- Hardcover: 400 pages
- Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd; First Edition edition (29 Sep 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0241142180
- ISBN-13: 978-0241142189
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.6 x 4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 528,388 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Edge of the Orison
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Product Description
Product Description
The story goes that in 1841, the poet John Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and, heading towards his home in Northborough, covered eighty miles over three-and-a-half days. On foot and alone, he was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce a woman already three years dead In Iain Sinclair s hands, the bare facts of John Clare's story turn both strange and elliptical. Armed with curiosity and a sense that his work has from the first been haunted by Clare, Sinclair together with fellow diviners and other stragglers of the road sets out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness and to explore his own obsession with the poet. Keats, De Quincey, Blake, Pepys, Shelley, Joyce, Beckett, artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore along with Sinclair's wife Anna, who shares a connection with Clare are his fellow travellers on a journey that becomes an exercise in memory and erasure encompassing parents, grandparents and other ancestral ghosts. The mad, wonderful, hallucinatory and physical prose of Clare finds new expression in Sinclair's deep-digging fiction of biography where memoir, history, travel, mystery and dreamstory combine in a magnificent eulogy to madness and to sanity along the borders of which may lie the poet's muse.
About the Author
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters, London Orbital and Dining on Stones. He lives in Hackney, East London.
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It is a sleeping country, unpeopled and overlit. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
It is a sleeping country, unpeopled and overlit. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
On the face of it, it's a logical progression: Sinclair's explorations of London lead him out to the M25 circuit of "London Orbital", the final leg of which takes him through Epping Forest and past the start of John Clare's walk home from the asylum, the walk at the core of this book. This ought to be fertile territory for Sinclair and indeed he writes on the empty countryside of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire with the same sardonic vividness he brought to the inner city. However, it's a book of fragments that don't cohere. Clare's walk is retraced, and this is recounted in fractured timescale; but we also get a walk along the Great Ouse in the company of the artist Emma Matthews who is revisiting the site of her father and sister's drownings, a tour of Northampton with the graphic artist Alan Moore (centring on the asylum that housed Clare and also James Joyce's daughter) and an exploration of Sinclair's wife's family history, centred on the village next to Clare's: different strands linked only by geography, which Sinclair fails to weld into an artistic whole.
The family history quest involves some well-described explorations of the Fenland landscape, but also rather too much detail of which William begat which Robert - family history here, as always, being more interesting to the researcher than to the outsider who has it recounted to them. It's a touching tribute to a marriage, and a more human and domestic side to Sinclair than we've seen before, but it could have been edited down: until now I would have said that Sinclair couldn't write a dull line if he tried, but his description of what people ate at a surprise anniversary meal for his wife manages it - doubly a shame given the Dickensian verve with which Sinclair can write about food, and with which he blowtorches the diners at a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet elsewhere in the book. Furthermore, the family history never really gels with the Clare material: and James Joyce's daughter Lucia seems to be crowbarred in there, the facts that Anna Sinclair's family also included a James Joyce, and that Lucia ended up in the same asylum as John Clare, failing to justify her presence.
The book is worth exploring - as everything Sinclair writes is - and it does some interesting things with the sheer weirdness of the Middle Level landscape, but it's a bit of a mixed bag, and not the place to start on this important writer.
The family history quest involves some well-described explorations of the Fenland landscape, but also rather too much detail of which William begat which Robert - family history here, as always, being more interesting to the researcher than to the outsider who has it recounted to them. It's a touching tribute to a marriage, and a more human and domestic side to Sinclair than we've seen before, but it could have been edited down: until now I would have said that Sinclair couldn't write a dull line if he tried, but his description of what people ate at a surprise anniversary meal for his wife manages it - doubly a shame given the Dickensian verve with which Sinclair can write about food, and with which he blowtorches the diners at a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet elsewhere in the book. Furthermore, the family history never really gels with the Clare material: and James Joyce's daughter Lucia seems to be crowbarred in there, the facts that Anna Sinclair's family also included a James Joyce, and that Lucia ended up in the same asylum as John Clare, failing to justify her presence.
The book is worth exploring - as everything Sinclair writes is - and it does some interesting things with the sheer weirdness of the Middle Level landscape, but it's a bit of a mixed bag, and not the place to start on this important writer.
Format:Paperback
Iain Sinclair's retracing of one of literature's most famous (and sad) journeys- that of the 'Peasant Poet,' John Clare from his Epping Forest asylum back to his home in Northamptonshire-should have been a classic. John Clare was unique among the romantic poets in that he was from the labouring classes; he wrote some of the finest nature poems in English literature and he was one of the first 'celebrities' in the modern meaning of the word. Feted by London society, Clare succumbed to madness and entered into a long decline. Sinclair is working with such promising material that I'm surprised that he didn't do more with it. Surprisingly, Sinclair choses to go off on tangents so we get lots of material about Sinclair's small walking party; Shelley's drowning, James Joyce's daughter (a later asylum inmate) and biographical information about Sinclair's wife's tenuous family connections to Clare.
I felt that Sinclair did best when he stuck to his story. In 1820 Clare makes his first visit to London as a rustic novelty: Sinclair compares him to the Elephant Man, which I thought was an interesting comparison. He is also good at describing the wide eyed wonder Clare must have felt walking around the city in the era of Blake and Keats. It was a city of whores, resurrection men, disease and overcrowding. A world away from Clare's rural life and a wholly different moral atmosphere to that of the poet's rural upbringing. Was being feted in this corrupt city the source of Clare's mental torment?
Sinclair's latter day reconstruction of Clare's journey begins in the industrialised landscape of the Lea Valley in the midst of industrial estates, motorways and travel lodges and he makes his way north via various Hertfordshire towns. He encounters the England of chain pubs and shopping outlets and as one might expect Sinclair is scathing about the heritage industry version of history that he seemingly encounters everywhere. Although the place names may be the same as in Clare's time, the 'meaning' of the land had changed beyond all recognition. If you enjoy Sinclair's post-modern style of writing then you may enjoy the book however, I felt that it only scratched the surface of Clare's life and art.
I felt that Sinclair did best when he stuck to his story. In 1820 Clare makes his first visit to London as a rustic novelty: Sinclair compares him to the Elephant Man, which I thought was an interesting comparison. He is also good at describing the wide eyed wonder Clare must have felt walking around the city in the era of Blake and Keats. It was a city of whores, resurrection men, disease and overcrowding. A world away from Clare's rural life and a wholly different moral atmosphere to that of the poet's rural upbringing. Was being feted in this corrupt city the source of Clare's mental torment?
Sinclair's latter day reconstruction of Clare's journey begins in the industrialised landscape of the Lea Valley in the midst of industrial estates, motorways and travel lodges and he makes his way north via various Hertfordshire towns. He encounters the England of chain pubs and shopping outlets and as one might expect Sinclair is scathing about the heritage industry version of history that he seemingly encounters everywhere. Although the place names may be the same as in Clare's time, the 'meaning' of the land had changed beyond all recognition. If you enjoy Sinclair's post-modern style of writing then you may enjoy the book however, I felt that it only scratched the surface of Clare's life and art.
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