52. Iain Sinclair

Originally published in The Boar.

Iain Sinclair – Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (Penguin)

If the hard-boiled, hyperactive, heteroglossic Sinclair of Downriver is now gone, as he settles into retirement as a 'media hack' (as Owen Hatherley has waspishly termed him), Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire comes into its own, distinct virtues: it is, in that awful euphemistic term, his most 'mature' and generous book. And rightly so: in Sinclair's usual twisted way, it's his tribute to the borough that's nurtured him and his writing since moving there in the mid-60s as an amateurishly bohemian film student. The story (or stories) of his 'hood is therefore his own story too, and the passages of memoir here make up perhaps the finest and most poignant writing he's done since Edge of the Orison.

The book luxuriates in its own fractal sprawl, but rarely seems self-indulgent; Hackney becomes a microcosm for the vast matter not only of London but of the whole world, that seems to drift or have drifted through: Sinclair tracks rumour and historic apparition like an addict, reporting on Joseph Conrad and Orson Welles' visits to the borough, Julie Christie leading tours of Abney Park Cemetery, the infamous Hackney Mole Man. Unlike his other non-fiction books on London, he gives a lot of room to other voices of the district, in a series of fascinating interviews: with those involved in filming Godard's notorious British Sounds, with former Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll, acquaintances of the mysterious East End novelist Alexander Baron, residents of the crumbling estates.

It takes the non-linearity, the twisting routes of his London masterpiece Lights Out for the Territory and expands it into an enormous trawl of the side-streets of place and history: we're left with the image of Sinclair aimlessly skirting the catastrophe zone of the Olympics site, running into his son – a strange confrontation that closes this loamy build-up of voices and history, this nose-against-the-brick testament to the particularity of place.