Sinclair’s kaleidoscopic rattlings

The Last London, Iain Sinclair, Oneworld.

Living with Buildings, and Walking with Ghosts, Iain Sinclair, Profile.

At the same time as I was reading Iain Sinclair’s latest books I was also reading Robert Moor’s recent account of trails, in particular Moor’s description of how Native American history is rich in place, over individuals and chronology, and how the centrality of place is exhibited even in Native American languages. Moor relates how Native Americans can navigate mentally through landscape using placenames which recall incidents, and walking a trail makes connections between all these places, in the same way perhaps that Westerners would remember by using a timeline.

The writing of Iain Sinclair might seem as if it is about staying put and observing in one particular place – London or more specifically Hackney – but walking is central to his writing, in his ‘orbits’ of roads and rail lines. His perambulations kick up the dust of stories, places recall people, books, events, art, bureaucratic inanity, any order in his books deriving not from linear time but from linear (sort-of) space, like Sebald, who he references.

The Last London is a walking tour of a city being blanded out by gentrification, much as some native trails in the US have been paved over as highways, local stories getting paved over and buried as part of the process. Sinclair describes apartments filling any vacant space, all cut from the same cloth, undergirded by bicycle repair shops, gyms and cafes, and sold not by highlighting the virtues of the communities they pop up in but by how quickly one can reach somewhere else (the city, the airport). They are, Sinclair says, primarily points of departure, anathema to the Native American way of looking at land.

Sinclair is dark on hipsterised, sanitised inner suburbia, sounding old-man-grumpy, but perhaps understandably so. The coffee may be good but the cafes may as well be chains – every one of them decked out in factory chic, with tattooed baristas and ironic, retro art (and one can recognise the aesthetic in other Western cities). Local colour is lost. Add this gripe to the list of things he hates – artisan bakeries, aggressive cyclists, ‘elective infantilism’ (adults dressing and playing like children), government doublespeak, bankers, developers. He writes about how, ‘post-truth’, developers promise to ‘work with’ local residents while demolishing their houses and shunting them off to the margins.

There is an overlap in his two latest books with the themes of community and place. Living with Buildings is, as the name might suggest, ostensibly more concerned with buildings, and in particular their effect on health. That in any case is his brief. He writes about how in centuries past houses could be thought of as accumulating sicknesses, necessitating periodic relocations of habitation, the opposite of modern ideas of ‘home’ as the depositories of accumulating comforts. He writes about the altruism of residents in housing projects usually deemed anti-social. But he admits his shot at the topic is ‘discursive’ and the book is filled with familiar but exuberant jaunts with filmmakers and artists, to poke in out-of-the-way places. And then there is his style. His writing is not so much a Fauvist painting but a whole gallery of them, a fall down the rabbit hole.

In Living with Buildings he encounters Philip Hoare, the nature writer whose particular focus is the sea, but Sinclair, urban explorer that he is, is less interested in the detritus the ocean throws up than the detritus our society throws up, seeking Hoare’s knowledge about a local mental hospital. In The Last London Sinclair is concerned with, amongst other ‘things’, the way the homeless keep ahead of the authorities who, always, try to move them somewhere else. This contrasts with London’s wealthy, always on the lookout for new opportunities to take into their own possession what was previously held in common. In particular, Sinclair writes about the new frontier of grand basements, the colonisation of the underland, which leads him to an essay on the ‘mole man’, an industrious Hackney resident who created numerous tunnels underneath his house (and who Sinclair has, as with other topics here, previously written about in the London Review of Books).

There are also, in both books, excursions to local churches to view art. He visits St Augustine’s church to view stained glass windows by Margaret Rope, and Christ Church, Spitalfields, the Nicholas Hawksmoor church depicted a number of times by Leon Kossoff, to view a watercolour triptych by Rebecca Hind. (Sinclair contributed to the idea, obviously not entirely substantiated, that Hawksmoor was an occultist whose churches contain Satanic coded designs.) There are the usual characterisations of out-of-date churches servicing oddballs (which should actually endear them to Sinclair). In churches come together various topical strands in Sinclair’s writing (though they are merely a colourful flash in Sinclair’s kaleidoscopic rattlings). In our rapidly recycling cities churches are specific sites of continuous tradition, community, attention to those sidelined by furious pelotons of money-grabbers. Contrast these churches with London’s Shard, a secular temple to wealth, which Sinclair describes as a steeple without a church (in other words, transcendent gesture without community).

Sinclair writes in The Last London about books fished from bookstalls and from rivers, and I thought there was something appropriate about the fact that while turning its pages, periodically, little clumps of newly cut hair fell from it. (I borrowed it from the library.) I assume the previous reader was reading it at the hairdresser. And on page 276 I eventually came to a single, neat pencil amendment of the text – someone, probably the reader with the new haircut, had changed an errant ‘as’ to ‘at’. Sinclair would probably make much of the strange ways the text interacts with and connects readers, in their city wanderings.

A regulated zone

Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp, David Sornig, Scribe.

Dudley Flats was a Depression-era shanty town in West Melbourne, on the site of today’s vast container terminal. Originally a bountiful wetland, as the city grew it became a marginal area of reviled swamp and a tip, a place for the city to turn its back on, but a ‘vortex’ that sucked in the jobless and homeless. It would perhaps be forgotten without the efforts of historian David Sornig.

Like London’s Iain Sinclair, and with similar literary flair, Sornig has an interest in the liminal spaces not listed in tourism brochures, and in Dudley Flats he finds an unsettling, slippery space that he likens to the ‘Zone’ in the centre of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous 1979 film Stalker. Even today, Sornig notes, the area under the Bolte Bridge, which cyclists speed through on their way to work, is a strangely empty space, frequented only by the marginalised.

The container port is listed in the Melways as a ‘Regulated Zone’. While trying to get a sense of where exactly things occurred, Sornig and friends attempt a walk through the port area, a big no no for a maritime border and terrorism obsessed government. As it has been for decades, the area is out of sight of the general public, but under the careful watch of authorities.

Sornig tells the story of the area’s mid-century residents through three characters, notorious in their own ways, who were victims of xenophobia, racism and the cruel Kafka-esque tendencies of politicians and planners, and whose lives Sornig pieces together from scraps of newspapers and government statistics. He worries about the adequacy of his reporting, and finds the need to imagine scenes and motivations – in evocative prose, mind you. He admits a difficulty in holding his images together, because, in contrast to the solid monuments of the rich and powerful that dot the city, remembrance of the Dudley Flats residents sinks into the mud, or is paved over by industry. So it goes in history, but a strength of recent psychogeographical history is to find interest and worth in the topics traditionally not prioritised in the writing of history.

In the portrayals of Dudley Flats he does uncover, Sornig finds contradictions and ambivalence. The area was often ignored, but not always. The police kept watch, newspapers occasionally flared up with sensational news of deaths and there were intermittent efforts to clean it up by those both genuinely compassionate and those with an eye on the political.  But there were mixed reports of squalor and dignity. The area was described as grossly unsanitary, but also as neat and tidy. The residents were described as industrious and free, and at other times as freeloaders and criminals. They were teetotallers and drunks, violent and polite. They should be left alone and moved on.

These conflicted attitudes remain in our own times. Sornig mentions the homeless at Flinders Street Station who, otherwise ignored, became too prominent for Melbourne’s civic leaders. But Sornig helps us see the marginalised as people, not just problems.

Impression of being unimpressed

A recent London Review of Books reviewer suggested of Robert Macfarlane that the landscapes in his books are strangely depopulated. This fits with his penchant for wild places, as the title of an earlier book of his has it, and his intention is to draw the eye (or brain) away from the urban landscape we are familiar with to the natural one we are increasingly blind to. But the reviewer has a point.

That criticism could not be made of James Rebanks, and indeed Rebanks’ intention is somewhat the opposite of Macfarlane’s, even if they share a spirit, and can be both lumped into the species of new nature writers that are spinning out some wonderfully evocative and important prose. Rebanks lives and works in the Lakes District as a sheep farmer – a shepherd – and even tweets on shepherding (imagine!). He wants, in his book The Shepherd’s Life, to refocus on the landscape of this northern part of England, from the typical tourist view, which tends to see the landscape as a place of wild beauty and ignores the farmers (or worse, sees them as intruders in an outdoor photo opportunity), to the working landscape of himself, his family and neighbours and their ancestors, who work and live through not just the district’s beautiful summers but also through its ferocious winters.

Rebanks is not your typical shepherd – local boy fails school, goes back onto farm, discovers books, ends up at Oxford while farming on weekends and now consults for the UN. The book’s narrative has a certain arc that privileges the traditional life over all that other stuff that goes on in the city, and clearly Rebanks downplays his more sophisticated (if that is not too much of a loaded word) doings against the earthy, simple farm life. (A reader may at some point wonder, ‘if he failed school then what is he doing writing this book?’) This is all fine and good, but there is also an element of anti-intellectualism here, and even though Rebanks is an Oxford scholar, he gives the impression of being unimpressed with the intellectual life, which is not as simply practical as sheep farming (itself something of a stereotype. Architecture or medicine, say, have their practical uses and tend to work better after some academic training). It is a worthy thing for Rebanks to defend shepherding as intelligence ‘tuned to a different channel’, but there is always the danger of defence turning to offence.

This is a downside of Rebanks’ bluntness, but otherwise his book is a corrective to the kind of nature writing that carries us off into the uninhabited zones, encouraging the feeling that the world would be better off without human beings (as well it might, but this is a strangely self-loathing utopian dream). Rebanks’ writing has its affinities with the writing of Iain Sinclair, who writes in an urban context but focuses on people and things flying under the radar of modern society, and its definitions of worthy pursuits, success, utility and beauty.

 

Warmed by the intensity

One is at risk of being overwhelmed by the forest of recommendations adorning the paperback version of Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways. Thankfully the hype is justified. This is an extraordinarily piece of nature writing; one is warmed by the intensity. Like the writing of Iain Sinclair, Macfarlane sees all the nuances, history and beauty in landscapes we would normally pass by, as well as in some sublime places, such as the Himalayas.

The book starts with a closely observed stroll in the midnight snow, and from there, amongst other journeys, he takes a boat ride in the UK’s north, and takes an eerie walk on the treacherous mudflats of the coast of East Anglia, where sky blurs with water, and walkers can easily become disoriented. All the while he refers to writers who have travelled before him, such as the poet Edward Thomas, who made his name as a nature writer before becoming famous as a poet, and who was a chronicler of walks. Macfarlane’s emphasis on the paths of England give the book’s title its double meaning, both in the sense of the traditional, and, more literally, ‘ways’ being paths in the countryside. As Ronald Blythe points out in relation to the poetry of John Clare, country paths used to be sites full of traffic and stories.

Trekking with Iain Sinclair

Wading through Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital is like trekking through some tropical rainforest, where the wildlife is surprising and surprisingly beautiful, if at times off-putting; a hard slog but rewarding, the closeness to the senses overwhelming, and the larger picture a bit difficult to discern. It’s all a bit foreign, even though only just off the beaten track of civilisation’s familiarity.

Sinclair is a surprisingly normal looking individual, with his sensible shirt. But he is something of an alchemist with words. They arrive in a dizzying barrage, of both information and linguistic gymnastics. He is like one of those highly intelligent conspiracy theorists whose apartment walls are plastered with photos and a web of lines connecting them in vast, almost impenetrable theory.

London Orbital cashes in on post millennia hype (or is it hang-over?), and on the surface catalogues a journey by Sinclair and friends around the M25, the roadway that is London’s “noose”. He is fascinated by the liminal spaces – the empty lots, the detritus, the chaotic artiness that can appear beyond the fringes of the respectable and desirable society. And the oddbods that inhabit those spaces. He is also interested in the way, particularly in Blair and Brown’s Britain, but of course more widely in the West generally, that history is erased, not just by the bulldozer, but also by the copy writer engaged in the production of glossy real estate brochures or government policy statements..