Selected Product:
| Downriver
Paperback
Edition: New edition
Author: Iain Sinclair
Publisher: Penguin
Release Date: April 2004
ISBN-10: 0141014857
ISBN-13: 9780141014852
List Price: £7.99
Average Customer Rating:
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Frequently exasperating, but Sinclair's shaggy dog story has a unique dark poetry
| Customer Rating:  | When Angela Carter no less, whose own work couldn't exactly be described as conventional, is quoted on this book's back cover blurb describing it as "a great, strange [...] fiction about London that follows its own logic", well, I suppose we can't say we haven't been warned. Often more anti-novel than novel, Sinclair's relentlessly downbeat low-life tale has little in the way of plot and makes few concessions to the reader as it meanders its way through the East End of London, as polluted and silt-heavy with the weight of history as the river it describes. Fascinatingly, Sinclair himself seems well aware of the reader's likely reaction, summed up in a fictitious Editor's (self-referential) response to the novel's supposed first draft - "Who is 'I'? ....Too compressed. What slaughter? What psycopath? What nickname?". "What nickname?" goes pretty much to the root of the reader's problem: Sinclair is an inveterate and unashamed namedropper, with his text's cultural referents being too dense and numerous for any single reader to have much chance of catching them all. For example, on a randomly chosen page from the last of his twelve tales, he invokes Joe Orton (fair enough, heard of him), Douglas Bader (sorry, no), Max Roach (vaguely ... a drummer, maybe??) and Michael Sandle (sorry, really haven't the foggiest). Well, call me thick, but it's nice not to have to consult Wikipedia more than once per page. And a lot of the references are just going to be lost on those of us not privileged to live in the Capital: maybe it's because I'm not a Londoner...
So, why bother? Because when Sinclair really finds his form in these twelve murky tales, he is on fire with a dark poetry which is quite unlike anything else in recent British literature. This is particularly true of the darkest of the book's sections, "Horse Spittle" (featuring the disappearance and presumed murder of a nurse turned prostitute), "Eisenbahnangst" (with its chilling Freudian deconstruction of Tenniel's famous illustrations for Lewis Carroll's "Alice Through the Looking-Glass"), and "Prima Donna", which describes Sinclair's supposed encounter with a disturbing character who has a troubling obsession with the victims of Jack the Ripper.
The book's twelve sections essentially narrate the wanderings of a second-hand-book-seller turned writer called (yes, you guessed it) Iain Sinclair, in the ever-shifting and thoroughly unreliable riverine territory of Margaret Thatcher's London Docklands. Although many of the characters he encounters are unashamed grotesques, it is in his portrayal of society's victims (prostitutes; rent-boys; addicts; the mentally ill) that Sinclair really engages the reader's sympathy.
Parts of the book have inevitably dated (the Silvertown memorial?? - presumably topical in Thatcher's last years as Prime Minister), and Sinclair's political satire in "Art of the State" and "Isle of Doges" is unashamedly heavy-handed (though I did love the vision of Dennis Thatcher as the Cerne Giant, naked and brandishing a golf club ...). There is no doubt that this "novel", even more than most of Sinclair's books, makes very considerable demands on the reader. All the same, it's worth making this trip downriver. |
All Over the Map
| Customer Rating: | | I picked up this book for a number of reasons: primarily, I was intrigued by the concept of a novel comprised of twelve stories which would reveal a gritty, dark side of London's docklands. (I'm not a Londoner, nor have I spent a great deal of time there, but I am drawn to fiction about it for some reason.) I have to admit I was also impressed with the plethora of effusive praise from the British press on the jacket. Having read the first three stories, I have now set it aside, unlikely to return to it. Why? Well, it all starts and ends with Sinclair's style. Had I known beforehand that he is a poet, I probably would have avoided the book. My experience with poets is that their prose style tends to be overly ornate. Some find this wholly delightful, but it generally leaves me deeply unmoved. I liked the notion of what Sinclair was trying to do in tying the Thames to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and mixing it all up with a critique of Thatcherite policies and the the capitalist assault on the underclass. He's clearly a writer with a political viewpoint who absorbs his cultural surroundings and infuse them back into his writing. Unfortunately, the connections aren't always visible, and worse, the stories aren't particularly interesting. There are flashes here and there of something, and clearly Sinclair has masses of knowledge and skill, but it's hard to find any cohesion to it all. The reviewer at The New York Times put it rather well in saying, "The book is a tremendous pillar of words, not all of them making direct sense and not trying to." It's writing one can appreciate, but not really enjoy, and since I have stacks of other unread books waiting for me, I'll put this one aside-perhaps forever. |
Sinclair's Splendid Smoke Opera
| Customer Rating: | | I think Michael Moorcock coined the phrase 'Smoke Opera' to describe the raft of "London" books, both fiction and non-fiction, which have been published in the last few years and reaching some kind of culmination with that great work of fiction Ackroyd's "London: A Biography". Downriver remains my favourite Sinclair novel and I can't recommend it highly enough. If you want real substance, a sense of value which you get from a Victorian classic, with the sense of street suss you expect from the latest junkista. It's very persuasive writing. Like Mother London, you have to take the writer's authority on trust, because this isn't a standard modernist text, but it is so thoroughly rewarding, you will not regret giving him that trust. These are very substantial books indeed, likely to outlast most of their contemporaries! Downriver will run and run! Twelve interconnecting narratives. Twelve times the value of the average Martin Amis! I originally bought this because Laurie Taylor said it was the best value for money to take on holiday. He was right. |
Rich and deep
| Customer Rating: | | This is the best of all the London books and could be one of the best novels of the past forty or fifty years! It is written on dozens of levels and can be reread for fresh insights, humour and general brilliance. Wonderful book. Honestly, most other stuff seems pretty thin in comparison. |
This and Mother London are the best
| Customer Rating: | | I read this because I read somewhere (Evening Standard ?) that this and Mother London were the two best novels about London. Together -- and they are very different 'reads' on the city although often linked together -- they do make a monumental picture of a living, richly textured capital. Other writers never seem to get as thoroughly involved with their material as Sinclair and Moorcock who almost seem to think the city IS them. That is, where a writer like Martin Amis will really be writing about himself in some way and his responses to what he sees, Sinclair and Moorcock seem to ABSORB themselves in the city -- accepting it, lock, stock and occasionally smoking barrel -- and celebrating it. That celebratory note is what unites the books. This is not your usual wimp's response to the Terrors and Pitfalls of the Big City. This is I LIKE IT HERE, CRAP AND ALL. The mocking lyricism is another thing which sometimes echoes across both books. These are sophisticated writers, but they are writers of passion and they are both romantic writers in the best, most intelligent sense. Impatient with orthodoxy, suspicious of received ideas, they go and look at everything for themselves and bring us back their reports. You can't ask for better than that. You do get better than that, because you get some glorious writing and wonderful characters. Downriver is constructed as twelve interlocking narratives and has a rather monumental Victorian structure to it. It feels a bit like the Tower of London, too. Mother London in contrast is the Kew Tropical Plant House with shafts of light falling forever unexpectedly on things we hadn't noticed before. Downriver is also full of things we hadn't noticed before and I am now re-reading it because I am discovering more things I hadn't noticed the first time! This is a Chinese box of delights and Mother London is, if you like, an Albert Memorial of delights. Together they show that English fiction has not lost sight of a larger contextual universe while examining local life-forms. In spite of being about one specific city, they refute the impression of the modern English novel as provincial or, at best, regional in its focus. I can't recommend them too enthusiastically. Both these great books are built to last. JB |
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