Landor's Tower

Though hardly a household name in America, in London there is something of a cult hounding the work of Iain Sinclair. There are essentially two reasons, easily summarized. Sinclair has a marvelous prose style. And he takes on as his subject matter a fascinating blend of contemporary streetwise outsiders — derelicts, gangsters, paranoid poets, slick filmmakers — and the ghosts of British history and culture.

Iain Sinclair has a complex background. Though he has a Scottish name, he was raised in Wales, and went to university in Dublin. Eventually Sinclair found his way to London, where, in his twenties, he worked as a gardener for Hackney Council, trimming the lawns in front of Nicholas Hawksmoor's oppressive, almost secular, churches. Sinclair was also a book scout, specializing in the Beat writers and in experimental poetry and literature. In the seventies he wrote poetry and had his own small press, seeking out authors among the estranged and the surreal. As Michael Moorcock wrote in a review of Landor's Tower for The Spectator, Sinclair "started a fashion. His earlier thoughts on Hawksmoor churches in [the book length poem] Lud Heat directly inspired Peter Ackroyd's excellent novel, Hawksmoor, which in turn virtually created an entire genre."

Then came the novels. Sinclair's fiction blends the past and the present, dream life and reality. His book White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings takes place simultaneously in Jack the Ripper's London and the contemporary world of grasping book scouts. It's true, sometimes the narrative threads of his novels are a little hard to follow. This is also true of Landor's Tower, which carries over some of the concerns and characters from his previous four novels, including the shabby book scout Dryfield.

The narrator of Landor's Tower, Andrew Norton, has been commissioned to write a novel about the poet Walter Savage Landor. Troubled with writer's block, Norton, for some reason, hires a conspiracy buff named Kaporal to gather information about Jeremy Thorpe, a former British MP once involved in a gay sex scandal. Meanwhile, two book scouts (called "runners" in England) named Dryfield and Billy Silverfish are also scouring the countryside, looking for whatever feeble volumes they can dig up from the slim pickings. They all end up in Hay-on-Wye, the Welsh city of bookstores. There, Norton has an affair with a clerk named Prudence. But in the phantasmagoric method of this novel, Prudence vanishes, and Norton ends up accused of her murder. Then, somehow he's in an asylum (or is that a flashback?). And can Prudence's disappearance and Kaporal's investigations be connected to the strange suicides afflicting the defense industry?

The reader may or may not get the answers to these questions. Landor's Tower is not a thriller in the conventional sense. The novel is really more of an essay on two ends of the literary life: the fears and desires that afflict the manufacturer of a book's contents, and the carny-like lifestyle of the scavengers at the low end of the book trade who scoop up literature's dregs (Sinclair doesn't have much flattery to bestow on Hay-on-Wye).

Sinclair's range of allusion is typically vast: the poet David Jones, the artist Eric Gill, Henry Vaughan, Francis Kilvert, Arthur Machen, Dylan Thomas, even a missing street preacher named Richey Edwards, all receive entries, references, or cameos. With its non-stop citations within a thicket of paranoia, conspiracy theory, utopianism, ancient rite, as well as Establishment connectedness contrasted with quotidian alienation, Landor's Tower is a heady brew. As Norton, a thinly disguised variation of Sinclair himself, observes, "I'd never had a problem cranking out labyrinthine fictions that tottered and tumbled under the weight of their conceits."

Like Seamus Heaney, Sinclair writes in a dense, clotted prose. You can almost feel the cold, moist clumps of dirt and smell the rich earth of his world. And like Don DeLillo, Sinclair has no qualms about stopping the novel to toss off theories, ideas, observations, and poetic word portraits of everyday activities. Influences on Sinclair include J. G. Ballard, science fiction writer Michael Moorcock, Cambridge don and poet J. H. Prynne, William Burroughs, and even P. G. Wodehouse. It all makes for an appealing stew.

Powell's employee D. K. Holm is also co-host of the movie review television show Film at Eleven, and runs its attendent website Cinemonkey.com.

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