So. Hi again. It’s February, and it’s been nearly a month since I last posted here. During that time period I moved (not far: from Park Slope proper to the edge of Park Slope/Windsor Terrace). There was much packing, much unpacking, and much packing-and-unpacking-related angst. There was not much reading around moving day: my brain was in that unpleasant frazzled state of not being able to comfortably take in new information. I’m officially three issues behind on the New Yorker. It took me about three tries before I properly got into London Orbital, mostly due to that frazzledness, but also because Sinclair’s writing, which is sometimes a rush of names (of people, of places) took me a while to get used to. I’m generally pretty compulsive about stopping to look things up when I read, and that was part of the problem: if I stopped to look up everything and everyone I’d never heard of (Bill Drummond, Bill Griffiths, electric milk floats), there was no chance of sustaining any kind of reading momentum. So I relaxed a little bit, let some references slip past me, and eventually found myself enjoying this book, which is shaped by Sinclair’s decision to walk around the edges of the M25, the London Orbital, the 120-ish mile motorway that basically encircles the city.
Sinclair’s walk around the M25 (which started January 1, 1998) was undertaken in twelve stages, and the book is organized by his counter-clockwise route through the areas at the fringes of London. The narrative is mostly chronological, but not totally, as there are some places that get second trips, greater attention. It’s a psychogeographical enterprise, an attempt to record the effects of place on life, the way the city changes: “Outsiders are struck by effects, shifts, that locals walking their animals, or collecting their kids from a fenced-off school, take for granted. There is a mystery at the edge of great conurbations; in the light, in places travellers have passed through for centuries” (232). It’s also a study of the liminal, the edge-places, what the city pushes out to the margins. It’s based on “the belief that this nowhere, this edge, is the place that will offer fresh narratives” (16).
So what is on the fringes? Kennels, slaughterhouses, waste-treatment plants. Shopping centers. Towns whose High-Street shops are all closed, because of the shopping centers. 264 bridges that cross over the motorway. Secrets. Old government land. Industry or research too dirty or dangerous to be in the city, or needing the privacy of wooded land: gunpowder, bombs. Asylums, now empty, now being turned into apartments or bulldozed to make planned communities, suburbs. Canals, prompting Sinclair to quote snippets of Dickens. Houseboats with wood-stoves. The airport, “the inscrutable geometry of Heathrow’s terminal runways, hangars and car parks” (228). At one point someone asks Sinclair what he’s interested and his reply is “poking about anywhere that wants to keep us out,” and that’s what Sinclair and his walking-companions do throughout the course of the book (459).
In spite of/because of its denseness, Sinclair’s style is appealing to me. I like how this book is full of lists, and I like how Sinclair has an eye for, to use his phrasing, “the improvised beauty of the accidental” (54). Like this:
Dawn on a wet road. Travelling east into the rising sun; drowned fields, mountains of landfill, ancient firing ranges. Everything smudged and rubbed. With the M25 as your destination, Purfleet and Grays as staging posts. Bridge, river, oil storage tanks. The border chain of chalk quarries occupied by Lakeside, Thurrock.
A high sierra of container units in rust colours and deep blues, chasms through which sunbeams splinter, wrecked double-decker buses with spider’s-web windows. Junk yards with leashed dogs. The Beam rivulet and the sorry Ingrebourne meander through spoilt fields, beneath the elevated highway (a road on stilts). (46)
I have more Sinclair waiting for me on my shelves—on different trips to England I acquired this book, another book of nonfiction called Lights Out for the Territory, and Downriver (a novel)—and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work. But for now, I think I’m in the mood for a little lighter fiction, and maybe my next post here will be sooner than March!
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