Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report [Hardcover]

I am not surprised that some people get irate about Iain Sinclair. I know at least two people who have hurled 'Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire' across their living room floors. The general feeling is that he overwrites with far too many metaphors that are tedious rather than enjoyable to read. Some of the people interviewed by Iain Sinclair clearly have very interesting stories to tell but are not allowed to do so, either through poor editing or poor contextualisation. So much more could have been made of the interviews with Sidney Kirsch and Rachel Lichtenstein. Too often he reverts to talking with fellow members of the middle class artist community, using place names as chapter headings while not really describing anything tangible. As much as he tries, I don't think Iain Sinclair has told the story of Hackney as effectively as some people try to make out.

Iain Sinclair must have wandered around Hackney with his head up his backside for the past forty years judging by what doesn't get into his confidential report. The exodus of the working class secular Jews in the seventies and eighties, the dissolution of the grammar school system, the failed comprehensives , the disappearance of the ragtrade, the ghettoisation of improverished ethnic minorities on the estates and other changes in the social fabric don't really feature.

This is not to say that I not amused to find that while Joseph Conrad was recuperating in the hospital in which I had my tonsils out as a child he may have reflected on how there was as much darkness in Graham Road as there was in the Congo.

Sexing up Hackney with literary connections is a wonderful antidote to its reputation for being the scruffiest borough in the London but I do wonder how vast chunks of this book did not end up in the Pseuds Corner of Private Eye along with most of the newspaper reviews of this thoroughly pretentious writer. Although these days reviews are usually given by chums promoting each other's books.

Ok, Sinclair does have a point about that absolute disaster the Olympics will be for the area and all the points about Hackney's corrupt and seedy council are on the ball. However there is something really slimy about the creation of a Hackney narrative that only places artists, weirdoes and middle class lefties at the centre of the story. Afro-Carribbean and Asian working class working class communities hardly get a murmur in this runic farce.

Sinclair's speculation about whether or not it was Sheila Rowbotham who posed naked for Godard in a sequence that seems to have been shot at her Montague road house is just prurience disguised as quest. And who gives a damn anyway?. Why so much emphasis on Rowbotham's Hackney residences and her ex lovers? But why is Sinclair is so excited by celebrity and canonical names? Why does he want to envelope Hackney in fictional and semi fictional blue plaques? The answer is that he is simply a very shallow man and his writing is `all fur coat and no knickers' . Sinclair's Hackney is mainly counterfeit. His special report is underpinned by an unhealthy interest in the grotesque which in turn generates some awful retailing of old tabloid crap about the Krays and Jayne Mansfields's terminal head injuries and the Angry Brigade. Someone needs to remind Sinclair that John Pearson and Monty Python dealt amply with krays in the seventies - its all old jack the hat. As one of my fellow Hackney exiles said to me- what scared people in Hackney most, was an early death from cancer. The ill-fated twins registered zero in most people's concerns

The real truth that forms part of the unstated subtext of this book is that the gentrification of Hackney was initiated in the late sixties by middle-class Marxists and anarchists when the Victorian and Georgian properties were reclaimed by the `bourgeoisie' . Sinclair's phantasmagoric attempt to socially cleanse and rewrite local history may please the croissant eaters of Stoke Newington Church street and local estate agents, but it will cut no ice with the estate dwellers past and present. For a proper account of east London people go and see that wonderful film by Andrea Arnold - Fish Tank

There was a time, around the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, when I would have said you couldn't have too much Iain Sinclair. This book, however, I read with teeth-grinding annoyance pretty much throughout; and fundamentally, I think, it's evidence of a talent being led astray by productivity and journalism.

Make no mistake about it, Sinclair can (still) write. As a shaper of phrases and chronicler of the low level crackle and static of the urban street, the white noise of minor threat and aggro that lies behind even the quietest moment, he has few equals. My problem with this book is that, essentially, it's not about Hackney at all, but about the uses to which Hackney and what it stands for can be put by a bunch of middle-class Bohemian incomers. Sinclair chiefly chronicles his thirty years living in Hackney firstly through interviewing people from his own artistic milieu who, like him, moved into the cheap housing here and pursued their own alternative lifestyles, or secondly through pursuing the stories of lost novelists who have similarly used Hackney as set-dressing. Will Self, Marina Warner, Chris Petit: the gang's all here. What we have much less of are the natives; notably, Sinclair seems to speak to one black person in the course of the book, and he's another creative type who's used as a conduit to tell us what all the other black people in the borough, the ones without a novel or mural on the go, are thinking.

The Bohemian viewpoint is an Olympian one: from this standpoint, all government either local or national is the work of charlatans or buffoons. We have the obligatory anti-Tony Blair stuff; we also have positively Clarkson-esque opposition to local council initiatives to foster cycling or recycling. Pretty much every administrative body gets it in the neck apart from the defunct Inner London Education Authority (who, it can't be coincidence, used to employ Sinclair's wife). We learn of Sinclair's reluctance to pay his council tax; later, encountering an arts project funded by Hackney Borough Council he comments that he'd have been happier to pay up if he'd known they were spending the money on this, instead of fobbing him off with nonsense about schools and waste disposal. Clearly that's meant to be a joke, but there's a truth behind it. Of course there's corruption and incompetence in Hackney Council - a long, sorry history of it - but this is at least a body grappling with some of the problems of the area, with real poverty leading to real suffering for real people, whilst the Bohemian flâneur passes by with an ironically raised eyebrow.

Returning to my point about productivity and journalism - as in a lot of recent Sinclair work, we get too much of the man himself, detailing how he went about getting the book written: he and his family muscling into the foreground and crowding out the urban landscape that was his forte. Writing about the process of writing is a classic journalistic space-filler; we even get a bit about his computer problems (next and final stop for the desperate journalist filling column inches anyhow, the column on erecting flat-pack furniture). We learn of his being commissioned to write the book and, as it progresses, we hear more and more about the deadline approaching and how certain alleyways will have to remain unexplored if he's to deliver it on time. There's a palpable air of "Will this do?" as we reach the ending. Ultimately, it's a bit of a lazy book: lazily assembled, and a chronicle of a lazy refusal to engage with Hackney as it actually is rather than simply using it and its natives as a gritty backdrop for his own purposes.

This sounds like a two-star or even one-star rubbishing. And yet he can still write, even if he chooses to spread it thinly across too much product at the moment. Three stars, then, because the sentences are still well put together, even if their content may drive you spare.