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Cargando... Hawksmoor (1985 original; edición 1993)por Peter Ackroyd
Información de la obraHawksmoor por Peter Ackroyd (1985)
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"Destruction is like a snow-ball rolled down a Hill, for its Bulk encreases by its own swiftness and thus Disorder spreads." The novel’s main protagonist, Nick Dyer, ( partly based on the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor who worked alongside Sir Christopher Wren), is a follower of a Satanic cult who consecrates his churches with human sacrifices. Hawksmoor is a 1980's detective investigating a series of murders that mirror those committed in the name of Dyer’s art. This is my third novel by the author having previously read 'The Lambs of London' and 'The House of Doctor Dee' so in some respects I knew what to expect. The novel will be based on a real historical character but mixed with a modern fictional character, the real world colliding with the fictitious world. The setting for the novel will be London but it will be a far darker and gloomier London than what the tourist of today is going to see with its Tudor smells and noises. Ackroyd’s narrative will shift between the early 18th century and the 1980s, as does the idiom. In all these respects this book doesn't disappoint. Difficult to do justice to this complex book with so many parallels in its interwoven narrative that switches between the early 18th century and late twentieth. The narrative of Nicholas Dyer, based on the real life Nicholas Hawksmoor - whose name Ackroyd gives instead to his 20th century detective - is an impressive recreation of the thought processes and even the style of expression, down to the eccentric spelling and frequent capital letters, of a deeply sinister character whose nihilism and devil worship has been formed from the trauma of witnessing his parents' deaths in the plague and from the education given subsequently by a cult leader who took him in off the streets. Dyer secretly adds elements to the seven churches he designs, to embody the power of his negative religious beliefs and to ensure that the churches form an everlasting nexus of murder and degradation, sanctifying each with a human sacrifice, but as time goes on, becomes increasingly paranoid that others are onto him, with disastrous results for two of his work colleagues. Centuries later, it seems that someone is repeating the human sacrifices with many parallels and Hawksmoor unravels as he fails to solve the killings. I like most the 18th century parts of the novel. I couldn't take to Hawksmoor, finding him a cipher rather than a character and found the ending baffling. This novel is in the form of two plot-poor stories separated in time. One is that of the fictional architect, Nicholas Dyer, who was both responsible for designing seven London East End Queen Anne churches and a serial killer with a peculiar mystic religion of his own, and the other is a modern doppelgänger-like detective named Nicholas Hawksmoor who is investigating a series of murders occurring at these same churches. The novel alternates between these narratives and progresses with the physical and mental deterioration of both characters. The writing is darkly atmospheric, cynical, horrific and dream-like. It is handled very well with Dyer’s dialogue apparently modeled on that of Samuel Pepys. I found the novel riveting, but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying since it is not an actual detective story, and the resolution seemed vague. In a 1989 interview in Bomb magazine, as quoted in the Wikipedia article, the author said, The modern sections are weak, not in terms of language, but weak in terms of those old-fashioned characteristics of plot, action, character, story. I looked up these churches and they are quite impressive massive-appearing structures. I presume that they were not built using human sacrifice. The churches were actually designed by an architect named Nicholas Hawksmoor. One of the churches in the novel, Little St. Hugh, is fictional, although Little Saint Hugh was an actual 9-year-old boy whose murder in 1255 was called a ritual child murder and attributed to the Jews by King Henry III and the Bishop of Lincoln.
Hawksmoor speaks the words of romantic duality, and is in a number of ways a double book. It consists of two alternating narratives, one of which is set in the 18th century and the other in the present, with the earlier delivered in the first person. Each of the two principal actors glimpses his double in passing, as a reflection in a glass, and each stands to the other in the same relation – a relation which presupposes, as in many other Gothic texts, some sort of metempsychosis or rebirth. Both of these men are disturbed or mad. Nicholas Dyer is imagined as the builder of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches in the East End of London: the enlightened edifices of a rational Christianity are thereby ascribed to a devil-worshipper, while the name ‘Hawksmoor’ is assigned to the Detective Chief Superintendent who, in the later narrative, frets himself into a delirium over a series of stranglings which take place in the vicinity of the churches. The later crimes duplicate those committed by Dyer, who has wished to baptise his churches with the blood of young victims. ''Hawksmoor'' is a witty and macabre work of the imagination, intricately plotted, obsessive in its much-reiterated concerns with mankind's fallen nature. It is less a novel in the conventional sense of the word (in which, for instance, human relationships and their development are of central importance) than a highly idiosyncratic treatise, or testament, on the subject of evil. PremiosListas de sobresalientes
In 18th-century London, squalor vies with elegance as architect Nicholas Dyer is commissioned to build new churches in the aftermath of the Great Fire. CID Detective Hawksmoor, 250 years later, investigates a series of murders that have occurred on the sites of certain 18th-century London churches. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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What I got from this book: there are two blokes named Nicholas, one is a dull satanist who builds churches with a secret ingredient in the 1710s, and one who investigates murders in those churches in the 1980s.