A walk on the wacky side
James Delingpole
LONDON ORBITAL by lain Sinclair Gram, £25, pp. 500, ISBN 1862075476
lain Sinclair is one of those distinctive, oft-name-checked writers you're supposed to have read even though you probably haven't. I hadn't either until London Orbital and, being as it's long, dense, wordy and at £25 in hardback pretty expensive, I expect what you're hoping I'm going to say is, 'Naah. Wildly overrated. Don't bother.' Unfortunately, 1 can't. But I should warn you straightaway he's not an easy read. In some respects, he reminds me of this lit-crit book we all used to crib at university, The Everyman History of English Literature, in which the author, Peter Conrad, manages to cram so many heavyweight ideas into every sentence that one page is the equivalent of about a dozen of anyone else's, and takes a dozen times longer to decipher.
In others — I'm sure there are more obvious influences, I'm just not well read enough to notice them — he's redolent of B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates, where, instead of writing proper sentences, he tries to capture the fleeting quality of thought and the immediacy of his perceptions in staccato, verb-free bursts. Eg: 'On a novocaine winter morning, the motorway sleeve is suspended like a Chinese scroll painting. Wooden fence. Bare trees. Electricity poles.'
The impression you get from all this is of a mind so busy and erudite that prose is almost too clumsy a medium to express its ingenious fancies. Often this can be striking and exhilarating and there are plenty of Martin Amis-style moments where you want to go, 'Wow, that is so right and true.' I liked very much, for example, his description of Heathrow airport's environs: apologetic farmland as a mop-up apron for Concorde disasters' and of Posh Spice's favourite shopping haunt, Waltham Abbey: 'All the women in the coffee-bar have that hard sheen, the laminate of non-specific celebrity.'
Obviously, this talent for making the quotidian seem extraordinary, for enabling the reader to see over-familiar things as if for the first time, comes in pretty handy when your subject matter is something as uninvolving as the M25.
Not that the book is really about the M25, of course. The ostensible subject — an exploration, in stages, of the countryside, asylums, industrial parks and greasy spoons round the London Orbital — is merely a vague excuse for Sinclair to spin off at whatever tangent takes his fancy, usually at the prompting of his even weirder walking companion, an artist called Renchi, on a mission to map the road's psychic geography.
When I mentioned to a friend I was reading fain Sinclair he said, `Ah yes. Old hippies selling paperbacks under railway bridges.' And it's true, Sinclair is not the hardest writer in the world to caricature. Nor is his prose quite as flawless as his more slack-jawed admirers seem to imagine ('Sinclair is a genius...' it says on the back). His scattergun observations don't always stand up to scrutiny, such as his description of Ali G: 'A branded look: dark aviator glasses, sock-hat, male jewellery, white as black.' Yeah, great, except Ali G doesn't wear aviators.
There are times too when Sinclair's impressionistic prose gets so abstruse that you're not wholly sure whether what he's describing is actually happening or whether you're in the middle of yet another imaginary flight; whether its going on now, or if it's something that happened to a friend of a friend of the old tramp whose millionaire aunt hoarded Spenser first editions in a Cambridge brothel 51 years ago.
Like I say, it's easy to parody Sinclair. But isn't that true of all the best authors? He's distinctive, he's involving, he's unpredictable and he does make an enchanting guide to places you might otherwise never have dreamed of visiting. As a walking guide to the M25, this book is next to useless (too rambly, no maps), but as a Hobson-Jobson to the quirks of a hidden England you feared had vanished (from Samuel Palmer's Golden Valley period to mosquito cures in lunatic asylums) it's unbeatable.
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