Landor's Tower
Iain Sinclair Granta, 345pp, £15.99
ISBN 1862070180
Iain Sinclair's favourite subject is London. He goads startling images from its least promising purlieus, and explores its hidden geometry with a restless, provoking intelligence. Yet in Landor's Tower, he shifts his focus to the west of England, and in the process assembles a new armoury of bugbears and foibles, without relinquishing his familiar ones. Thus Howard Marks rubs shoulders with the ruralist John Clare, Lord Archer with a delightfully epicene Jeremy Thorpe, and the booksellers of Hay-on-Wye with a galaxy of documentarists and film-making oddballs, many of whom figured in Sinclair's earlier novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Some of these appear in spirit, others in person, but the abiding impression is of new terrain colonised by old ideas.
The West Country excursion is motivated by the narrator's work on a biography of Walter Savage Landor, the irascible poet caricatured by Dickens as Boythorn in Bleak House. Landor's most important work was his collection of "imaginary conversations", quasi-political dialogues in which Bacon sparred with Hooker, Dante with Beatrice, and Leofric, Earl of Mercia, with his wife, Lady Godiva. This kind of imaginary colloquy is a central motif of Sinclair's writing, in which the past and present fuse together. Here, the fusion melds two distinct narratives: a contemporary one that smacks of noir-ish thriller and a historical one concerned with the endless search for utopia.
The result is something rather more, yet at the same time rather less, than a novel. The plot, such as it is, serves only as a scaffold from which to hang a variety of musings and conceits. Sinclair's alter ego frequently spins off into vertiginous spirals of opinion: about the pleasures of watching women eat; about motorway driving; about the disappearance of the Manic Street Preacher Richey Edwards; or about the time-warped shamanism induced by taking ketamine. These reflections are seldom less than interesting; however, as they ramify repeatedly, their effect becomes wearing.
Even when this is so, the writing is often startling. In Sinclair's prose, the proportion of solids to liquids is unusually high. His metaphors bristle with malicious intent. One character has eyebrows like "curls of unlit gunpowder"; another appears to have been "carved from suet"; a late breakfast comprises "devilled kidneys and a necklace of poached eggs"; frozen fish resemble "edible ice-skates" ("You could hang them on a tree and play them like a xylophone"). The language is incandescent, and the sentences teem with data - names and arcane observations sprout from every clause. At times, however, this becomes obstructive; many of the allusions are painfully obscure, and the wilful conflation of fiction and autobiography results in a succession of in-jokes that risks leaving most readers bewildered. Some of the imagery misfires. Can one really claim that the McDonald's logo looks "spiky"? And what are we to make of the suggestion that a frightened character "had the air of an abortionist fleeing from a house case that had gone badly wrong"?
The esoteric humour and self-referentiality make it unclear for whom the novel is intended. Too frequently, Sinclair loses sight of his audience and appears untroubled at the thought of the reader's possible travails. Behind his story's entanglements and elusive occult significance, it is possible to discern a writer inhibited by his friendships, his debts of gratitude and, above all, his own erudition.
In a slippery appendix, Sinclair describes the work of several of his novel's minor players. One of these is the early 20th-century visionary Arthur Machen, the author of The London Adventure. Machen's efforts are "notable for an unresolved dialogue between the labyrinthine metropolis (London) and the memory fields of the Welsh borders". This would do as a miniature self-portrait - a sketch of the author of Landor's Tower, torn between the different allures of provincial myth and urban bestiary.
It is perhaps no great surprise that the author's favoured subjects are those whom he resembles. Of the novel's ostensible touchstone, Landor, it was remarked by Ralph Waldo Emerson that "his books are a strange mixture of politics, etymology, allegory, sentiment and personal history". The description fits Sinclair's work as well. Landor's Tower is a cocktail of occult reckonings and autobiographical oddments: everything is to be included, nothing is sacred, and irony may intrude anywhere.
One last thing. In an especially droll scene towards the end of the novel, two characters pick a bowlful of raspberries. Nothing unusual in that, but only in the world of Iain Sinclair would it then emerge that, returning to the kitchen, they "tipped the red fruit out on copies of an exotically radical publication known as the New Statesman".
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