BOOK OF THE MONTH
London Orbital
by Iain Sinclair
Granta (1862075476)
Reviewer: Joe Harvey — Bibliographer, Lindsay and Croft.
"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life," goes Dr Johnson's proverb. Iain Sinclair, one time book dealer, sometime poet and London's unofficial psycho-geographer, has penned numerous works about his walks through the City and although his most recent, 'London Orbital' is a departure from his usual stomping grounds, moving out to the M25 motorway for psychic inspiration, it doesn't look as though Sinclair is tiring of his beloved London just yet.
I doubt if Dr Johnson, when he said "life", would have thought of the places Sinclair finds life affirming, but this "mad orbital walk" through the desolate retail parks, out of town shopping centres and the post-industrial estates of Staines, Watford, Dartford and beyond is probably Sinclair's most accessible and most lively work to date.
This is the territory where London, "gives up it's ghosts", the dividing line, Sinclair feels, of the city's very identity, and this 422 page tome — idiosyncratic travelogue, set to the background of New Labour, Mad Cow Disease and The Dome — succeeds in illuminating the millennial tensions of the city and in turn the whole of Britain with great effect.
Accompanied by the likes of pop-art terrorist, Bill Drummond, Sinclair's walk around the 122-mile long motorway is a form of cultural exorcism at heart; his gaze is unremitting, intense and thankfully for us often spirals off into hilarious cul-de-sacs of bile-fuelled humour. It's his determination to walk into these places, the uncharted wastelands of modern Britain and force through incantation some kind of meaning through the numb tarmac that makes this book a genuinely exciting read. What Sinclair's hero JG Ballard, (who makes a brief appearance along the way) calls the "faceless dead-land of inter-urban sprawl", is the territory Sinclair thrives on because it's been forgotten, it really is uncharted and surreal, and it is where the cracks of our culture show up most profoundly.
James Joyce, it's been said, would deconstruct labels on beer bottles if you took him into a pub and Iain Sinclair is a similarly intense companion. Someone else walks across a motorway bypass they see concrete and grass, Sinclair sees, political agendas, ley lines, pastoral myths, burial mounds, disenfranchised futures and the ghosts of pagan pasts. The word 'palimpsest' was invariably invented to describe his particular brand of literary metal detecting. He'll conjure up the ghosts of a Saxon King, Margaret Thatcher and an obscure Victorian novelist in the same breath, then relate them all to a piece of graffiti he's seen on the side of a corporate warehouse. It's inevitable that this kind of writing can become too convoluted and clever at times, (who else would coin the phrase "riverne hermeticism" but Sinclair), an overload of literary and obscure cultural references, but the landscape of 'London Orbital' is particularly fertile ground, and the glimpses of commuter belt Surrey alongside "CCTV estates concealed by managed stretches of ancient woodland", toys with London's relation to the pastoral myths that haunt modern England in fascinating ways.
"We need to explore total alienation" JG Ballard said, and what better place to start than the M25. Ballard also said "the periphery is where the future reveals itself", and 'London Orbital' has that curious mix of poetic insight, travelogue and political critique of New Britain that cuts open contemporary England, revealing a plethora of uncomfortable and fascinating truths about how we live and consume.
The M25 is not Bill Bryson country, but who knows maybe a Rough Guide to the motorway and its underpasses will be printed next year and the National Trust will open teashops along route. It's probably safer to say that Sinclair and his array of madcap journeymen are the only ones crazy enough to walk such a stretch and in the colour photos at the centre of the book, you can't help but see Sinclair, hiking boots on sat under a motorway underpass, as some kind of post-modern day Mallory or Shackleton.
'London Orbital' in this sense is a mysterious flag planted in the desolate outer reaches of Empire London, a triumph of a unique, bizarre and individual human spirit.
