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London #2
Downriver
Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair.
WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE
The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent lowlife, broken criminals and reborn lunatics picks over the rivers detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction . . .
'Remarkable: part apocalyptic documentary, part moth-eaten ghost story, part detective story. Inventive and stylish, Sinclair is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists' Sunday Times
'One of those idiosyncratic literary texts that revivify the language, so darn quotable as to be the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare' Guardian
'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' Angela Carter
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.
WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE
The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film crew of magpie scavengers, high-rent lowlife, broken criminals and reborn lunatics picks over the rivers detritus. They examine the wound, hoping to expose the cause of the city's affliction . . .
'Remarkable: part apocalyptic documentary, part moth-eaten ghost story, part detective story. Inventive and stylish, Sinclair is one of the most interesting of contemporary novelists' Sunday Times
'One of those idiosyncratic literary texts that revivify the language, so darn quotable as to be the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare' Guardian
'Crazy, dangerous, prophetic' Angela Carter
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.
544 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
About the author
Iain Sinclair
130 books350 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 - 30 of 37 reviews
August 22, 2026
Downriver is equally the book of the dead and the book of the living. It is a surrealistic Gothic tale of the present and the past where the sinking of Princess Alice, Jack the Ripper and Rodinsky’s abandoned room are the recurring nightmares.
Life is macabre. Life is dangerous. Life is like a trip down the gloomy tunnel…
The writing is so dense that the novel seems to be thrice as long and it is so thick with allusions and reminiscences that one may easily get lost there.
The stale air is fraught with whispers, susurrations, tintinnabulations and the voices of the dead… Reality is bleak and blurred…
To find the Heart of Darkness you needn’t to travel far. The Heart of Darkness is right here.
“History doesn’t come cheap.”
So we always pay for the past, the present and the future.
What does Eliot say? ‘We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration.’ Everything we say parrots words that have already been spoken. We speak in quotations.
Life is macabre. Life is dangerous. Life is like a trip down the gloomy tunnel…
…follow me down that slow incline. The tunnel drips with warnings: Do Not Stop. Seal your windows. Hold your breath. This is not reassuring to the pedestrian, who wobbles along a thin strip of paving, fearing to let go of the tiled wall: working the grime into his icy hand. Your heart fills your mouth, like a shelled and pulsing crab. Why are there no other walkers? Traffic scrapes so narrowly past: the drivers are mean-faced and locked into sadistic fantasies. White abattoir walls solicit vivid splashes of blood. You feel the brain-stem ineluctably dying, releasing, at its margins, dim and flaccid hallucinations.
The writing is so dense that the novel seems to be thrice as long and it is so thick with allusions and reminiscences that one may easily get lost there.
The stale air is fraught with whispers, susurrations, tintinnabulations and the voices of the dead… Reality is bleak and blurred…
Trees lost their leaves. Black clouds revolved like a diorama, unwound to plunge headlong into the silver smokestack. ‘Here’ could not shift: it was incorruptible. We slid sideways, backwards, ahead – futile as wasps animated by the false sun of autumn.
To find the Heart of Darkness you needn’t to travel far. The Heart of Darkness is right here.
“History doesn’t come cheap.”
So we always pay for the past, the present and the future.
August 15, 2010
Downriver—Or, The Vessels of Wrath sports a smoky frontispiece of a dozen curious black-and-white photographs: one each of the twelve is subsequently attached to the opening page of the twelve narrative tales that subdivide the book. These photos are of various locales in and around the Congo River at the turn of the previous century: native blacks sport Western apparel; West European merchant travelers take turns going native; modernity and tribal primitivism warily circle each other, releasing strange and powerful currents and energies. Behind and below it all the Congo river, a sinuous jungle-black, winding serpent omnipresently looms—along its steaming pathways rationality was introduced into equatorial darkness, but concurrently madness slithered its way through rational defenses and stirred the inky depths of the unknown. Joseph Conrad, an explorer of the margins, haunted by the crepuscular Congo, probed the effects of this intermingling of the new with the ancient and how it unleashed horrors to accompany its wonders.
Sinclair follows in the footsteps of his literary forebear some nine decades later, shifting the locale to late-Thatcher England at the dawn of the nineties and focussing upon the Thames river in-and-around London—a stretch which had undergone a whirlwind of change during the market-marvelous eighties, tearing down long-standing structures and neighborhoods to make way for temporary speculative sparkles; dispossessing former residents to create a new indigent class that was shuffled around and away from shiny new (and empty) office towers and cocaine-fueled entertainment districts. Thatcherite England—energy without soul in Sinclair's words—sought to impose a new history overtop of centuries of established tradition and legend. This superficial façade, hastily plastered and smoothed over, stirred up roiling clouds of ash and dust from a history demolished; and the tidal ebb-and-flow of the shimmering Thames, lidless and sleepless, regulated the eternal watch the river kept upon this newest frantic and manic folly perpetrated by that always-innovative and enterprising creature that so brashly dared its liquid demesne.
Within a very loosely conjoining metafictional conceit of Sinclair roaming the Thames waterfront to capture narrative ideas for an always-looming BBC documentary, this spectacularly imaginative London-based Welshman has crafted a phantasmagoric, weird, disturbing, cryptic, and wildly, satirically funny masterpiece. Thatcher—labelled The Widow in these Wrathful vessels, a hairless, soulless market chief apparatchik and fluffer who is determined to refashion Britain into a redoubt of glittering, steely speculative frenzy, unrecognizable under its eternal makeover —is the focal point from which flows the occult, nightmarish energies that have broken and rent the London districts surrounding the Thames waterfront. As Sinclair has it, history has soaked into the buildings of the riverine metropolis, into the soil—and nothing bears the ghosts and memories of forward-marching time like the Thames; indeed, its continually churning silt and mud dredges up phantoms and phantasms from the past with alarming regularity, intruding its keepsakes before Sinclair's riverbank ferreting—the author narrator accompanied by a zany crew of artsy misfits and down-on-their-luck rogues. The concrete-and-grime waterfront, with its creepy, ocular deep-water docks and intestinal pipelines is linked via the railway—deregulated and privatized into a multitude of circular and ambulatory lines that crisscross the East London neighborhoods that haunt, and are haunted by, Sinclair and his Unmerry Men; maze-like warrens and open-field transport all sloping downwards towards the bending liquid spine of the transfigured city.
The past blends seamlessly with the future into confounding and displacing the present—the occult materializes from the commonplace in nightmarish vignettes, the river coughing up bloated, deformed bodies and spirits that unassumingly take part in driving Sinclair and Company to the very edges of madness—a madness mirrored in the maelstrom of change and destruction enacted by the greedy moguls who hoover up the cash shaken out of broken buildings, relics, livelihoods and dreams. This brilliantine apocalypse exists both in reality and within the paranoid, despairing sanatorium of Sinclair's febrile mind: how much of the tale is the former, and how much the latter, can never quite be determined. Each of the dozen episodes unwinds a new madness, a new sanguinary mystery or mystical disappearance in which the characters come to understand that history, as commonly understood, is as fictional as the wildest novel; that what is held to be the truth depends far more upon one's particular point-of-view, one's agenda, than on what actually occurred; and that time cryptically links individuals separated through decades and centuries, that ripples from the past may have been set in motion to answer an urgent need or desperation from an occluded future. We can become trapped within these bonded and created realities, unaware of how we are imprisoned and both desirous and terrified of the prospect of sudden and irrevocable change, of preconfigured coincidence.
I absolutely loved this book—however, I recommend it cautiously, as I can also understand that others would find it maddening and frustrating. By the time I had finished, though still stunned and bedazzled by Sinclair's verbose brilliance, I was also becoming weary of the endless and exhausting authorial shenanigans, and could see how others might have been tempted to abandon ship long before. Sinclair is also a poet, and it shows in the effortlessly beautiful style he wields. He can shift from the comical to the sinister, from grim drudgery to luminous sublimity in a heartbeat and without any disturbance to the narrative flow—in many ways, it reminded me of Gravity's Rainbow filtered through a mind more attuned to symmetry than entropy. The macabre intrusions of the occult, the flowering of dream and nightmare take place within the modern setting in a way that disjoints the reader and confuses what is the result of each character's madness with the mad ends and means of Britain's market enthusiasms. An apocalyptic fever burns throughout the stories—settling to a low hum in some, blazing forth in tempestuous insanity in others—while Sinclair's narrator detective chases down the rendered actuality behind the lives of a sultry and provocative Canadian exotic dancer; a transplanted aboriginal cricketeer; a Rosicrucian-fearing beggar; the ghostly dead from a terrible century old Thames River collision; a Norman knight slain by his murdered steed's vengeance-bearing bones; a pink-capped English aristocrat's shell-shocked destiny with paddle and wicket and window-lowered basket; a Vatican Mafia takeover and transformation of the Isle of Dogs into a guard-towered magnet for penitents and anchorites; a snail-shell-armored Wicker Man conjured forth by mound-light pathways to do battle with the Widow's dead (murdered?) consort's inflated Halicarnassian memorial; and a crippled, destitute Jew whose life-force dispersed into the molecular structure of his rented room above an abandoned synagogue. Characters come and go, appear and re-appear, some returning for a starring role, others fading away into left-behind pages—the connecting link is Sinclair, driven ever nearer the abyssal brink as he uncovers further evidence of the madness and delusion inherent in time's passage and fiction's conception; and, always, the Thames. The wending, arterial river, like its African counterpart, daily buries, afresh and anew, the bodies and creations of humankind, entraps these dampened spirits within the charcoal layers of grimy and grasping muck. A voyage downriver can serve as a journey into the past—but the traveler may not always gain from what he uncovers, let alone comprehend how the river never remains the same after you've breached it the first time.
Sinclair follows in the footsteps of his literary forebear some nine decades later, shifting the locale to late-Thatcher England at the dawn of the nineties and focussing upon the Thames river in-and-around London—a stretch which had undergone a whirlwind of change during the market-marvelous eighties, tearing down long-standing structures and neighborhoods to make way for temporary speculative sparkles; dispossessing former residents to create a new indigent class that was shuffled around and away from shiny new (and empty) office towers and cocaine-fueled entertainment districts. Thatcherite England—energy without soul in Sinclair's words—sought to impose a new history overtop of centuries of established tradition and legend. This superficial façade, hastily plastered and smoothed over, stirred up roiling clouds of ash and dust from a history demolished; and the tidal ebb-and-flow of the shimmering Thames, lidless and sleepless, regulated the eternal watch the river kept upon this newest frantic and manic folly perpetrated by that always-innovative and enterprising creature that so brashly dared its liquid demesne.
Within a very loosely conjoining metafictional conceit of Sinclair roaming the Thames waterfront to capture narrative ideas for an always-looming BBC documentary, this spectacularly imaginative London-based Welshman has crafted a phantasmagoric, weird, disturbing, cryptic, and wildly, satirically funny masterpiece. Thatcher—labelled The Widow in these Wrathful vessels, a hairless, soulless market chief apparatchik and fluffer who is determined to refashion Britain into a redoubt of glittering, steely speculative frenzy, unrecognizable under its eternal makeover —is the focal point from which flows the occult, nightmarish energies that have broken and rent the London districts surrounding the Thames waterfront. As Sinclair has it, history has soaked into the buildings of the riverine metropolis, into the soil—and nothing bears the ghosts and memories of forward-marching time like the Thames; indeed, its continually churning silt and mud dredges up phantoms and phantasms from the past with alarming regularity, intruding its keepsakes before Sinclair's riverbank ferreting—the author narrator accompanied by a zany crew of artsy misfits and down-on-their-luck rogues. The concrete-and-grime waterfront, with its creepy, ocular deep-water docks and intestinal pipelines is linked via the railway—deregulated and privatized into a multitude of circular and ambulatory lines that crisscross the East London neighborhoods that haunt, and are haunted by, Sinclair and his Unmerry Men; maze-like warrens and open-field transport all sloping downwards towards the bending liquid spine of the transfigured city.
The past blends seamlessly with the future into confounding and displacing the present—the occult materializes from the commonplace in nightmarish vignettes, the river coughing up bloated, deformed bodies and spirits that unassumingly take part in driving Sinclair and Company to the very edges of madness—a madness mirrored in the maelstrom of change and destruction enacted by the greedy moguls who hoover up the cash shaken out of broken buildings, relics, livelihoods and dreams. This brilliantine apocalypse exists both in reality and within the paranoid, despairing sanatorium of Sinclair's febrile mind: how much of the tale is the former, and how much the latter, can never quite be determined. Each of the dozen episodes unwinds a new madness, a new sanguinary mystery or mystical disappearance in which the characters come to understand that history, as commonly understood, is as fictional as the wildest novel; that what is held to be the truth depends far more upon one's particular point-of-view, one's agenda, than on what actually occurred; and that time cryptically links individuals separated through decades and centuries, that ripples from the past may have been set in motion to answer an urgent need or desperation from an occluded future. We can become trapped within these bonded and created realities, unaware of how we are imprisoned and both desirous and terrified of the prospect of sudden and irrevocable change, of preconfigured coincidence.
I absolutely loved this book—however, I recommend it cautiously, as I can also understand that others would find it maddening and frustrating. By the time I had finished, though still stunned and bedazzled by Sinclair's verbose brilliance, I was also becoming weary of the endless and exhausting authorial shenanigans, and could see how others might have been tempted to abandon ship long before. Sinclair is also a poet, and it shows in the effortlessly beautiful style he wields. He can shift from the comical to the sinister, from grim drudgery to luminous sublimity in a heartbeat and without any disturbance to the narrative flow—in many ways, it reminded me of Gravity's Rainbow filtered through a mind more attuned to symmetry than entropy. The macabre intrusions of the occult, the flowering of dream and nightmare take place within the modern setting in a way that disjoints the reader and confuses what is the result of each character's madness with the mad ends and means of Britain's market enthusiasms. An apocalyptic fever burns throughout the stories—settling to a low hum in some, blazing forth in tempestuous insanity in others—while Sinclair's narrator detective chases down the rendered actuality behind the lives of a sultry and provocative Canadian exotic dancer; a transplanted aboriginal cricketeer; a Rosicrucian-fearing beggar; the ghostly dead from a terrible century old Thames River collision; a Norman knight slain by his murdered steed's vengeance-bearing bones; a pink-capped English aristocrat's shell-shocked destiny with paddle and wicket and window-lowered basket; a Vatican Mafia takeover and transformation of the Isle of Dogs into a guard-towered magnet for penitents and anchorites; a snail-shell-armored Wicker Man conjured forth by mound-light pathways to do battle with the Widow's dead (murdered?) consort's inflated Halicarnassian memorial; and a crippled, destitute Jew whose life-force dispersed into the molecular structure of his rented room above an abandoned synagogue. Characters come and go, appear and re-appear, some returning for a starring role, others fading away into left-behind pages—the connecting link is Sinclair, driven ever nearer the abyssal brink as he uncovers further evidence of the madness and delusion inherent in time's passage and fiction's conception; and, always, the Thames. The wending, arterial river, like its African counterpart, daily buries, afresh and anew, the bodies and creations of humankind, entraps these dampened spirits within the charcoal layers of grimy and grasping muck. A voyage downriver can serve as a journey into the past—but the traveler may not always gain from what he uncovers, let alone comprehend how the river never remains the same after you've breached it the first time.
June 12, 2018
Has it really been 3 whole weeks since I finished this? I still haven't returned it to the library, and every time I see its pleasing turquoise spine on the bookcase, I feel a fondness for it. It's a maddening species of novel-like thing, as the other reviews attest, gorgeously lyrical and so funny. Unexpectedly so.
There are books that annoy you with their dense allusions to people and places you've never heard of. Not this one, thick as it is. Its page count is even longer if you count all the Wikipedia pages I perused in the meantime, catching up on neighbourhoods around the Thames, obscure historical figures and a variety of word wonders.
I don't remember a damn thing about the "plot". Is that a selling point for you? Jump in.
There are books that annoy you with their dense allusions to people and places you've never heard of. Not this one, thick as it is. Its page count is even longer if you count all the Wikipedia pages I perused in the meantime, catching up on neighbourhoods around the Thames, obscure historical figures and a variety of word wonders.
I don't remember a damn thing about the "plot". Is that a selling point for you? Jump in.
November 14, 2009
Insane, bizarre, flowing nightmare of book. Goes from bizarre reporting to freak-out Blakeian visions as it documents London and its people. The past, future, and the present flow freely into one another as Sinclair delivers his freak dream logic in some of the most visceral and strange prose being written today. Fans of Burroughs, Moorcock, and Angela Carter(find her review of it also) need to find this exasperating but brilliant book.
Read
August 17, 20198/17/19 - Finished this book earlier this year, and then, to be perfectly honest, tried selling my copy at Green Apple for store credit. They wouldn't take it, however, as my copy turned out to be in too shabby a condition for them to shelve even in their Used section. I was slightly disappointed at the time, but keeping this book around has turned into a great boon to my reading life this year...
I would characterize Downriver as a pretty decent book to read from cover to cover, but a really stunning, in fact incredible, book to open at random and read for little nuggets of inspiration. Just this morning:
How the fuck does someone learn to write like that?
***
Imagine if the opening prose poem of Suttree went on for over 400 pages, rather than quickly yielding to a novel with characters who are continuous over time. That's sort of what this book is like. Sort of, but not exactly. I confess I found huge chunks to basically be gibberish. It may help if you come to it already familiar with the psychogeography of London - personally I've only been to the Big Smoke* once, briefly, during the day. Much of the content here simply went over my head. Still, impossible to deny moments of profane illumination...
A hallucinatory love song to a suppurating whore.
I earn my keep here in San Francisco by giving tours, but then do I really have it in me to love this horrifying place the way that Iain Sinclair loves London? Doubtful, I'd say, very doubtful.
There is no monument to civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism, and nowhere is this more true than at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.
Relatable content. In San Francisco, I would say, the dogs are actually over-civilized; if I became mayor tomorrow I would make it illegal for all but the homeless to have dogs. I'd then be forced to have some grudging respect for the few yuppies willing to sleep outside rather than lose their canines.
*I literally just googled "nicknames for London."
I would characterize Downriver as a pretty decent book to read from cover to cover, but a really stunning, in fact incredible, book to open at random and read for little nuggets of inspiration. Just this morning:
Sileen spoke from the throat: abrupt, punched sentences. He coated each syllable phlegm, like craftsman varnishing a dubious Old Master.
How the fuck does someone learn to write like that?
***
Imagine if the opening prose poem of Suttree went on for over 400 pages, rather than quickly yielding to a novel with characters who are continuous over time. That's sort of what this book is like. Sort of, but not exactly. I confess I found huge chunks to basically be gibberish. It may help if you come to it already familiar with the psychogeography of London - personally I've only been to the Big Smoke* once, briefly, during the day. Much of the content here simply went over my head. Still, impossible to deny moments of profane illumination...
A hallucinatory love song to a suppurating whore.
I earn my keep here in San Francisco by giving tours, but then do I really have it in me to love this horrifying place the way that Iain Sinclair loves London? Doubtful, I'd say, very doubtful.
There is no monument to civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism, and nowhere is this more true than at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.
Things had improved; my guardian, and familiar, had lost his collar - but not the weals that reminded him of its once-irritant presence. The cur waited at the head of the stairs, hieratic, dribbling in the dirt, posed for me to appreciate its startling defect it had no eyes. I do not mean that it was blind, or that its eyes had been gouged out by handlers preparing it for some specialized dogfight. Coarse hair covered the place where the sockets should have been. The skull was smooth as wood. The animal had never possessed eyes, and did not appear to miss them.
An answer - the wrong one - came to me, in response to Sabella Milditch's oracular riddle. "What is the opposite of a dog?" "An Andalusian dog": the "encounter between two dreams."
Relatable content. In San Francisco, I would say, the dogs are actually over-civilized; if I became mayor tomorrow I would make it illegal for all but the homeless to have dogs. I'd then be forced to have some grudging respect for the few yuppies willing to sleep outside rather than lose their canines.
*I literally just googled "nicknames for London."
June 26, 2013
Twelve stories which are connected, Sinclair shows his knowledge of Londan. Areas are mentioned like Tilbury, Greenwich, Isle of Dogs and the Isle of Sheppey.
There's lots of weird and wonderful characters, but sometimes the stories seem to come straight out of left field, do have yo concentrate on what's happening.
There's lots of weird and wonderful characters, but sometimes the stories seem to come straight out of left field, do have yo concentrate on what's happening.
January 31, 2026
Downriver quickly becomes an exhausting slog, burying any sense of narrative or momentum under self-indulgent digressions and opaque psychogeographical rambling. What might have felt daring instead reads as tedious and overlong, making the book feel more like an endurance test than a rewarding literary experience.
March 7, 2023
I got about a third of the way through this before realising that 1. I didn’t HAVE to finish something that was annoying me so much and 2. I’m still going to record it to remind me of why I gave up next time I’m curious about Iain Sinclair’s fiction
See, I really liked a lot of Lights Out For The Territory - it was an impulse buy over twenty years ago in a Nottingham charity shop and helped my dissertation no end, even though I couldn’t pretend to understand a lot of it. I’m a bit wiser about psychogeography now so thought I’d try this, but I found the conceit that it’s sort of fiction deeply frustrating and Sinclair’s erudition coming off frequently as showing off
I have a friend who is doing a PhD in psychogeography and she shared some of the concerns about Sinclair’s work being a bit of a male centric dead end, and that did sort of exacerbate some of my concerns with the book. It does have a very blokey sort of tone to it which I initially thought was heavily ironic, but instead - especially during the Edith Cadiz sections - began to realise that no women have had any agency whatsoever in this book so far. Everyone is either wives, mothers or lovers and are very sketchily written. Instead here comes another absurd friend of the narrator and then another… and after a while it’s just sort of exhausting
So it’s undeniably clever and the glimmers of ideas that are far strongly realised in his non fiction work are very much there, but this just left me wildly frustrated and annoyed. Not for me. Very much not
See, I really liked a lot of Lights Out For The Territory - it was an impulse buy over twenty years ago in a Nottingham charity shop and helped my dissertation no end, even though I couldn’t pretend to understand a lot of it. I’m a bit wiser about psychogeography now so thought I’d try this, but I found the conceit that it’s sort of fiction deeply frustrating and Sinclair’s erudition coming off frequently as showing off
I have a friend who is doing a PhD in psychogeography and she shared some of the concerns about Sinclair’s work being a bit of a male centric dead end, and that did sort of exacerbate some of my concerns with the book. It does have a very blokey sort of tone to it which I initially thought was heavily ironic, but instead - especially during the Edith Cadiz sections - began to realise that no women have had any agency whatsoever in this book so far. Everyone is either wives, mothers or lovers and are very sketchily written. Instead here comes another absurd friend of the narrator and then another… and after a while it’s just sort of exhausting
So it’s undeniably clever and the glimmers of ideas that are far strongly realised in his non fiction work are very much there, but this just left me wildly frustrated and annoyed. Not for me. Very much not
January 28, 2020
This is not a novel so much as a fever dream. There is no plot or character development. Apart from an aborted river journey that's part Three Men In A Boat, part Heart Of Darkness, it’s not even about the Thames; it starts off in Tilbury but soon turns into a ramble through Ian Sinclair’s obsessions: Hackney, David Rodinsky, railing against institutions (this time the BBC rather than Hackney Council), mental asylums, ambitious outsiders, forgotten (and eccentric) writers, the Whitechapel murders, the folly of grand regeneration projects, and the blokey friendship between men (women have three choices: a) stay invisible, at home, tolerant of the menfolk’s ways, b) be a permanently nude prostitute-slash-nurse (hey, a “mother” and a whore! I see what Sinclair did there), or c) become a murder/rape victim) - the book features film-maker Chris Petit disguised as “Frederik Hansbury”, Sinclair’s loyal retainer/outsider artist Renchi as Joblard, local historian obsessed with Sutton house Davey Clarke is probably Patrick Wright (somewhere in a not yet closed down humanities department of a new university, an MA student is completing their (or more likely his) thesis on the Sinclairverse) and other friends, imaginary or real (I’m guessing Drummond is in there somewhere).
That said, as always with Sinclair I learned things: hidden histories, geographical oddities. Meath Gardens in Mile End, now a park, was once a graveyard that housed King Cole, a cricketer who died in England during the first tour of Britain by an Aboriginal team, several years before a tour by white Australians. The Victorian arch entrance to Meath Gardens was built from stone salvaged from the old London bridge.
The book is classed as a novel because some of it is libellous (the corrupt, prostitute-visiting Hackney MP is surely based on LibDem defector Brian Sedgmore) and some of it has been fiddled with: Homerton hospital is renamed Hackney Hospital, Whitechapel Mission as The Big Doss house. Other times, it’s just Sinclair making stuff up, coercing London into the shape he wants it to be. The men he meets in pubs are visionaries, prophets, not just piss-heads and chancers. Sinclair is chronicling an apocalyptic city rather than just wandering around and banging on about things in his own Sinclairian fashion.
That said, as always with Sinclair I learned things: hidden histories, geographical oddities. Meath Gardens in Mile End, now a park, was once a graveyard that housed King Cole, a cricketer who died in England during the first tour of Britain by an Aboriginal team, several years before a tour by white Australians. The Victorian arch entrance to Meath Gardens was built from stone salvaged from the old London bridge.
The book is classed as a novel because some of it is libellous (the corrupt, prostitute-visiting Hackney MP is surely based on LibDem defector Brian Sedgmore) and some of it has been fiddled with: Homerton hospital is renamed Hackney Hospital, Whitechapel Mission as The Big Doss house. Other times, it’s just Sinclair making stuff up, coercing London into the shape he wants it to be. The men he meets in pubs are visionaries, prophets, not just piss-heads and chancers. Sinclair is chronicling an apocalyptic city rather than just wandering around and banging on about things in his own Sinclairian fashion.
January 24, 2013
This isn't a story, it's a journey. The river is the Thames and the journey is through the psyche of the city the river bisects. What does the Thames mean to London? If you had to describe that meaning through fictional characters, who would they be and what would they do?
Sinclair is a psychogeographer - he's interested in how cities affect the minds of the people who live in them. Downriver is his attempt to capture the essence of London wharf-life. It's surrealist, captivating, inspiring, deeply disturbing. If you read it at bedtime it will become contiguous with your dreams.
Sinclair is a psychogeographer - he's interested in how cities affect the minds of the people who live in them. Downriver is his attempt to capture the essence of London wharf-life. It's surrealist, captivating, inspiring, deeply disturbing. If you read it at bedtime it will become contiguous with your dreams.
October 9, 2016
Prose poetry, and not in a good way. I couldn’t make head nor bleedin’ tail of it, as one of Sinclair’s own characters might say. The majority of reviewers seem to think Downriver is some sort of stylistic tour de force, so maybe it simply went over my head. Either way, there was nothing in the first hundred pages or so that gave me the slightest inclination to keep reading and I quickly abandoned it to flee back into the comforting arms of John le Carré.
November 16, 2013
With a prose style equal to anyone alive and a modern sensibility, it's tempting to call Iain Sinclair the William Faulker of London with this book. But, considering his analytical mind which is also capable of mystic universalism, alongside the best deconstructive and reconstructive tendencies of the Situationists, it's best just to call him Iain Sinclair.
March 7, 2024
A beautifully written book that portrays the squalor of London vividly. Can be demanding of the reader at times but a very rewarding book as a result.
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February 15, 2018On the face of it, Sinclair's fiction doesn't seem too different from his nonfiction -- there's the same obsession with the gritty details of London, with every broken pub window, every spray of political graffiti, every needle in an alley mattering. And likewise there's this almost too-clever use of words, a sense of verbal mastery and an ability to sum up every one of these aforementioned gritty details with a witty, smirking turn of phrase. So, much as I adored Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory, I was equally charmed with Downriver.
December 28, 2022
Make no mistake, this is brilliantly written and described and what kept me going until the end otherwise I would have long given up. However, apart from the chapter on the poet, Nicolas Moore, it’s very aimless and plotless. If you enjoy endlessly rich and florid writing without a storyline then you’ll embrace this book.
August 12, 2010
I couldn't get on with this at all. It's very rare that I give up on a book but I could only get halfway through this. Some of the interwoven stories were just about to break out then we'd fly off somewhere else and I'd lose the thread. Possibly just a bit too bonkers for me.
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August 3, 2011I skim read this in order to get all the throwaway comments in which Iain Sinclair displays his deep knowledge of east central and riverine East London. Sometimes with Sinclair the throwaway bits are more interesting than the plot..
August 26, 2019
I tried with this book, I really did but could not take the sheer volume of imagery which, despite the blurb's promises, did not all seem to connect. There were themes here but I couldn't follow them.
March 9, 2007
Dense, allusive work from Sinclair. Not an altogether successful novel, but passionate. I found you have to read the majority of his sentences twice. Hence why it only got two stars.
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November 17, 2014Not entirely pleasant, or even sensible, but frequently brilliant.
March 14, 2015
Urban criticism in novel form. dense, funny, a little too non-linear even for my taste.
June 22, 2020
I really tried but it's very much like Burroughs at his most difficult to read
August 21, 2023
Annoyingly self-important and obscure, with the occasional imaginative phrase. An example of 'psychogeography'.
March 11, 2026
I refuse to believe that anyone genuinely enjoyed this book.
March 7, 2020
You will LOVE this book IF 1. you know everything there is to know about world literature, music, movies, history, and British pop culture, 2. you like books with no plot or memorable characters, and 3. you like vaguely-worded sentences with lots of non sequiturs (think Samuel Becket). I thought I knew a lot about the things I listed in #1, but not nearly enough to catch all of the references. (I also think it's funny that there's a blurb on the back by Peter Ackroyd praising the book, and he also gets referenced a lot in it.) I'm not really sure what this book was about. Maybe it's a rant about the evils of Margaret Thatcher and gentrification. If he's trying to make a persuasive argument, he needs to re-do his first semester of college and learn how to make a persuasive argument. If he wanted me to feel bad for the poor people, he needs to describe them in a way that makes me care. As for the obscure references, it almost felt like the author likes to vomit up random bits of knowledge just to make other people feel stupid or demonstrate his own superiority. He even has a part toward the end where he talks about a publisher who can't understand the book because of the obscure references, and Sinclair can't quite understand how it is that people don't know the things he's writing about. (Maybe it was self-aware irony, maybe he really doesn't get it. Not sure.) For me, it was a complete waste of time. I almost gave up with just six pages left because I just couldn't take it anymore. I did get a couple of chuckles, and there were a few lovely phrases. But, it was kind of like listening to 100 hours of "Fight for Your Right" just to hear two minutes of "Sabotage". (And if you don't get that reference, that's about how I felt through the entirety of this awful book.)
June 23, 2024
Whew, that was hard work but enjoyable. Sinclair does things with language that twist the mind. I almost gave up on this because I was struggling to understand it but I eased into it. It’s a novel of its time, postmodernly pontificating about peculiar people around the Thames, in London, Essex and Kent, with various occult goings on, outsider deviants doing unpleasant things, swipes at Thatcher and the BBC, and a wry, sardonic humour throughout. I'm not sure who to compare him to, but he brings to mind comic book writers like Alan Grant (esp. From Hell), Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis, alongside a version of Martin Amis that has actually met working class people. First and foremost, it is a novel about place, I would say. I thought that would involve dropping in a lot of facts about location, but Sinclair describes metaphorically with oblique poetry and opinions about those places and who lives there now. It's this subjectivity rather than objectivity that suggests he really knows these places.
January 24, 2024
I'm not going down to East London's Thameside waterfront anytime soon, there is some seriously weird stuff going on: from Aboriginal cricket pioneers, a Mafia Vatican temple on the Isle of Dogs, bloated corpses in the water, ghosts of the sunk Princess Anne and the inhabitants of a deserted synagogue, all jostling under the gaze of the Widow, wanting to build a monument to her departed, to elevate him to demi-god and cult status to cement her own votes and legacy in her fifth term. No, I think I'll let Sinclair and his ne'er do well accomplices scope out the riverine geography and I'll wait for the BBC documentary. But perhaps I have already missed it, thank God.
June 13, 2026
Simultaneously one of the most perfect pieces of prose while also being incomprehensible at times. The former compliment can allow for much of the latter complaint, but it's just so genuinely incomprehensible for like 50% of the text that it just feels purposefully sadistic. And I love this type of stuff usually. Now, I'd rather have incomprehensible well written novels rather than those written terribly that make perfect sense, but nonetheless...
Anyway, it is a pretty great work cataloging the decaying cities of old in a neoliberal political state. And it does a phenomenal job at that. But still... it's too much.
Anyway, it is a pretty great work cataloging the decaying cities of old in a neoliberal political state. And it does a phenomenal job at that. But still... it's too much.
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April 3, 2026I think Downriver is a good/ very well written but ultimately frustrating book. I enjoy complex writing, but this didn’t feel complex in terms of syntax or the driving force of the prose. Instead, it leaned heavily on information delivery—which I don’t inherently mind—but the lack of a distinct voice or tone, of a clear authorial presence, undermined the entire experience. It felt nothing like JR or Gravity’s Rainbow, despite the comparison on the back cover.
November 7, 2022
Abrasions in time's progress in egress. And it all beats on as soul laments energy's absence.
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