Landor's Tower
by Iain Sinclair
Granta Books

Iain Sinclair is most known for his fractious psycho-geographical explorations of London and, in particular, the urban mythology of the East End. Through the ill-lit and twisted sentences of his prose, the figures of the Krays, the Ripper and Rodinsky the Vanishing Jew flit and skulk. It comes, therefore, as something of a surprise that his first novel in eight years foregoes the usual stamping ground to explore the landscape of South Wales.

Norton — Sinclair's alibi or alter ego — has been commissioned by an unseen power to write about the Victorian-era author Walter Savage Landor and his misconceived project to build a senatorial estate around Llanthony Priory. This plan reveals itself to be typical of many utopian thinkers, from the artist Eric Gill and the poet David Jones, to the possibly fraudulent Father Ignatius who founded a new monastic order in the valley, to modern day mushroom-heads in hippie communes.

Floundering and suffering from writer's block, Norton hires the mysterious, burnt-out Kaporal to conduct some research. Kaporal, however, has his own investigations to pursue: 25 suspicious suicides in secret defense installations, and cryptic rumors about the truth behind the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Norton becomes increasingly embroiled in Kaporal's conspiracies, to the extent of being accused of one of the murders and incarcerated in an asylum, where he begins the painful process of exhuming his own memories of childhood in the Welsh valleys.

Those familiar with Sinclair's previous fiction will immediately see parallels: paranoia, power-bases, the interweaving of past and present. Many of the characters who form Sinclair's pantheon recur as well — Dryfeld the dyspeptic book-seller; Nicholas Lane, that "icicle of pure intelligence"; Rhab Adnam, the genuine, self-immolating prophet (here, swimming in toxic waters round the coastline). But the cast is increasing. Especially memorable are two crazed literary theorists, Bad News Mutton and Hummp, a.k.a. the Ketamine Kreeps. It is a sign of Sinclair's absolute control that he can introduce two characters whose specific purpose is to critique his style of prose:

You rely on portentous hints, bit and pieces stolen from better writers. The ethics are shit. You think you were satirising Thatcher? You were celebrating the bitch, delighting in the ruined riverscape. The worse it got, the better you liked it ... You've become part of the accepted apparatus of disapproval, the so-called — lily-livered, sponsored by Beck's — counterculture.

In the later sections, Sinclair's meditation on the absolute economic collapse in South Wales should provide enough real anger and perceptive criticism to shock the most self-absorbed cultural pundit.

The plot's frantic satire does not deter readers from emotional engagement. More than anything, "Landor's Tower" is an elegy; not just for place and childhood, but for parents. As far back as "Downriver," Sinclair has been investigating the effects of the death of parents, using his scalpel style to unpeel the process of grief. Throughout the novel, the phone call informing him of the death resurfaces as a mental scab he can't help but scratch. The final section of the book introduces a cooler, collected voice, a voice stunned by the finality of death. In a haunting conclusion, the narrator studies a memento mori image:

This personification of Death was older than the church. It hadn't been painted. It had arrived; lifted, vertically, from the ground.

Iain Sinclair is, in many ways, the true heir of William Burroughs, a predecessor to whom he regularly pays his dues. The hallucinatory, high-octane prose makes most contemporary British fiction look pallid and flabby in comparison. Sinclair is, as the jacket proclaims, an authentic visionary, shell-shocked by the surreal reality of the age but still able to translate the vision into frothing, hysterical but fundamentally lyrical language. Where can Iain Sinclair go from here? From the evidence of "Landor's Tower" the answer would seem to be: Anywhere he wants.

— Stuart B. Kelly (stuart_b_kelly@hotmail.com)