Some Thoughts on Iain Sinclair’s London Overground

Iain Sinclair’s London Overground opens with the image of a pigeon that has been splattered on a road, inviting other birds to pick at the carrion and causing further carnage. It ends with a picture of Andrew Kötting’s mutilated leg, pieced back together after surgery. It doesn’t get much less gory in between as Sinclair and Kötting follow the eruption of the London Overground around the landscape.

I am definitely an Iain Sinclair guy now, I can’t help it. I think London Orbital (which I reviewed here) is a masterpiece of monomania and a real non-fiction treat for any Ballard fans out there. I’ve also got a copy of Lights out for the Territory that I’m gonna start working my way through soon. I really dig his blend of fiction and non-fiction, of memory and the present, of travel writing and memoir. He’s got a really particular voice, and having since watched some of his work on film he seems to me to write how he speaks, which is an incredibly effective technique that is deceptively hard to do.

(It also means he speaks how he writes; in opaque prose poetry. I do not mean this as a criticism.)

If you’re reading this you know what psychogeography is. I tried to describe it to someone the other day and ended up saying something like, “it’s like walking around things you’re supposed to drive around and recording your impressions.” Yeah, I know it’s not quite it, but I was thinking of Sinclair’s two circuits around London as I spoke to them.

I knew going into this stuff that I was going to love it, but if you’re at all worried you might not, London Overground seems to me to be a good starting point. It encompasses a lot of his main concerns, it seems very typical of his style, and despite being much shorter than London Orbital it still describes a difficult odyssey.

A criticism I’ve seen of Sinclair is that he just likes to moan about things. I don’t disagree that he’s often depicting the more negative aspects of postmodern living, but I’ve met plenty of pub bores, and if any of them were half as erudite as Sinclair is I would have enjoyed my local pub a whole lot more. You often get the feeling he uses these walks as an excuse to talk about his reading, his favourite authors. If that is the case… it’s fine. He’s interested in fascinating writers. He’d met both J.G. Ballard and Angela Carter, and uses large parts of London Overground to talk about his memories of them, as well as the importance of their fiction, and the areas of London they wrote about. Memory presses upon these pages heavily, more so than before perhaps inevitably considering the nearly twenty years of living between Orbital and Overground.

Another figure that looms large is Sigmund Freud. Sinclair mostly seems concerned with his illness, the cancer that killed him. I didn’t think too much of it until I was flicking back through after I’d finished it to extract some stuff for my commonplace book and noticed the death and sickness that opened and closed the book. We’ve broached his grouchiness; I’ll give you one guess as to whether Sinclair things London is improving or getting worse, the walk in this book having taken place right in the post-Olympic hangover.

I mentioned in my review of London Orbital that he makes sure to include foils for himself. Andrew Kötting is his foil in this one, and what a foil he is. It’s like watching the Dionysian and the Appolonian perambulating around London. Sinclair is documenting relationships as much as he is places and feelings, and his works highlight his own friendships as much as they do anything else. It’s really… nice, I can’t think of another way to put it. If I had a friend who produced something like London Overground as a document of our friendship I’d count myself a loved and lucky man indeed.

London Overground is great, a nice little slice of what Sinclair does, a circumscribed document for a limited excursion. I’m still pretty early in my engagement with Sinclair’s work, but I can really imagine this functioning as an accessible entryway.

Some Thoughts on Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital

I’m a white guy with a beard and a humanities degree. I like going for walks. It was inevitable, then, that I’d find my way to psychogeography.

It’s a practise (or set of practises, I guess), that I’ve been aware of for a long time but haven’t engaged with in a serious way. I read The Society of the Spectacle around the time the Leveson enquiry was happening and felt very knowing. I’ve recently felt compelled to take more and more notes in all areas and aspects of my life, and one of those areas has naturally been the walks I take around the Peterborough area.

But more on that later.

Happenstance, serendipity, chance. Call it what you will, it plays a bigger part in our lives than any of us can admit and stay sane. The stakes aren’t always super high, though. I was thinking about Iain Sinclair and how London Orbital was such a great idea for a book because I had seen people discussing it on Twitter. I was thinking about it as I walked in to a charity shop and immediately spotted a copy of it on the shelf.

(I know what the Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon is.)

I started it pretty much immediately but it’s taken me a good while to work through. I get the impression Sinclair does not write nice easy books about his nice easy travels. His project, to walk a circuit of London directed by the M25, within its “aural boundaries”, and to get it done before the Millennium, was a difficult, stop-start task, and London Orbital is a difficult, stop-start book.

A lot of it is down to Sinclair’s writing style, which is one of those where you have to glom on to the rhythm and tone and go with it, as opposed to fighting it and trying to decipher every sentence exactly. In a lot of ways Sinclair is non-fiction Ballard, obsessed as he is with the same spaces, the same processes, but in terms of style and tone, it’s more like Virginia Woolf’s writing about London, or Hope Mirrlee’s Paris. You are absolutely in the stream of Sinclair’s consciousness. As much as he is reporting facts about where he walked, when, who with, he’s also recording his impressions, snatches of conversation, bits of text he sees on the streets, adverts, digressions about the history of literature and the history of London.

It’s great and I love it and I found myself going with the flow quite quickly, even if I couldn’t always abide it for very long, but I can imagine someone struggling and getting out and not coming back.

The digressions are fascinating. I suspect some of these projects Sinclair engages in are ways of him bringing his enormous reading to bear in a context that will stand it, and who can blame him? What’s particularly interesting, I think, is the way he doesn’t make much of a distinction as to fact or fiction. A house William Blake might have stayed in is treated with the same weight as an area that plays a part in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. And why not? It weighs just as heavily in the imagination, especially if you’re there. The few pages on Dracula stunned me; Sinclair describing him as the original psychogeographer, as map obsessive, London obsessive, someone already forming deep and psychic connections with a space before he’s even arrived. It’s an angle I’d never considered, and it’s made me immediately want to go and re-read Dracula. It’s almost throwaway how Sinclair introduces the idea and it’s better, more original, more interesting literary criticism than I’ve seen in ages.

(If the idea comes from somewhere else, or has an antecedent, please let me know in the comments.)

I imagine you have to be careful, writing non-fiction featuring your friends, to not abuse their good nature or turn them in to figures of fun. I always loved the way Bill Bryson talked about his relationship with his friend Stephen Katz in A Walk in the Woods and thought it a model for that kind of thing. Sinclair walks the same tightrope and succeeds here. In particular I’d highlight his portrayal of Kevin Jackson, who comes along on some stretches of the walk totally unprepared, or even misprepared, and is treated within the narrative with real sympathy. He brings a jacket that’ll “cook him if he wears it, cripple him if he carries it”. He wears trainers when he should wear boots, and boots when he should wear trainers.

It’s clever, the way he uses these real people as characters. Renchi Bicknell is a foil for Sinclair in the sense that Sinclair is often a detached observer, interested in what these spaces do to his own interior space, whereas Renchi is the people person, the smooth talker, the one who can get them past a security guard or talk down a paranoid local. Kevin, on the other hand, reminds us of the physical reality. Life isn’t frictionless; we have bodies we need to navigate through these spaces. Kevin stops the book becoming about the M25 in Sinclair’s own head, which would be fascinating I’m sure, but also one-note.

If you’ve read any of my reviews before you’ll know the highest compliment I feel can pay a book is that, having read it, I immediately want to go off and write an imitation of it (see Renata Adler’s Speedboat). If you haven’t guessed by now, I’d pay London Orbital the same compliment. I’m ready to fall down the psychogeography rabbit hole.

I can see Iain Sinclair has written quite a few books. Is there somewhere you’d recommend I go having started with London Orbital? Not that I lack for stuff to read, because to pay it another compliment, I’ve come away with yet more on my reading list.