Fantastic Metropolis

No mere pasquinader, Iain Sinclair, larking, drags from London’s amniotic silt the trove of centuries and presents it to us, still dripping, still stinking, still caked and frequently still defiantly kicking. In a series of ever more ambitious raree shows, ring-mastered with a mixture of relish and horror, with sly Celtic magic, with almost supernatural control, he has established himself as London’s most original celebrant and one of her great creative voices. Peter Ackroyd, another subtle London visionary who has much in common with Sinclair, enthusiastically points to Lud Heat affiliate link as an inspirer of his time-travelling Hawksmoor. Sinclair always leads my own imagination back to its true territory.

At its best London fiction has, in the past twenty years, become characteristically a visionary medium. In contrast to the rational neatly-written disappointments of Old Sir Kingsley, we have a Gilrayish Young Martin, as unEnlightened as they come, sifting the Sunday morning Portobello gutters for revelations and gagging like Swift. We have the unfortunate Rushdie, not quite suffering almost the noblest fate of any visionary, and Fay Weldon and, these days, even A.S. Byat. To those of us who have been exploring the territory for some time, it looked like everyone started knocking back the laudanum and investigating the paranormal pretty much as soon as a handy tourist trail had been blazed to the high ground where angels live. Territory penetrated and mapped long-since by Sinclair and other extra-mural romantics like Angela Carter, Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard in largely unpublicised expeditions since the mid-1960s.

It could be argued that the Occult has in the nick of time come to the aid of a threatened Orthodoxy. Talismans and omens are eagerly snapped up by a technologically-challenged middle class. Some days, any old bone will do. Little visionary peels are slipped into Professor Lodge’s jellies. The modern English novel contains almost as many ghosts and visitations as a Radcliffe three-decker. Spontaneous combustion should soon become an acceptable literary convention. A larger measure of supernatural melodrama is allowed to English domestic fiction than at any time since Northanger Abbey put a welcome lid on the Gothic’s groaning trick coffin. Fifty-year-old notions of pulp sf writers become novel and exciting elements to spice the traditional mix. No wonder all these people are obsessed with vampires and rejuvenation formulae.

Most of the recycling undertaken by English fiction’s best-known careerists is about as effective as a Hampstead Green Bin in evading the inevitability of decay and death or even disguising that familiar rather unpleasant sweetish smell. A bit of genre-borrowing isn’t really the same thing as owning an original vision, but at least those grave-robbers and wine-waterers, those croppers and colons, helped produce the climactic shift which now allows a writer as original as Iain Sinclair to find the larger audience he has deserved for years.

He started showing up in high-street bookshops with a tangle of bombsite brambles and gaudy fireweed, the contents of long-buried basements, the muttering bones and whispering rags of his book-dealer’s trawls through a city largely unexplored by her own inhabitants and thus insufficiently respected or feared, which he called White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. He followed this with a structurally more sophisticated Downriver and then gave his widening readership Radon Daughters as glorious proof of his ever-increasing powers. A manipulative Harlequin slipping through the alleys and twitterns between one world and another, one supernatural realm and another, one age and another, weaving what at close perspective sometimes seems a chaotic course, Sinclair is an authentic visionary. Only at the end of a book, however, do we realise we’ve also been in the power of a genuine wizard, someone capable of tracing patterns and designs only barely perceptible to most people and, more to the point, able to reveal them to us.

Iain Sinclair’s rich enthusiasms, his relish for the idiosyncratic, the original and profoundly grotesque gives his work a certain Dickensian flavour, but Sinclair’s never as desperate as Dickens to discover hope. His literary heroes are Hodgson, Burroughs, the beats, the best pulp writers — all people madly in love with their own powers of language, their own massive turbulences, their own impossible paradoxes, their own perceptions of non-linear Time, of coexistent past, present and future, forever seeking to communicate the ecstacy of their unguarded souls to an average reader who has come to look to books for consolation, not inspiration.

Sinclair works as a revenant, a publicist, an archivist of the marginal, the unfashionable and the self-doomed, against the general tenor of Englit power politics whose vested interests permit no real assault on the status quo, where the established canon is forcefully promoted because lazy convention also acts to employ academics, critics and literary editors at good wages for small effort. The old catholics like Walter Raleigh or Quiller-Couch, who founded our English schools, were soon replaced in the early 2Oth century by ambitious puritans, low Tories or worse.

It’s against a tide hazardous with rotting driftwood, snapping predators and the not-quite-dead, queer lights reflecting from his benign dome, his terrifying glasses, that Sinclair poles his stately punt. He has a bookdealer’s eye for obscurity and rarity, a way of spotting something which, until he fishes it out and polishes it up a bit, we hadn’t ourselves noticed amongst the ordinary, the disgusting or even alarming flotsam of London’s endless flux. Sinclair’s people are no more bizarre or grotesque than most real people. That is to say, they are often, like Dickens’s, larger than fiction, but in no way larger than life. Sinclair celebrates what is idiosyncratic in men and women, yet no character is stranger or more quirkily obsessed than half the people you’d meet on a long train trip. You always leave Sinclair, as you leave Rembrandt or Hals, looking at the familiar world with freshly informed eyes.

Sinclair’s relish for language, for lost words and forgotten notions, his lust for metaphor, links him with earlier London visionaries like Blake or Eliot, just as the breadth of his enthusiasms allows the inspiration of Ginsberg and De Quincey, but it’s neither his eclecticism nor his influences which define his work — it’s his curiosity, his sense of justice, his bardic instincts, his generosity, and above all his original vision of what remains in spite of everything the greatest and most complex of all cities. He proves to us why London is still the best and most rewarding place for a poet or a novelist to live.

He proves it through celebrations like this.

Copyright © 1995 by Michael Moorcock.