I've just finished reading Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor (a mere 17 years after starting it, giving up and bunging it on a shelf, 16 year old me clearly had less patience); it was, as Ackroyd nearly always is, dense, verging on the mystical and practically damp with the Thames' winter mist rising from the page.
I mention it purely because as I was reading it, as so often seems to happen, one of the central themes started to chime with a notion which has been bouncing around my head these past few days. I shan't test your patience by outlining the plot in any great detail but suffice it to say that in Hawksmoor the future is in part an echo of the past, the details repeat, the characters exist down generations.
Now, there's a more extensive (and probably more interesting) point to be made here about Hawksmoor being in an oblique sense a comment upon palimpsest, or on archetype, template, the workhorses of literature (which, given that Ackroyd is famous for rewriting history, and on occasion, other's books, would be reasonable enough). But, as with so much else in these brave new days of coalition politics, I choose to read it as a comment on the Conservative party. For, in the week that George Osborne showed the breathtaking lack of sense to let himself be photographed in Klosters (of which Rachel Johnson's bumbling defence in the observer was beyond satire, apparently it's okay because he satyed with friends, and Kosters is "old money" - genius) who amongst us did not look at the proselytising millionaire and think "Fuck me, it's Marie Antoinette"?
The lessons of history, people!
I mention it purely because as I was reading it, as so often seems to happen, one of the central themes started to chime with a notion which has been bouncing around my head these past few days. I shan't test your patience by outlining the plot in any great detail but suffice it to say that in Hawksmoor the future is in part an echo of the past, the details repeat, the characters exist down generations.
Now, there's a more extensive (and probably more interesting) point to be made here about Hawksmoor being in an oblique sense a comment upon palimpsest, or on archetype, template, the workhorses of literature (which, given that Ackroyd is famous for rewriting history, and on occasion, other's books, would be reasonable enough). But, as with so much else in these brave new days of coalition politics, I choose to read it as a comment on the Conservative party. For, in the week that George Osborne showed the breathtaking lack of sense to let himself be photographed in Klosters (of which Rachel Johnson's bumbling defence in the observer was beyond satire, apparently it's okay because he satyed with friends, and Kosters is "old money" - genius) who amongst us did not look at the proselytising millionaire and think "Fuck me, it's Marie Antoinette"?
The lessons of history, people!
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