The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is a remarkable technical achievement, but it pales beside the ludic and verbal virtuosity of Hawksmoor, in which he plays far more elaborate games with fact and fiction, history and imagination. The dazzling erudition and ingenuity of Ackroyd's third novel bring to mind such authors as Borges, Nabokov, Pynchon, and Eco without seeming derivative in the pejorative sense."

Although most reviews were positive there were voices which criticized Hawksmoor as confusing or morally repellent, particularly in sexual terms (Hollinghurst, King, Maddox).

While most critics especially praised Ackroyd's imitation of 18th-century English there were critical voices here, for example Cedric D. Reverand II, who wrote that "Ackroyd's notion of the appropriate style seems at times idiosyncratic and more Jacobean–Mannerist than late senventeenth–early eighteenth century".

Hawksmoor is still being praised more than twenty years after its publication and is seen as an important work in Ackroyd's oeuvre. It has become the subject of numerous studies, especially on Postmodernism. Adriana Neagu and Sean Matthews wrote in 2002 that

" is anything but the archetypal 'early' novel. This history-spanning dual narrative prefigures the writer's pet themes, 'history-mystery' and the expression of a dialectic relationship between past and present. Coming together by way of the most unlikely mixture of the comical and the macabre, the lofty and the sordid, the book offers two historical perspectives: the early eighteenth century of London architect Nicholas Dyer, and the present day city of detective Nicholas Hawksmoor. Although told in alternating sequences, the two story lines collapse into each other and intertwine ambivalently, the novel offering a sample of the complex architectonic structure of Ackroyd's fictions."

Hawksmoor is praised for Ackroyd's "convincingly 18th-century prose" in the 2006 edition of The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English It was chosen by Penguin in 2010 as one of five novels representing the 1980s in their series Penguin Decades.

Peter Ackroyd himself is a harsh critic of his novel:

"I certainly haven’t looked at again, I wouldn’t dare; I’m so aware of all the weaknesses in it, it’s an embarrassment. The modern sections are weak, not in terms of language, but weak in terms of those old-fashioned characteristics of plot, action, character, story; they are rather sketches, or scenarios, and that rather disappoints me about it. But at the time I didn’t know anything about writing fiction, so I just went ahead and did it. It’s only recently I’ve come to realize you’re meant to have plots and stories and so on. strong, but in part it is a patchwork of other people’s voices as well as my own. Actually it’s not really strong at all but what it is, is an echo from about three hundred different books as well as my own. He doesn’t really exist as a character—he’s just a little patchwork figure, like his author. You see, I was very young then and I didn’t realize that people had to have definite characters when they appeared in fiction. I saw it as a sort of linguistic exercise; it never occurred to me that they had to have a life beyond words."