Dyer tells the reader. 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. Mr. Ackroyd's sense of drama is fiercest when it involves ideas rather than people. As for the luckless Detective Hawksmoor , whose voice is perhaps meant to be our own - he not only fails to solve his case but appears, on the novel's final page, to have fallen victim to the malevolent Dyer himself. At first glance this singular work of fiction would seem to have little in common with Peter Ackroyd's excellent biography, ''T. S. Eliot,'' published in 1984.
Women are sluts and prostitutes.
Clearly Mr. Ackroyd shares Eliot's high regard for the language of the Renaissance and for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Mr. Ackroyd is a virtuoso writer whose prose is a continual pleasure to read. 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. It is not surprising that he fails to catch his man, or even to grasp the pattern underlying the series of seemingly motiveless crimes. Nor is he conscious of the curious fact that he bears the name of the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor , who was Christopher Wren's assistant surveyor - the gifted architect of unconventional work who was responsible for the seven churches in which the novel's murders occur.