The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Landor's Tower by Iain Sinclair
James Sallis

Iain Sinclair. Landor’s Tower. Granta, 2001. 345 pp. $24.95

No one writes like Iain Sinclair. First, there’s the idiosyncrasy of his preoccupations, among which one might list obscure genre writers, the history and character of London, Jack the Ripper, draw-blood booksellers, leftist politics, the city’s-all of society’s-disenfranchised. Then there’s his style, as gravid and confounding as Europe’s ancient encrusted streets. Indeed, his sentences sweat and huff and fart with the meaning packed onto them. In Sinclair’s hands, language simultaneously builds the world and consumes it. In Landor’s Tower as in previous novels such as White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, Downriver, and Radon Daughters, discrete narratives begin on parallel tracks and, contrary to all our assumptions, converge. The best way to envision a Sinclair novel may be as a three-dimensional chess set, with Sinclair shuttling vertically, horizontally and obliquely from level to level: historical, socio-literary, personal, political, obsessive. The house game is always fixed. Replacing standard narrative strategies with a series of loose foci, Sinclair allows these to breed among themselves a host of correspondences, contradictions, collisions, corrections. It’s rather like sitting in the optometrist’s chair as he clicks numbered lenses into place, asking Which is clearer, this? this? Here, the story of Walter Savage Landor’s return to Wales is interleaved with Sinclair’s failure to write a book about Landor and with two booksellers’ doomed pursuit of rare editions. One hopes that Landor’s Tower, along with Granta’s reissue of new editions of White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, Radon Daughters, Lud Heat, and Rodinsky’s Room, may bring Sinclair to the attention of U.S. readers. The current state of publishing here certainly does little to encourage that hope. But Iain Sinclair, palpably, is a fine and (I rush to use a word often shied away from) an important writer. [James Sallis]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Landor's Tower by Iain Sinclair James Sallis Iain Sinclair. Landor’s Tower. Granta, 2001. 345 pp. $24.95 No one writes like Iain Sinclair. First, there’s the idiosyncrasy of his preoccupations, among which one might list obscure genre writers, the history and character of London, Jack the Ripper, draw-blood booksellers, leftist politics, the city’s-all of society’s-disenfranchised. Then there’s his style, as gravid and confounding as Europe’s ancient encrusted streets. Indeed, his sentences sweat and huff and fart with the meaning packed onto them. In Sinclair’s hands, language simultaneously builds the world and consumes it. In Landor’s Tower as in previous novels such as White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, Downriver, and Radon Daughters, discrete narratives begin on parallel tracks and, contrary to all our assumptions, converge. The best way to envision a Sinclair novel may be as a three-dimensional chess set, with Sinclair shuttling vertically, horizontally and obliquely from level to level: historical, socio-literary, personal, political, obsessive. The house game is always fixed. Replacing standard narrative strategies with a series of loose foci, Sinclair allows these to breed among themselves a host of correspondences, contradictions, collisions, corrections. It’s rather like sitting in the optometrist’s chair as he clicks numbered lenses into place, asking Which is clearer, this? this? Here, the story of Walter Savage Landor’s return to Wales is interleaved with Sinclair’s failure to write a book about Landor and with two booksellers’ doomed pursuit of rare editions. One hopes that Landor’s Tower, along with Granta’s reissue of new editions of White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, Radon Daughters, Lud Heat, and Rodinsky’s Room, may bring Sinclair to the attention of U.S. readers. The current state of publishing here certainly does little to encourage that hope. But Iain Sinclair, palpably, is a fine and (I rush to use a word often shied away from) an important writer. [James Sallis]

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