URBAN STUDIES: Hackney, That Rose-Red Borough,By Iain Sinclair, Penguin, 575pp. £20
IAIN SINCLAIR, the London novelist and poet, gained his intimate knowledge of the city on foot. Lights Out for the Territory(1997), his exploration of sub-cultural Whitechapel and Brick Lane, accompanied the reader through shadowy, unfrequented zones far removed from the tourist's West End. London's heart of darkness, for Sinclair, has always been in the east, where Irish immigrants struggled to earn a crust and Yiddish cockneys operated out of fur workshops. Sinclair's is a romantic London, then, filtered through a rose-tinted nostalgia for bygone days.
Interestingly, Sinclair is not a Londoner: he was born over 60 years ago in a Welsh mining town, the son of a Scots doctor. In the early 1960s he went to Dublin to read English at Trinity College. He did this for four years, apparently as homage to his literary heroes Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and JP Donleavy. These Irish writers mean more to Sinclair, I would guess, than almost any English writer this century.
His wonderful new book, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empireis a non-fiction account of London's most crime-blighted, lively and polyglot borough. Over the years, Hackney has acquired a reputation for being a cool, as well as a politically corrupt part of the British capital. It lies cheek-by-jowl with the City and is therefore prey to the depredations of the money men. Sinclair has lived in Hackney for 40-odd years but the borough seems to have lost much of its allure for him now. Swathes of it have been claimed by developers and unscrupulous housing officers.
In pages of pavement-pounding satire, pastiche Beckett (“Start again. Fail better”) and virtuoso word-spinning, Sinclair casts a jaundiced eye over the borough’s present-day transformations. Routinely, bulldozers raze Georgian terraces to make way for Olympic sports hotels and ugly car parks. Hong Kong bankers, “buying blind from the catalogue”, snap up Victorian warehouses, then tear them down. The “regeneration” is funded by offshore operations run by newly wealthy Russian, Middle Eastern and Irish businessmen.
Much as Sinclair has been rude and excoriating about London’s heritage industry (the Spitalfields neo-Georgians are a special hate), his atmospheric evocations of the city’s past have inevitably made him a part of it. In this new book, however, he is at pains to chronicle contemporary black London, which hardly lends itself to Peter Ackroyd-style fable-making and heritage poetics. The demolition of the Four Aces Club on Dalston Lane, a Victorian-era theatre that became a reggae venue for local Jamaicans (as well as for Joe Strummer of the Clash), saddens Sinclair, who reveals an almost John Betjeman-esque obsession with the theatre’s now vanished architectural glories.
Typically, Sinclair is always on the move, raking the Hackney streets for signs and symbols, digging up its forgotten novelists and artists, among them Alexander Baron, author of the 1960s classic The Low Life. Sinclair's pitch is urban, jagged, and Hackney is a maze of symbols waiting to be deciphered.
Some readers may find the author's enthusiasms too arcane. A classic piece of Sinclair arcana reveals that Joseph Conrad had briefly been a patient in the German Hospital on Graham Road. I often drive past the hospital (now converted into private flats) which, thanks to Sinclair, now resonates eerily with the presence of the author of Heart of Darkness.
By his own admission, Sinclair is congenitally incapable of not seeing connections between things. This book is a study, among other things, in coincidence, where the most disparate facts seem to connect. "Every clue had to be chased", says Sinclair as he searches for traces of the film director Jean-Luc Godard's sojourn in Hackney in 1968, during the shooting of Sympathy for the Devil (One Plus One).
While Sinclair indulges these quests, mixing social surrealism with polemic, he interviews a host of Hackney old-timers, whose transcripts poignantly chronicle a vanished world. Among them is Tony Lambrianou, a former associate of the criminal Kray brothers; even his comments (“I fear for the future”) have a valedictory tone that moved one.
In a sense, all of Iain Sinclair's books are one book. Other real-life characters here have appeared, thinly disguised, in his earlier fiction. There's the cultural commentator Patrick Wright, for example, or Drif Field ("Driffield"), author of the indispensable if opinionated Drif's Guideto the second-hand bookshops of Britain. With his Donegal tweeds and posh cor-blimey voice, Drif used to be a familiar figure round London's book marts, shlepping bags of hardbacks down Portobello Road of a Saturday morning. Sinclair himself was for many years a Hackney-based book dealer.
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empireis giddy with information and off-piste detail. Jayne Mansfield (a "steroidal Monroe clone") visited Hackney in 1959, as did, in 1955, Orson Welles. Sinclair's prose throughout is of a Joycean richness. "Afternoon drinkers, fathoms deep in cream-foamed melancholy, build Olympic rings across dark tables with the shifting of wet glasses." Too much? I love it. For my money, Iain Sinclair is one of the finest writers at work today in the English-speaking world, a true alchemist of the word.
Ian Thomson’s
The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica
will be published by Faber in May