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Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's 'Journey out of Essex'
In Edge of the Orison the visionary Iain Sinclair walks in the steps of poet John Clare
In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead ...
In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.
'Brilliant . . . amusing, alarming and poignant. An elegy for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent and urgent'Robert Macfarlane, Times Literary Supplement
'A sensitive,beautifully rendered portrait . . . a feast, a riddle, a slowly unravelling conundrum . . . a love-letter to British Romanticism'Independent
'Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psychogeographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plain'J. G. Ballard, Observer
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, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
In 1841 the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead ...
In 2000 Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.
'Brilliant . . . amusing, alarming and poignant. An elegy for an already lost English landscape. Magnificent and urgent'Robert Macfarlane, Times Literary Supplement
'A sensitive,beautifully rendered portrait . . . a feast, a riddle, a slowly unravelling conundrum . . . a love-letter to British Romanticism'Independent
'Sinclair walks every inch of his wonderful novels and psychogeographies, pacing out huge word-courses like an architect laying out a city on an empty plain'J. G. Ballard, Observer
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, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
400 pages, Paperback
First published October 26, 2006
6 people are currently reading
180 people want to read
About the author
Iain Sinclair
120 books342 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
November 10, 2019
Edge of the Orison didn't yield a wave of surprises. Iain Sinclair remains one of my favorites. This is not a unique effort in the oeuvre of Sinclair , Edge isn't a work so beyond the pale as to blur genre. It isn't. It is a series of smaller endeavors allowed to lapse into something formidable and magnificent. Ostensibly there is an attempt to recreate the sojourns of pastoral poet John Clare who battled with mental illness and made a few jaunts of endurance and exposure. Sinclair, Alan Moore and a few others follow his path with an eye to the astral plane and along such but also gather in the family history of Sinclair's wife who has links to Clare as well as to James Joyce. Readers of Moore will anticipate these convergences. Routine readers of Sinclair will marvel.
June 16, 2019
I don’t like to abandon a book unfinished, but every attempt to read more of this book results in me becoming so bad tempered that I really have no option.
I have reached page 99, and it has been a battle. I have stumbled over many a sentence that re-reading several times fails to unscramble. I have got lost in the wandering of the prose, from the past in Claire’s time, to the present, then back to Sinclair’s wife’s families time, then back to Claire. And I have gritted my teeth over the punctuation. I know I do not punctuate perfectly, but I trust punctuation to help me make sense of prose, and reading a book as madly punctuated as this is hard, hard work. I think that in the 99 pages I have read the statement that punctuation is unimportant about three times. I disagree.
This kind of writing works for some, but not for me.
I have reached page 99, and it has been a battle. I have stumbled over many a sentence that re-reading several times fails to unscramble. I have got lost in the wandering of the prose, from the past in Claire’s time, to the present, then back to Sinclair’s wife’s families time, then back to Claire. And I have gritted my teeth over the punctuation. I know I do not punctuate perfectly, but I trust punctuation to help me make sense of prose, and reading a book as madly punctuated as this is hard, hard work. I think that in the 99 pages I have read the statement that punctuation is unimportant about three times. I disagree.
This kind of writing works for some, but not for me.
June 2, 2013
The trick with Iain Sinclair is not to try too hard to take in everything, mentally wander with him and his friends through the landscape and if at times your attention wanders or you get a little tired that's really okay. Sometimes you'll perk up like when he meets Alan Moore, at other times you'll probably stifle a yawn as parades of dead relatives (his wife's) names start to blur into one another.
This is his tale of searching for John Clare in the luminous empty landscapes of East Anglia but also a story of looking for lost family in old abandoned churchyards and provincial record offices, with no real plan just stumbling from clue to clue grubbed out of the landscape. Psychogenealogy.
The search for Clare was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book. History and poetry unearthed. The search for his wife's relatives began to lose me a bit by the end, so many names the same, so much repetition of the 'wives of farmers' theme without much insight into whether this searching for roots had much meaning for his wife, so I enjoyed this book less than his walks around the M25.
Nevertheless, as you'd expect from Sinclair the book is full of snippets of information about the past, unexpected illumination of a familiar landscape and funny observations of modern life. Sinclair is an engaging companion and worth accepting an invitation to follow through the landscapes of modern Britain.
This is his tale of searching for John Clare in the luminous empty landscapes of East Anglia but also a story of looking for lost family in old abandoned churchyards and provincial record offices, with no real plan just stumbling from clue to clue grubbed out of the landscape. Psychogenealogy.
The search for Clare was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book. History and poetry unearthed. The search for his wife's relatives began to lose me a bit by the end, so many names the same, so much repetition of the 'wives of farmers' theme without much insight into whether this searching for roots had much meaning for his wife, so I enjoyed this book less than his walks around the M25.
Nevertheless, as you'd expect from Sinclair the book is full of snippets of information about the past, unexpected illumination of a familiar landscape and funny observations of modern life. Sinclair is an engaging companion and worth accepting an invitation to follow through the landscapes of modern Britain.
February 4, 2012
I first heard of Ian Sinclair a few months ago when he did an event with Alan Moore at the Barbican. He did some readings and I liked his style. I borrowed this book from the library as I really like Moore's chapter on John Clare in Voice of the Fire and apparently Moore was one of the people in the book so it seemed like a good place to start.
I have to say I did not get on that well with this book. I found the lack of structure really frustrating. It seemed to drift all over the place, sometimes about walking, family history, other history, Clare's life with no real reason behind any of it. When he was talking about historical things I did enjoy the book. There was a chapter about Shelly which I particularly liked. However, there was a lot I didn't care for. The walking chapters just seemed SO pretentious it hurt. It was like he was the subject of Pulp's common people. Recreating a walk of a madman on the run from a mental hospital and then staying in nice hotels just felt like cheating, and being outraged when you couldn't stay in the posh one cause you were too scruffy from walking even though they'd taken your credit card seemed absurd. He just came across as so annoying. He was like the opposite of Kerouac, instead of going around and digging all the things he saw and celebrating them, it just all came off as superior comdemnation. There was also a lot about his wife's family history, which while he attempted to link with Clare I don't think he managed very well and in the end I found those sections very dull.
I've got a copy of his book he wrote with Rachel Lictenstein about the disappearing cabalist in spitalfields which I'm looking forward to reading. But I can't see myself picking up any more of his books.
I have to say I did not get on that well with this book. I found the lack of structure really frustrating. It seemed to drift all over the place, sometimes about walking, family history, other history, Clare's life with no real reason behind any of it. When he was talking about historical things I did enjoy the book. There was a chapter about Shelly which I particularly liked. However, there was a lot I didn't care for. The walking chapters just seemed SO pretentious it hurt. It was like he was the subject of Pulp's common people. Recreating a walk of a madman on the run from a mental hospital and then staying in nice hotels just felt like cheating, and being outraged when you couldn't stay in the posh one cause you were too scruffy from walking even though they'd taken your credit card seemed absurd. He just came across as so annoying. He was like the opposite of Kerouac, instead of going around and digging all the things he saw and celebrating them, it just all came off as superior comdemnation. There was also a lot about his wife's family history, which while he attempted to link with Clare I don't think he managed very well and in the end I found those sections very dull.
I've got a copy of his book he wrote with Rachel Lictenstein about the disappearing cabalist in spitalfields which I'm looking forward to reading. But I can't see myself picking up any more of his books.
June 20, 2017
In Edge of the Orison Sinclair retraces the steps of John Clare, a 19thC poet who fled a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest and walked for three days to his home 80 miles away. The voyage is also a personal odyssee, as Sinclair tries to investigate possible blood links between Clare's family and the lineage of his own wife. Written in a freely associative style, the novel is nearly impossible to grasp: the attention to minute details and the repetition of forced imagery (drowning, flying) renders it hermetic. Edge of the Orison seems to have been written without a specific reader in mind, safe for the writer's own persona.
March 29, 2023
Every book by Iain Sinclair gets three stars from me. They're all the same book. I'd like to give them four stars, or more - but I've got my pride.
John Clare is one of my favourite poets. (Listen to Kevin Coyne's inspired musical version of 'I Am') To follow Clare's journey out of London, from a madhouse to his rural home - what a brilliant idea! Only Sinclair could come up with such a wonderful premise - only Sinclair could stuff it up so wonderfully...
John Clare is one of my favourite poets. (Listen to Kevin Coyne's inspired musical version of 'I Am') To follow Clare's journey out of London, from a madhouse to his rural home - what a brilliant idea! Only Sinclair could come up with such a wonderful premise - only Sinclair could stuff it up so wonderfully...
May 12, 2022
Imagine taking one too many relaxing pills then being driven out of London in the nearside back seat of a very smooth, quiet, powerful, automobile by a driver who doesn't speak.
You go east along the A13, more or less, and every now and then the car takes a diversion to some random place and then smoothly resumes its route. You are sat very comfortably in your seat and you look out the window as the view passes by.
Sometimes, all you see is colourful, ragged, posters peeling from the facades of boarded up shops, sometimes you see beggars , other times you pass Jamaican Steel bands playing and the sound dopplers as you pass. Your body is so relaxed that cannot feel any individual part, you are immersed in a warmth that surrounds your soul. Any sense of time has long since left, you are in stream of images, sounds, dreams, phantoms, and wonder.
You see this rag tag band of people and you are sure you passed them a while back, but here they are again. Sometimes one is leading, other times one of the others is leading. Sometimes there are five of them and yet at other times it seems like there are many, more.
You are so relaxed that your naturally enquiring mind is turned off and instead of a series of pointless questions filling your head, you can feel, taste, smell and experience everything you pass. This a way of living that you have never lived but always wanted to, and now here you are.
You realise that your mundane existence will still be waiting for you when you leave.
You know, instinctively, that you will never be able to explain this experience to your friends because, you now realise, they are not your friends at all, just people you know.
This is a pointless journey, and yet, that is entirely the point. Your life up to this point has always had meaning, method, and purpose, and what a waste it has been, by and large. Yes, it has had moments, but nothing of any real lasting value until now. But you cannot verbalise that value because it exists on a non-verbal plane, so instead you sit back and enjoy this unique view as it passes by.
You go east along the A13, more or less, and every now and then the car takes a diversion to some random place and then smoothly resumes its route. You are sat very comfortably in your seat and you look out the window as the view passes by.
Sometimes, all you see is colourful, ragged, posters peeling from the facades of boarded up shops, sometimes you see beggars , other times you pass Jamaican Steel bands playing and the sound dopplers as you pass. Your body is so relaxed that cannot feel any individual part, you are immersed in a warmth that surrounds your soul. Any sense of time has long since left, you are in stream of images, sounds, dreams, phantoms, and wonder.
You see this rag tag band of people and you are sure you passed them a while back, but here they are again. Sometimes one is leading, other times one of the others is leading. Sometimes there are five of them and yet at other times it seems like there are many, more.
You are so relaxed that your naturally enquiring mind is turned off and instead of a series of pointless questions filling your head, you can feel, taste, smell and experience everything you pass. This a way of living that you have never lived but always wanted to, and now here you are.
You realise that your mundane existence will still be waiting for you when you leave.
You know, instinctively, that you will never be able to explain this experience to your friends because, you now realise, they are not your friends at all, just people you know.
This is a pointless journey, and yet, that is entirely the point. Your life up to this point has always had meaning, method, and purpose, and what a waste it has been, by and large. Yes, it has had moments, but nothing of any real lasting value until now. But you cannot verbalise that value because it exists on a non-verbal plane, so instead you sit back and enjoy this unique view as it passes by.
February 4, 2022
I tried reading this over ten years ago, but gave up, perturbed by its lack of obvious structure. This time I have persevered and completed the book. It is a psychogeography, not a book of nature and landscape or even really John Clare; a ramble (metaphorically and literally) in the almost footsteps of John Clare, and Sinclair's wife's ancestors and Sinclair's own internal ghosts (including his love/hate relationship with London). It has strengths, but at times I found myself wishing Sinclair didn't keep measuring East Anglia against London and could enjoy the land for what it is, or that he went into some matters in more factual or historical or emotional depth. Maybe in the end he did, but I was mentally footsore and weary by then and feeling the author benefitted more from the therapy of writing the book than perhaps I did from reading it, as entertaining as it was in many parts. Then again, as I was expecting a book that was more factually focused on John Clare and the landscapes he inhabited, perhaps I am the wrong person to offer a view of the book.
March 12, 2023
Ostensibly a book about a journey following in the footsteps of the poet John Clare as he fled from an asylum in Epping Forest to his home in Northborough, near Peterborough, this turned out to be so much more.
On his travels he's accompanied at times by friends and also by his wife Anna, who has family connections with the area and perhaps with John Clare. As part of the research into Anna's family history they travel to Northampton (a couple of times) where they meet up with author and all-round expert on Northampton's history, Alan Moore. They visit the grave of Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce) who died in an asylum in Northampton and there are riffs on the Joyces, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which was an unexpected, but welcome, surprise. The discussions of Lucia reminded me I should read her biography (by Carol Loeb Shloss) as, by all accounts, she was a fascinating woman.
The book touches on so many places, people, writings and connections that it is a joy to read. I loved the book and look forward to my next venture into Sinclair-world.
I guess this is not a book for everyone, but I loved it, though perhaps it's not as good as 'London Orbital'?
On his travels he's accompanied at times by friends and also by his wife Anna, who has family connections with the area and perhaps with John Clare. As part of the research into Anna's family history they travel to Northampton (a couple of times) where they meet up with author and all-round expert on Northampton's history, Alan Moore. They visit the grave of Lucia Joyce (daughter of James Joyce) who died in an asylum in Northampton and there are riffs on the Joyces, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, which was an unexpected, but welcome, surprise. The discussions of Lucia reminded me I should read her biography (by Carol Loeb Shloss) as, by all accounts, she was a fascinating woman.
The book touches on so many places, people, writings and connections that it is a joy to read. I loved the book and look forward to my next venture into Sinclair-world.
I guess this is not a book for everyone, but I loved it, though perhaps it's not as good as 'London Orbital'?
November 19, 2017
I loved the first part of the book, were Clare and his poetry and peregrinations are the main subject. I also like Sinclair's style: Pacifying, a bit like a walk in the forrest. Unfortunately, I have never been in the regions Sinclair describes, and I suppose this is a handicap for really appreciating the book, once Clare's story is told. So I stopped without finishing it. Should I ever come in a region about which Sinclair wrote, I will certainly come back to his books. Reading them has something of a meditation. Bringing you down to earth in a pleasant way.
June 2, 2018
Like the parson's egg, it was good in parts. Midway through I found I'd forgotten what the point of the book seemed to be. I agree with an earlier review about the tedious quality of reading all about Anna's relatives. After all, why should I be interested in all that?
However, there are plenty of parts on the book where Sinclair is on form and when he is then he writes very well. Not one of his best.
However, there are plenty of parts on the book where Sinclair is on form and when he is then he writes very well. Not one of his best.
May 22, 2019
Made me want to read more John Clare.
Yes, the free association, almost stream of consciousness style needs some getting used to, but don't try too hard, go with it. This isn't a text book and you don't have to remember everything; just imbibe the spirit and the rest will follow. Well worth the effort, a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
Yes, the free association, almost stream of consciousness style needs some getting used to, but don't try too hard, go with it. This isn't a text book and you don't have to remember everything; just imbibe the spirit and the rest will follow. Well worth the effort, a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
March 16, 2024
Read this as a love letter to Iain's wife, Anna, and you won't be disappointed.
August 13, 2025
Disappointingly all sense of linearity dissolved pretty quickly.
December 15, 2022
Sinclair offsets the boredom of the genealogical ferretings of others by hitching his wife's to an alltogether more appealing quest: the retracing of John Clare's flight from Essex. As the narratives play out on roughly the same turf, a tandem is formed, with one slipstreaming the other through the fenland byways.
For the seasoned Sinclair reader, signposts to his recurring motifs are positioned so as not to intrude. His fellow travellers also are known to us from previous drifts. And we still have the broken glass in the leaves, but having clocked the baggage carousel, something does seem to have been left behind: R.D. Laing.
A hot-spot otherwise in the Sinclair canon, where is he?
Like an itch that can't be scratched, the reader's need to hear mention intensifies as Sinclair passes up chance after chance to acknowledge the presence that stalks his book. It is not Iain Sinclair but R.D. Laing who pursues Clare; a ghostly renegade hide-and-seek in the woods duveted by the Sinclair domestic. Laing, the great listener (Negative Capability), seeks a test for his capacity: Honest John unspools.
As for Sinclair, he is at an age when he can ask a little indulgence, and this book is just that, an extended love letter to his wife.
For the seasoned Sinclair reader, signposts to his recurring motifs are positioned so as not to intrude. His fellow travellers also are known to us from previous drifts. And we still have the broken glass in the leaves, but having clocked the baggage carousel, something does seem to have been left behind: R.D. Laing.
A hot-spot otherwise in the Sinclair canon, where is he?
Like an itch that can't be scratched, the reader's need to hear mention intensifies as Sinclair passes up chance after chance to acknowledge the presence that stalks his book. It is not Iain Sinclair but R.D. Laing who pursues Clare; a ghostly renegade hide-and-seek in the woods duveted by the Sinclair domestic. Laing, the great listener (Negative Capability), seeks a test for his capacity: Honest John unspools.
As for Sinclair, he is at an age when he can ask a little indulgence, and this book is just that, an extended love letter to his wife.
October 12, 2011
Mixed feelings about this book. At times loved it as it meshed together his own journey in Clare's footsteps, his wife's hunt for her family history, his various friends, the character's who in one way or another became linked to his, his wife's, John Clare's - and Uncle Tom Cobbly's journey's through life. Also his brilliant fluid style.
As I was initially drawn to read it through interest in Clare's poems and life, there were times were I actually longed for some straight forward, solid information on that focus,rather than the author's own convoluted, if often very humourous, inner and outer journeyings.
Glad however, that I gave it a second go. First time I gave up in annoyance, and would have missed a lot of excellent things.
As I was initially drawn to read it through interest in Clare's poems and life, there were times were I actually longed for some straight forward, solid information on that focus,rather than the author's own convoluted, if often very humourous, inner and outer journeyings.
Glad however, that I gave it a second go. First time I gave up in annoyance, and would have missed a lot of excellent things.
April 24, 2017
Hallo,
ich habe die deutsche Ausgabe des Buches gelesen. Hatte vorher "Rodinsky's Room" gelesen, der Autor bleibt seinem Schreibstil treu.
Das ganze Thema "John Clare" wird in diesem Buch zu einer untrennbare Masse aus Autobiographie, Reisebericht und biographischen Elementen aus John Clares Leben gemischt.
Über die eigentliche Reise John Clares wird wenig gesagt, Unterhaltung aber trotzdem garantiert.
ich habe die deutsche Ausgabe des Buches gelesen. Hatte vorher "Rodinsky's Room" gelesen, der Autor bleibt seinem Schreibstil treu.
Das ganze Thema "John Clare" wird in diesem Buch zu einer untrennbare Masse aus Autobiographie, Reisebericht und biographischen Elementen aus John Clares Leben gemischt.
Über die eigentliche Reise John Clares wird wenig gesagt, Unterhaltung aber trotzdem garantiert.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews