Product Description
'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' - Angela Carter. In "Downriver", Iain Sinclair traces the ruins of Margaret Thatcher's reign through the lens of a fictional film crew that has been hired to make a documentary about what's left of London's river life. The Thames may still flow through the heart of the capital, but life along its shores has changed dramatically. "Downriver" is a savage, satirical quest to understand how people's lives, government's policies and a legendary water land conspire together in a boggling display of self-destruction. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

geschilderd!!! an ogrepoets Ruprecht turdKnech!!!
the revenesent raddish said rather much all that concerning this book must be said. the style is the largest problem, which is followed by the tales. a work shouldn't transport you; and there are a fine line between the succulent and overstuffed prose of Turkey. downriver a breaking loose bird is. record this- if some obscure work is constructed as above/below, being the great book nobody's never read of, it are of some critics who try to pull one of the left field simply to print another one for each other. (and they had probably never read it in any way, too much a disturbance)...never forget that the work for a reason was desperately incomprehensible. dumme Dichters.

Genius...I think.
I'm not even going to pretend that I really know what this book was about, all I do know is that months after reading it, I cannot get the book out of my head.
Here is what I do know: the book is about London, a seedy side of London, a side of London that Dickens wrote about, only Sinclair is writing about the 20th century version of that London.The language is updated and exponentitally more graphic, the characters participate in activities that Dickens characters could not conceive of, and the plot is more convoluted, if there actually is a plot, that is.The book is divided up into 12 sections, and at first I thought the sections were connected, then I realized they weren't, then I thought they were, and then I still thought they were, but only in ways I did not understand.I was confused, enthralled, intrigued, frustrated, and fascinated, and only when exhausted did I put the book down, turning each page in the hopes that the next page woud contain the answers to the multitude of questions every preceding page produced.
One thing is not up for debate, though, and that is Sinclair's ability to write.Like Joyce, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, the highly underrated William Gaddis, Sinclair does what he wants with the English language and seems to do it with ease.At times dense, other times frivolous (not many, these other times), profane in a way that hints at sacredness, Sinclair challenges your every notion about what makes a good story, what makes a good book, what makes an interesting read.I do not read books twice- there are way too many out there to waste my time on the same one twice- but this one will be the exception to the rule.
Challenging- without a doubt.Worth it- most definitely.

... without a paddle.
Sinclair's book is the only one I have ever read that makes Joyce seem only mildly difficult. I hope Sinclair had a good time writing this; perhaps he'd consider writing "Explaining Downriver".

So, why did I give it 2 stars? The first star is for his ability to write. The second is in case my lack of understanding is due to my being lame rather than this story.

If you are looking for a difficult read that at least makes some kind of sense, try David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

a painted, polished turd...
reviewer ross pretty much said all that needs to be said about this book. the style is the biggest problem, followed by the stories. a work shouldn't bore you; but there is a fine line between succulent and overstuffed turkey prose. downriver is a burst bird.
remember this, if some obscure work is built up to be the greatest book no one's ever read outside of some critics trying to pull one out of leftfield to impress others (and they probably never read it anyway, too much of a bother)...never forget the work was hopelessly obscure for a reason. silly poets.

A mind-blowingly original novel from a master
Iain Sinclair is one of the masters of modern English prose, and he deserves to be much better known outside of Britain. If a writer's visibility were proportional to his sheer talent, Sinclair would have a profile as high as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, two other British writers with whom his talent is--at least--on a par.
"Downriver" takes us to Sinclair's familiar turf, the East End of London and eventully transports us all the way downriver to the mouth of the Thames, but the real geography mapped here is the one inside Iain Sinclair's head. This man's imagination is incredibly fertile, and it rarely flags. I would compare him to Pynchon, Grass, Kafka, even Garcia-Marquez. But I must also go further afield and compare him to Blake and Coleridge. One of his blurb writers calls Sinclair "a demented magus of the sentence." Now that I've read "Downriver," I understand exactly what that means. ... Read more

Product Description
'A book full of richness, unexpected enticements, short sharp shocks and breathtaking writing' - "Guardian". Welcome to the real, unauthorised London: the disappeared, the unapproved, the unvoiced, the mythical and the all-but forgotten. The perfect companion to the city. 'Exhilarating, truly wonderful, a cavalcade of eloquent writing. London demands an anthology like this to remind us of the irascible quirkiness of its residents, and we have Sinclair to thank for marshalling such a perverse and ultimately pleasurable exercise' - "Independent on Sunday". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Kindle version is filled with printed errors
I was very disappointed in this book.
Almost every page has printing errors
and the book is in too large a font.

Writing is very uneven in style and content.
I am a fan of Iain Sinclair-but his editing
of the pieces is poor.

I want a refund ! ... Read more

Product Description
This is a novel about London - its past, its people, its underbelly and its madness. 'In this extraordinary work, Sinclair combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history' - "Guardian". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

WUI - writing under the ....
I am going to keep reading Sinclair (and Haruki Murakami) until I understand one book they have written. I didn't get there with this one.

Sinclair can write some amazing sentences. He can also write some that make sense. He just never combines the two skills.

Since there is virtually no description of this book above, take the time to use the "Look Inside" feature and read the back cover. You won't learn a lot, but it will make you think you have.

To get a feel for Sinclair, think Pynchon - but lacking in clarity.

Dirty and dangerous
Iain Sinclair knows the mythical paths of London like no-one else. In poetic often painfully intense prose, he conjures up the half-dead spirits that stalk the streets of this seedy town. The landscape is dominated by dodgy second-hand book dealers skulking in the shadows obsessed by the Ripper murders, and by the vicious presence of Jack himself, the embodiement of powerful evil forces embedded in the fabric of the city. If you only ever read one novel about Jack the Ripper, or never wanted to read one, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings is a must. A warning though: it is not for the faint-hearted. ... Read more

Product Description
"Iain Sinclair is our greatest guide to London...(his) pitch is urban, jagged; the city is a maze of symbols waiting to be revealed, and Sinclair conjures them beautifully before our eyes".-"The Spectator".Amazon.com Review
Ever listened to a madman rant? Often, buried somewhere in hismonologue, there's an idea that is true glittering brilliance. Perhapsyou will listen for hours trying to catch another strand of hisunusual logic. Or perhaps you will shrug your shoulders and walkaway. Reading Iain Sinclair is like that.The idea behind LightsOut for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History ofLondon at its most mundane level--and this book has many levelswoven into its 386 dense, perplexing pages--is to reflect London byexploring its shadows: its streets, its graffiti, its anachronisms,its forgotten geniuses, and its subcultural characters. But readers,at least readers not from London, are scarcely taken by the hand on astroll through the city. Instead, they are pushed and pulled, yankedand tossed, given little explanation of what they're reading about orwhy. More often, Lights Out feels like a high-speed ride in astolen car--images recklessly thrown before you, then knocked over bysheer velocity as you pass, pedestrians run over before you've metthem--and all the while you never know where you are, since sites,characters, and references are rarely set up or explained.

Insteadof mapping out London, its secrets, and hidden characters, Sinclairmuddles the picture, leaving this image of London impenetrable exceptto scholars or those with free months to muck through this unbridledslop. Is it the use of peculiar British words, the liberal tossing ofobscure references, or Sinclair's vastly brilliant mind that makesthis book so unknowable? Whatever the reason, expect writing thatbewilders, such as this chapter beginning: "The saturnine, widdershinsexcursion of Alan Moore's anti-solar mystagogue, Sir William Gull, asrevealed in Chapter Four of the graphic novel, From Hell,begins, traditionally enough, with Boadicea...."Judging from coverblurbs, the British press loves this book. But for all its hype andglowing praise, it's hard to see why. --Melissa Rossi ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Hits and misses
Melissa Rossi's review is exceptionally clear and focused, and defines LIGHTS OUT FOR THE TERRITORIES well.
In those qualities, her review is everything that LIGHTS OUT is not. What is so maddening about this book of Sinclair's is that it tantalizes with its brilliant language while darting off in all directions at once and confusing the reader. Sinclair is a fine, poetic writer with a remarkable grasp of the language and an incandescent fire in the way he pours on the imagery, but the principal difficulty is that there is no center. The book wanders about, much as the author did with his research, and alternates its focus from closeups of obscure trivia and minutiae to grand and glorious vistas. And the editor (we are assured that one was at work, though that editor's hand remains well hidden) permitted Sinclair to act out his every last professional, social and experiential tic, pleasure and annoyance to the last bleeding degree. He rants spectacularly.
The truly saddening part about such negative comments, reflected in the other Amazon reviews as with Rossi's, is that Sinclair is one of the most interesting voices around these days. Of course he has the right to express himself on his own terms, and Granta permits him, but readers have the equal right to say 'Enough.'
For a better and more disciplined read that nevertheless shows Sinclair's skills, LONDON ORBITAL is a far superior effort, a book that Sinclair admits was rehearsed in part through earlier works like LIGHTS OUT. Read my LONDON ORBITAL review and you will see why.

The Londoner's Londoner
If you enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's 'biography' of London, then you will want to read this account of modern London.Sinclair is a great walker and he describes a series of journeys across the contemporary city which few others have ever taken.This gives him the chance to comment on the way. This book is essentially a modern meditation and it's wonderful. Extended poetry.This is the best of modern English literature.Don't miss it!

Less a travelogue, more a personal diatribe
What can you say about someone who pokes every eye including his own? In its relentless pursuit of that English national pastime, sneering, this dense thicket of a book encapsulates Wilde's definition of a cynic. Targets range from the Krays to Lord Archer through Thatcher (of course) and anyone else with the temerity to pass before Sinclair's broadcast gaze, including himself. A combination of unremitting carping and abstruse referencing can be tedious, and Lights Out lays out deserts of tedium. But they're nearly worth negotiating for the jewels that come out of them, because Sinclair's obviously no idiot and his hot-and-cold mind can produce gems. He has the uncanny ability to conjure up a scene without describing it in detail, whether it be London's back alleys or the view from Archer's window, pocket-parks or tidewater filth. By the end of the book you feel as if you've spent the longest evening of your life in a pub with an intelligent, but increasingly drunk, companion. As the evening wears on the conversation becomes one-sided, disconnected and relevant only to the speaker. You're glad when he finally runs out of steam and goes home, but the next day you warmly recall the brighter parts of the evening.Melissa Rossi's review has it almost right except for one important thing: I have to believe Sinclair got a huge laugh out of the slavishly positive reviews his book received from British critics. If not, if he takes himself as unreservedly seriously as they do, he's setting himself up for a pole-axing from the next Sinclair to come along.

Outstanding investigator of modern London mythology
Angela Carter, M.John Harrison, Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock -- and Iain Sinclair.All of them have made it their business to investigate the myths and apocrypha which they believe are the psychic structure of London. Whether it's Carter's Wise Children,Harrison's Travel Arrangements,Moorcock's King of the City or Ackroyd's Dan Leno, they all display thesame obsessions. What's remarkable is that all are very different. Sinclair's is the only book which is factual, but it fits so smoothly intofiction like Downriver and Radon Daughters that sometimes you can hardlytell.There is an intellectual rigour, an original eye, a beautiful poet'sprecision -- and the low-down on some high life characters. I can'trecommend this wonderful, rich book enough.Great value, too!

Learn to see London through new eyes
This book is of interest to anyone who has ever lived in London. Using mainly intuition, Sinclair takes us on a psychogeographical open-top bus journey down the city's darker alleys, parks and thoroughfares. (In)famousLondoners are deconstructed. My only gripe would be the lack of referencingto Dickens, who has been there before, and knew all about it. ... Read more

Product Description
This graphic novel follows its central character, Norton, through the underbelly of London's history. Trapped in space, within London's city limits, but not in time, Norton is present at dark deeds from Deptford at the time of Marlow's death to the East End at the time of Jack the Hat's murder. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A surreal trip through London's "dodgy" east end
Iain Sinclair takes the reader on a dream like trip through the dark corners of the city.The main character; Norton, reveals the underbelly of London with the help of some twisted compatriots. Dave Mckean providesintense illustrations to help reinforce Sinclair's dark prose.Truly wortha read. ... Read more

Product Description
A brilliant voyage of discovery into the deeply unfashionable fringes of London. 'It isn't often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic, but I'm sure that "London Orbital" will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair's Britain. It's a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose, and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres' - J. G. Ballard, "Observer". ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Carmageddon?
LONDON ORBITAL is more than just a book. It's a world model. Circumferential roads permit regional traffic flow around cities while reducing inner clog, a worldwide effort beyond London's M25--other cities, other orbitals: Paris' Peripherique, Washington's Beltway. Many others exist.

Iain Sinclair circumambulated London's M25 over months, with friends, in seven distinct bites. The M25 is a 125-mile creation, reputedly the world's busiest highway, traveled over the years by millions. It transforms not just the immense geography and culture of Greater London, as complex and diverse as Los Angeles or Calcutta of equivalent populations, but the inner and outer landscapes of residents and visitors, wherever they live and however they travel.

Sinclair's world view engages all six senses, back through the history of England and Europe, across the sepctrum of human experience: past and present, art and architecture, law and literature, horticulture and horror movies, geology and geography, politics and poverty, road and rail, medicine and military technology, even the psychopathology of asylum dwellers/victims and their external brethren: obsessive-compulsive walkers . . . and some writers. Name it, he does it. Well.

He works in ways that push the reader from rapture to rage, his global asides reaching all the way to California and beyond. He starts and finishes with Greenwich's Millennium Monstrosity, the Dome, which he detests ("Prejudices Declared"), showing how roads rearrange world geographies and cultures, putting people into a psychogeographical (his word) tumbe-dryer set on HOT but with no 'off' switch. As long as motor vehicles move, he implies, the effects will endure. Carmageddon?

Sinclair employs a diverse, sometimes mind-numbingly hyperbolic range of verbal acrobatics, inventions, riffs, jump cuts, phrases and words standing alone, summoning up the intellectual spirits and curiosities in ways that make him one of today's most readable but occasionally infuriating writers. If jazz is the metaphor, think Sonny Rollins or Charlie Parker with new and improved chemical influences. If cooking, it's bouillabaisse notched to new novelty, minestrone reinvented by a master chef toying with our taste buds. The flavors keep coming, onrushing, unstoppable. He's an intellectual shock-jock, messing with our minds and emotions. Breathless. Amazing. Often fun.

Sinclair's overwriting is exuberant, shameless, quite unlike the self-conscious, preening equivalent of Tom Wolfe, his nearest match this side of the Atlantic, or maybe Christopher Hitchens, who tries to finagle both sides of the pond. Sinclair longs to inform, indulge his curiosity, obsess with back-story research, earn our attention; Wolfe and Hitchens only want to impress, flaunt their superiority, plumb the shallows of their personal conceits, provoke our adulation. Guess who wins? Right!

This is a Big Read, the writing sustained from start to finish, all 457 pages. On balance its dense information content and lyrical prose make the journey worthwhile. Sinclair admits, in the credits, that some of the book appeared earlier in the London Review of Books, The London Magazine and The River; parts were also, as he puts it, 'rehearsed' in a sequence of books going back to 1999.

Whatever Sinclair is doing (the San Francisco CHRONICLE has called him "a prose stylist almost without peer"), he pushes the limit of modern word usage. The reader, beguiled by the lyricism, is drawn into his labyrinth, his orbit, a never-ending trip like the circular M25 itself. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs or you might not escape.

No Sinclair metaphors were used in writing this review. Granta's strictures prohibit it. ... Read more

Product Description
Commissioned to write about a disastrous attempt to create an estate around a medieval abbey in Wales, a London writer is sidetracked by a series of bizarre suicides in the secret defense industries, and by witnesses who claim to know the truth about a decades-old murder case. He employs a burned-out media man named Kaporal to research these events, only to find himself accused of murder. Featuring 20 black-and-white illustrations, Landor's Tower is an intriguing tapestry of fiction, history, and autobiography. "Iain Sinclair is the most inventive novelist of his generation." — Peter Ackroyd ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Nostalgia De La Boue
Right. So, here we have a narrative of sorts about a tower that was never built (only planned by a somewhat obscure literary figure, Walter Savage Landor - though perhaps the least obscure of the many authors to whom the author alludes herein) about an author planning to write a novel that it turns out he can't write.It's set in Wales- er, mostly, sort of, a bit in London too.According to the book, "Wales is the perfect locale.An hour's tramp would lead the most vacant optimist to thoughts of suicide." Thus, what we have is a wandering pilgrimage set in richly allusive, delightfully funny at times prose - prose which only someone steeped in all things obscurely literary or the omniscient cineaste (I was surprised that the reviews failed to mention how much the book owes to obscure films, lighting techniques etc.)can fully appreciate.Also, and this really cannot be overstated, we have a sort of dandyish form of what the French refer to as a nostalgia de la boue.Sinclair loves wending his way through all the contemporary muck of today's Britain in search of the muck of past, forgotten (admittedly unjustly so in many cases) poets, literary figures of all sorts, and pieces of rare filmography. - I suppose you can stop here if this sort of thing doesn't appeal to you.

But this faithful and appreciative reviewer shall trundle on. Something must be said here about the fad of "psychogeography" which Sinclair has helped to inspire.A great deal of literary London is, as I write this review, under the spell of it, due to the highly articulate proselyte and author Will Self.Unfortunately, Self, whilst an eloquent orator, simply can't write well; and I keep wondering when the English press is going to come to its senses.But the less-celebrated Sinclair is a wizard with prose:

"I trembled that first morning out in the air, the privilege of this light, with the stereophonic babble of the river, hustling against rocks, rattling against pebbles, sweeping broken branches downstream at Crickhowell.Dry red leaves caught in the fuzz of the hedge, giving it a wounded look.The gardens had been designed as shadow traps.Avenues, abandoned tennis courts, in which speckled paths appeared and disappeared, as fast-moving clouds masked the sun."

Read these deliciously falling cadences aloud.Notice how everything in Sinclair ends up "abandoned" or "wounded" or derelict or flickering out of sight.The prose is very, very rich and funny, but you have to be very well-read and cultured to laugh aloud as I did at snippets such as these:

Describing his postcoital pillow talk with Prudence:

"She really couldn't see what these new painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, were on about."

Describing the burning of Landor's estate, which had been converted into a monastery at the time:

"Most authorities agreed that the blaze, the destruction of the castle, Gormenghast revisited, was down to the drunken odd job man."

LOL- Gormenghast Revisited indeed!

I could go on with these quotes.But those who can will get the drift.Those who can't won't.
It would be very easy for me to pick apart this plotless "novel," but I have no need.Sinclair, with his pixie wit, does it already in the form of the demotic character - lots of these in the book - nicknamed "Bad News":

"What's with this three-part structure?One: lowlifes running around, getting nowhere.Two: a baggy central section investigating `place', faking at poetry, genre tricks, and a spurious narrative which proves incapable of resolution.Three: quelle surprise.A walk in the wilderness.What a cop-out, man!"p.285

Still, if you half fancy this sort of thing, as I half do, and enjoy rich allusive language,than you could do far worse than open this book and step into the muck "on a morning of treacherous, milky sunshine" or whenever, really.

More effort than entertainment for the reader
You need to invest considerable time and effort to benefit from this novel. It's not a quick read, and quite dense in parts. Fans of post-modern fractured looks at Britain presumably know what they'll encounter here. Those, like myself, with less experience with the likes of not only Sinclair but Moorcock, Ackroyd, & Chris Petit (whose The Psalm Killer is a great take on the Irish Troubles in 90s Belfast) may find it a tough slog.

In parts, notably the few pages on post-Thatcher Wales and the episodes on the poet-artist David Jones in his stay with Eric Gill at Capel-y-ffin, the relatively straightforward tale telling and powerful descriptions work wonders. But the greater tale of Kaporal and his pursuit of disgraced politician Jeremy Thorpe, along with the suicides in the West Country and the mixing in of Sinclair's own Landor-ing tries at a novel and his own semi-autobiographed childhood, make for less than knockout fiction, over the course of 350 pp.

The trouble is that, as Sinclair's clever enough to incorporate (285) a character who critiques accurately Sinclair's faults as a writer, is that Sinclair seems too self-satisfied to keep on meandering in the same groove. A mish-mash of events rather than an attempt to learn from them, the ultimate laziness of Sinclair, masked as a Borgesian or Burroughian exercise in the nature of unreliable truth & fiction, seems tired and listless far too often. My three rather than two stars are credit to the effort Sinclair puts into many small details that work well, but even these fail to resonate beyond a few pages at a time.

This lack of quality control leaves lots of glintingly crafted needles among the prosy haystacks that'll prick your attention, but I wish there were so many more. Colin Tunstall's attempt to revive the utopian dream, Prudence & Annwn and the Mabinogion, the clash of pulp vs. poetry, the Eagleton quote on the literature of a subject people tending towards neologisms, shamanism, and farcical excess, the details on the Bob Dylan photo at Aust ferry (that conincidentally graces the new Scorcese Documentary on the bard): these may bolster his thesis that "endlessness is immortality" in the accumulation of facts, opinions, and observations, but I doubt if Sinclair himself will wind up among the immortals of Brit Lit.

His newly proclaimed Welsh origins caused hin, evidently, to aspire to a take-down of both the Welsh and the English, but the dreariness inherent in a plague on both houses dispirits the whole enterprise, and after hundreds of pages of inconclusive material, a wish for a more succinct and focused control over so much promising raw data may mean that I'm less trendy than the likes of Sinclair, but a story does come first, immortal or not.

One of our best living writers
Iain Sinclair is without doubt one of our greatest prose stylists and this is a wonderful piece of reading.It has a lot of narratives running through it but, like life, not all of them cry out of be resolved.As is usual with Sinclair, there are dozens of stories lurking just beneath the surface.This bizarre picaresque, in which the central character has truck with rogues and vagabonds of various description, is tremendously refreshng for those of us who had becom a bit bored with that most prominent strand of English fiction, which some Americans seem to think is all there is.Sinclair, Moorcock, Ackroyd, Carter.The so-called Cockney Visionaries.All are substantial writers, but Sinclair is the best of them all.
Try Downriver before this, if you get the chance.But get this now.You won't regret it.

A difficult read
It contains writing good enough to merit five stars but the confused plot makes it tough to read through. It helps to have read a few of the reviews first. Skipping to page 297 and reading the last part of the book first also makes it more understandable. Get some maps of South Wales and South-West England and then you're almost ready to read the book. You may notice that the the reviews have different versions of what it's about. I would say it's mainly about people trying to establish communes in Wales, and perhaps about the fate of utopian/religious communities in general and the relation between Wales and England. The main plot, told in the first person it about the author travelling from London to Hay-on Wye, on the Welsh border, which is itself a kind of commune, a town of used bookstores, to research the life of Walter Savage Landor. He has an affair with a woman called Prudence. He returns to london, and then learns that his father, a doctor in Wales, has died, and has to go back to Wales. On the way back he is falsely accused of having murdered Prudence and then incarcerated in a mental hospital. In the final chapters (which are more coherent) he is restored to sanity and there are reminiscnces of his boyhood in Wales.
The characters Dryfeld and Silverfish, the crooked bookdealers, who are travelling from London to Hay on Wye in the first chapters, later disappear from the book. The Kaporal plot is entirely separate and is mainly told in extracts from Kaporal's tapes (This part is also first person, so there are two separate first person narrators). These are partially explained after page 345 in "Files Recovered from Kaporal's Caravan"
It's full of literary allusions, especially to Anglo-Welsh writers who lived in the border area. It contains a lot of information about them but it helps if you already know who Kilvert, David Jones, Eric Gill, Father Ignatius, Henry Vaughan etc are. There are also many allusions to contemporary British writers and some of them appear under their own names, or thinly disguised, as characters. ... Read more

Product Description
Norton, the hero, travels through London's underbelly trapped in space but not in time. He is present to witness dark deeds from Deptford at the time of Marlowe's death and in the East Endduring the sixties watching the murder of Jack th Hat McVitie. Bizarre and phantasmagoric, the book draws on images of the city from the Rennaissance to the deacy of Thatcher's london. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Very interesting
This book was recommended to me and I have to admit that I really enjoyed it. It was VERY different, so be ready for a weird read. ... Read more

Product Description
Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest for both writer and reader. ... Read more

Product Description
The eccentric, manic, often moving collaborative explorations of London's hidden streets, cemeteries, parks and canals by photographer Marc Atkins and writer Iain Sinclair were first recorded in Sinclair's highly acclaimed 1997 book Lights Out for the Territory, praised in the Guardian as "one of the most remarkable books ever written on London." Liquid City documents Atkins and Sinclair's further peregrinations, focusing on the city's eastern and south-eastern quadrants. An array of famous and lesser-known writers, booksellers and film-makers slip in and out of Sinclair's annotations, as do memories and remnants of the East End's criminal mobs. The title Liquid City is meant to evoke the Thames, which flows silently through the photographic and textual narrative, and to suggest the changes London has undergone and, like all cities, is constantly undergoing.

Marc Atkins is a freelance photographer. He has exhibited across Europe and North America, and his images have been published in books and magazines world-wide.

Iain Sinclair is the author of many books, including Downriver; Radon Daughters; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Lights Out for the Territory.Amazon.com Review
In their previous collaboration Lights Out for the Territory, Marc Atkins's few dark, brooding photographs focused writer Iain Sinclair's dense, impressionistic formulations about London, the city he loves to drift through. Here Atkins's penetrating black-and-white portraits and his beautiful, troubling shots of a London we forget we know dominate. Sinclair contributes essays in a lighter, more journalistic prose than readers of his wonderful, overwrought novels might expect. In them he discusses Atkins, or one of his photographs, and their mutual project of attempting to pin down London's story. And he writes about other writers (Peter Ackroyd, Michael Moorcock, John Healy) who share his fascination with one of the world's great cities. As the title of their book suggests, it is nearly impossible to articulate absolute truths about a space as dynamic as this city, and equally difficult to hold a fixed position on it. Despite that (Sinclair praises his friend for creating flux whereas his writing tries to "mould wriggling chaos"), the pair's project is worthwhile, as it has produced words and some remarkable pictures that only such a troubled engagement could create. This is a visual feast of contemporary photojournalism, in which Atkins's visions and Sinclair's words help the reader perceive a London that can easily be walked past daily without a second glance. --Mark Thwaite, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

The lack of gratitude in me is staggering
IAIN SINCLAIR ON JOHN HEALY'S CRITICS: "The thing that really disturbed them was this: if the man was alive and well, chipper as a cricket, cranking out novel after novel, then the emotion they had invested in the lowlife was misplaced. An early death, coughing his guts up, was the least they could expect. The lack of gratitude in this creature was staggering. The reviews had been written under false pretences. The raves were disguised obituary notices."

Uh-huh. Well at least Wilfred Owen had the good manners to get himself croaked by Krauts. And thank God that Sylvia Plath clinched her lit cred by offing herself. But then there's Iain Sinclair. Who cranks out the sort of cartoon-paranoia fiction that's otherwise associated with Don DeLillo & Thomas Pynchon. And it's just a darn shame. Cause some of us are just plain noided out (as it were). Fortunately, LIQUID CITY is a temporary respite from Sinclair's usual subject-matter.

The London only a Londoner can know
This book told me more about London and Londoners than a million travel books or books about the legends and myths of London. Sinclair and Atkins are interested in the scenery and people that nobody ever notices. Thespaces between highways, for instance, and what kind of people live inthem. I read his book on Ballard's Crash and it seemed to me then thatwhile Ballard is noticing the abstract geometry, the beautiful curve of theelevated highway, Sinclair is more interested in who lives under thatcurve. If youthink you know London, think again.You'll know it a lotbetter after you've read this book.I did and it's a city I've lived in. A book which will become, I suspect, a cult classic. ... Read more

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City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair collects fourteen pathbreaking essays treating the panoramic oeuvre of novelist, poet, filmmaker and essayist Iain Sinclair. This book aims to reflect and develop the current strong interest in the work of Sinclair, who is widely recognized as one of the most significant figures in contemporary British literature and culture. The essays herein cover the key genres and periods of Sinclair s output, discussing his poetry, prose and filmmaking, and are developed from the proceedings of the first academic conference on Sinclair, which was held at the University of Greenwich in 2004.Following the introductory chapter, which includes a brief survey of Sinclair s career up until now, the collection is arranged thematically in four sections. The first part,Contexts , features essays which comment on the critical categorization and definition of Sinclair s work. The second part,Culture and Critique , includes essays which explore the political import and contexts of Sinclair s oeuvre. The articles in the third part,Connections , look at the links between Sinclair and other writers, addressing the often noted intertextuality of his writing; and the final section,Spaces , contains three considerations of Sinclair s treatment of London s urban spaces. This collection provides access to the latest research by the leading scholars working in this area, and will be a key point of reference for anyone interested in Sinclair s production. To some, the field of `London writingmay increasingly look like an indifferent, over-populated wasteland. Iain Sinclair, however, remains pre-eminent, by virtue, not only of the amplitude of his knowledge of the city, but of the intensity and complexity of his thought about it. He is the redemptive memorialist of a host of disregarded London cultures that lie quite beyond the reach of contemporary pieties. In that respect, he is less our Blake, as he sometimes seems to believe, than our Pepys or our Defoe. At the same time, he is an audacious experimenter with prose forms in the modernist tradition from Joyce to Burroughs and beyond. Like the Sinclair phenomenon itself, this valuable collection of essays is multifaceted, illuminating its subject from a variety of different angles, whilst very well aware that it is part of a `work in progress . It offers important testimony to the scope and power of a writer engaged in an original, serious and necessary project.Andrew Gibson, Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London This is an important and timely collection about arguably the most significant living London writer who is increasingly being recognised as an important contemporary English author in every sense.Lawrence Phillips, Principal Lecturer in English, University of Northampton At last, Iain Sinclair has the readers he deserves--at least on the ample, often provocative, and always fascinating evidence of City Visions, a collection of essays marked equally by panache and verve, awareness of alternative cultural history and theoretical sophistication. Over fourteen chapters, critics with wide-ranging interests gather their restless energies and obsessions in response to the scatter-gun agitprop and guerilla-intellectualism of Sinclair, to produce a necessary and necessarily edgy volume. In this admirably relentless collection Jenny Bavidge and Robert Bond offer an unnerving and inventive critical topography that uncovers the dark heart of a writer who is simultaneously the enfant terrible and éminence grise of English letters. Belles-lettrists and other dilettantes be warned, this is not a volume for the faint-hearted these essays manifest an evangelical zeal equal to their subject's own; in doing so, they take us on an exhilarating intellectual ... Read more

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Iain Sinclair has a growing reputation as a novelist and writer of documentary non-fiction. This study covers his major works, but also seeks to trace the connections between the writings and his earlier books of poetry. ... Read more

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In "The Verbals", a long conversation mingling confession, memories and self-criticism, Sinclair lays bare the origins of these works, from the myths of Freemasonry surrounding his ancestry to his encounters with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, from his adventures in the film world to his bohemian life in Dublin, from casual labouring in the East End to esoteric studies of earth mysteries and psychogeography. ... Read more

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This monograph undertakes the first extensive comparative analysis of the works of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, placing the fiction and non-fiction of both writers in relation to the broader cultural, social and political contexts of London from 1979. It begins by tracing the two different Londons of both writers, arguing that their literary and cultural projects are intrinsically linked, yet have remained under-explored in academic criticism.

Alex Murray argues that that while both Sinclair and Ackroyd attempt to utilize radical narrative practices to challenge the dominant historical discourses within contemporary London, those challenges must be placed in relation to broader issues of cultural history, government appropriation of historical narratives and debates about the relationship between literature and the city. This argument is traced from the `radical' historical fiction of the 1980s which launched the career of both writers, through to their extensive bodies of work on creating a specifically London form of literary history, to their engagements towards the turn of the millennium with larger questions of historiography and material history.This study then links these issues of narrative and material history, demonstrating the increasingly problematic relationship that both writers have as their fictionally `radical' recalling of London is transformed into issues of material history, primarily the issues of politics and ethics in historical representation, and the relationship between history and commodification. ... Read more

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This study represents the first comprehensive study of Iain Sinclair's writing, covering his key texts from the early 1970s to the present. It features individual chapters analyzing "Lud Heat", "White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings", "Downriver" and "London Orbital". In exploring Sinclair's unique vision of London, this study aims to define his writing as the culmination of a trajectory of London writing that stretches from Blake and Dickens, up to more contemporary writers such as Alexander Baron and Peter Ackroyd. The book suggests that the writing of the city is preoccupied by the relation between capitalism and religion, and hence by the question of domination. It emphasizes the mythic quality of contemporary urban life. The book therefore aims to extend the critique of urban experience formulated in the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer. The book's cultural Marxist perspective is supplemented by a sociology of culture derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The author aims to explain why Iain Sinclair has become the sole serious contemporary poet to have broken from the avant garde into a popular, more commercial status.What can we learn from a writer who is at once a rare neo-modernist and the focus of a metropolitan literary cult? Why are other major poets still unrecognized outside academia? This study explores Iain Sinclair's relation to the 'Cambridge school' of neo-modernist poetry, and reconstructs the twentieth century poetic genealogies upon which Sinclair's writing has drawn. ... Read more

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An exploration of a contemporary city and the historical and mythical patterns that it hides. The churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, built to a strange plan in a London ravaged by fire and plague, are the sites of mystery and energy that animate this story of post-war England. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A must for anyone interested in modern UK literature.
This book is particularly interesting because it is probably the first book using what Sinclair later came to call 'psychogeography', an obsession he shares with his two close friends Michael Moorcock and Peter Ackroyd.Ackroyd made very free use of this book for his own splendid supernatural mystery story Hawkwsmoor and Moorcock introduces it, offering his own spin on the talented Mr Sinclair, as well as a few passing amiable swipes at half his famous contemporaries.Ackroyd's own riffs on Doctor Dee and a Platonic view of London (both from
Moorcock's own fantastic London novel Gloriana) find echoes in Sinclair's rich reflections on the underlying sense of a city's history reflected in her earth, stones and architecture, written when he was still working as a municipal gardener in London's East End.What Sinclair and Moorcock offer is the raw stuff of their own experience and observation whereas Ackroyd's views are slightly more academic, more enthusiastic at a distance than close-up.But all three writers should be read together to get a sense of another, very different, strand of English fiction which occasionally feeds the imaginations of people like Rushdie, Amis and Self but is hardly recognised in its own right as a vigorous and ultimately far richer canon. This kind of literature has little to do with the consumer age and is built solidly to last, I'd guess, a few centuries.Get this as an introduction to Sinclair and the school of writers he represents, but get Downriver to enjoy him at his finest. ... Read more

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IllustratedDavid Cronenberg's Crash (1996) brought on a storm of controversy when it was first screened and remains controversial today. Though some members of the jury disassociate themselves from the film, it won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. A cool, controlled, formal film and a brilliant exposé of modern pathologies, it has almost none of the violence and explicit sexual content of the J.G. Ballard novel from which it is adapted. In this book, which includes an exclusive and revealing new interview with Ballard, Iain Sinclair explores the uncanny temporal loop that connects film and novel. If Cronenberg "adapted" Crash, he also absorbed it and made it into something new. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A brilliant essay on the origins of the movie
As a fan of Ballard I am definitely not a fan of Cronenberg, whom I find superficial, sensational and laddish in the extreme.The movie extracted the least interesting elements of the book and turned them into a kind oftechno-porn which I associated with Cronenberg's preferred genre beforethis book.Now I have a clearer idea of what disturbs me aboutCronenberg's versions of books which I have admired -- including The NakedLunch -- and Sinclair subtly teases out thewoman-hating elements whichare in both Ballard and Cronenberg, attacks the specious nature of thetreatment and reveals the film for the piece of faux-auterism that it is.I didn't know why I didn't like Crash until I read Sinclair and Sinclair inno way attacks the film.He just collects the evidence and presents it.Arespected film maker himself (Cardinal and the Corpse, The Falconer,Asylum) Sinclair must be one of the smartest critics in the business.Ialways follow his essays in the London Review of Books and would recommendthem. Sinclair may make films about 'illuminati' but he is himselfwonderfully illuminating.I can't recommend this clever, precise essayenough.

Concerns Ballard's novel, not Cronenberg's movie
Sinclair all but ignores David Cronenberg's adaptation of "Crash," focusing instead on Ballard's novels "Crash" and "The Atrocity Exhibition."Unfortunately, he offers littlefresh insight into these seminal works.

The BFI series are supposed to beabout FILMS, not the novels that inspired them.

The RE/Search volume onJ. G. Ballard still remains the best introduction to his work, renderingSinclair's book unnecessary. ... Read more