Street Wise
Pat Rogers
- Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
Hamish Hamilton, 218 pp, £8.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 241 11664 3 - Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer
Viking, 374 pp, £9.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 670 80094 5 - High Ground by John McGahern
Faber, 156 pp, £8.95, September 1985, ISBN 0 571 13681 8
It takes no time to see that Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor is a book wrought with extreme cunning. A slower discovery arrives, that this virtuosity on the surface goes with imaginative density and profundity of inquiry. Inquiry into many related topics: the vagrancy of youth, the corruption of obsession, the permanence of evil. Allusive throughout, the text (though it contains a character named Eliot) does not utter the passage from The Waste Land which seems to underlie its themes, the one on the ‘unreal city’ at dawn:
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to all 12,000 articles subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
Vol. 7 No. 17 · 3 October 1985 » Pat Rogers » Street Wise
pages 18-19 | 2001 words