The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of Iain Sinclair. Obviously, such a discussion is central to any talk of books and London, but I’m always slightly afraid of writing about Sinclair because his star has ascended in the last couple of years and he is everywhere – Radio 4 the other day, commenting on something or other; the Guardian the next; Patti Smith’s Meltdown (which I missed. Typical).

But I don’t think we’ve really come to grips with Sinclair yet. The work that broke him into the mainstream, London Orbital, is a fantastic piece of writing, but it is assumed by many to be a piece of utter, if spirited, non-fiction, and has given Sinclair the reputation of a scholar and a man of letters, rather than the intense writer of the imagination that he is. Personally, I believe than Iain Sinclair is the best novelist currently writing in England.

I don’t know too much about Sinclair’s work with the Albion Village Press or his bookselling days, although recollections of these recur in his work, and a full bio is available here. His own poetry – particularly the wonderful Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge - foreshadows many of the obsessions of his later fiction. But it is the first set of novels, White Chappell Scarlet Tracings (1987), Downriver (1990) and Radon Daughters (1994) that marry the psychic readings of London’s streets with a narrative style that is unique in modern fiction: fragmentary, hallucinatory, unbearably modern in its full, Joycean sense. Landor’s Tower, although viewed by many – including the author - as a weaker effort, is one of the best examples of Sinclairs self-fictionalising. His doppelgangers stalk the pages (most frequently ‘Norton’) – and characters such as Dryfield, the legendary bookseller, the photographer Marc Atkins and lit-nut Stewart Home recur in fiction and non-fiction. My point about the non-fiction titles – beginning with Lights Out… but particularly Orbital - is that “Iain Sinclair” is no more the author of these books than Robinson is of Patrick Keiller’s films, to which he frequently refers. The books are fugues, visionary ecstasies, produced by exhaustion, which break down the barriers between non-fic and fiction, creating alternative structures of history and form: they end with charred notes and jumbled letters. He repeatedly stresses the inability of language to contain ideas, both individually (words) and collectively (the novel). This is radical work.

Of course, as soon as I started thinking about writing this post, I found my way to this interview at Londonist. It touches nicely on a number of the things I’ve mentioned above, as well as namechecking fellow legends Alan Moore, Michael Moorcock and the previously mentioned Stewart Home. It also includes some thoughts on the recent London Eye brouhaha, although without mentioning an interview Sinclair had with Tony White (author and Lit Ed of The Idler a few years ago where he pointed out the sheer commercial genius of British Airways selling “flights to nowhere”, and suggested that the BA gift carrier bags might be better used to deal with airsickness…

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