London Overground by Iain Sinclair
Hamish Hamilton
Pp. 258
In 2012 Iain
Sinclair and his walking companion, Andre Kötting (British artist, writer and
film-maker b.1959) spent a day tramping around the London Overground circuit,
and Sinclair recounts the journey by weaving in references to others who have
come before. Processions and pilgrimages are evoked from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, as the duo walk just
for the sake of walking. He is at his best when describing the physical
mechanics of motion. “Refuelling was a requirement, but sitting down would
carry the risk of our not being able to rise again. Pints were delivered,
swilled back, replenished, before a bowl of steaming fish pie made it from
microwave to table.”
He likes to
walk. He has walked around Hackney, the M25, and areas that have been cleared
for the Olympics before, and written books about all of them. Understanding the needs for a hook with which
to draw in the reader, he chooses routes that are frequently travelled, but by
different forms of transportation. Above all, he fears bland homogenisation and
he despises shopping centres, such as Clapham Junction, in a sentiment familiar
from Ghost Milk.
Sinclair writes
with a sense of nostalgia, and is proud of his grumpy old man status: “This
old-man sourness is addictive. Period pains from the inability to accommodate
change. When nature pricks and the heart engages, people go on long
pilgrimages”. Resistance to progress tends towards snobbish bigotry. He
dislikes popular culture; he dislikes cyclists, mothers with pushchairs, and
people on mobile phones; anyone, in fact, who enters ‘his’ space.
His references
are deliberately esoteric but they are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and
decidedly male. The number of name drops becomes exhausting – there are 387 in
258 pages (I counted and catalogued them all, with their Wikipedia entries as
interpretation). Of these 387 authors, artists, poets, politicians,
film-makers, architects, actors, explorers, scientists and activists who people
this particular landscape, only 43 are female: that’s fewer than 12%. Women may
be mentioned as eye witnesses to events, nameless passers-by to whom he talks,
or memories of previous lovers (again nameless), but they make no significant
impression on this history of London.
Sinclair writes
in truncated sentences, which can be punchy but soon grow tiresome: “He put his
money where his mouth was. And his tongue was blistered with diamonds.” It can
be difficult to tell whether the prose is clever or just obtuse: are these
profound analogies or empty aphorisms?
One of
Sinclair’s bugbears is the commercialisation of the environment. He notes the
areas of desirable real estate: “Even a minor physical elevation comes with
entitlement to upward social mobility.” He admits, “We would all live on the
river if we could, waiting for the rains of Schadenfreude
to wash us away. Climate is another word for conscience.” He shuns the
wealthy and the nouveau riche. “Fundamentalism of every stamp, including the
fundamental decencies of the old Surrey stockbroker belt (now given over to
Russian oligarchs and Premier League footballers), is suspect. Bourgeois
marriage is a lie. Property is debt.”
While mourning
the past, he invokes the present in poetic language, “The Thames riverbank
would, in a few years, become a circus with a Ferris wheel, chair-lift rides,
millennial (discon)tent on the East Greenwich swamps, and a shockheaded mayor
as a public clown, swinging from wires or falling off a trick bicycle.” His
associations with the city are intense, and he refutes any that don’t align
with his emotions. “Maybe that’s it: the memory-place should remain fixed. The
attitude to the great sprawl of the metropolis is verging on Oedipal.” London
changes constantly, and while everyone is defensive of their own version, they
should probably be more tolerant of the fact that there is room for many more.
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