Review - London Orbital

I've been watching for a while and have, finally, finished this book. It's been a long-ongoing one - but worth the fight.

Book Title: London Orbital
Author: Iain Sinclair
Genre: Travelogue, Psychogeography
Your rating of the book:B+/A -
Who would be interested in this book? People who like travel writing, anyone interested in the unseen, the margins of things, the liminal.
Warnings: Some reporting of real crimes. Heavy going in places.

Synopsis: Whilst most Londoners, and non-Londoners generally travel stretches of London’s Orbital Motorway (the M25) in a bid to reach escape velocity from the Capital’s gravitational pull Sinclair and his friend Renchi choose instead to do as the road’s name suggests and orbit - on foot and within the auditory footprint of the road they quest from Waltham Abbey to, erm, Waltham Abbey in a bid to exorcise the blot of the millennium dome.

My thoughts: This is no exotic travelogue but a fascinating snapshot through a long lense of the state of London in the build up to the damp squib of Y2K. Sinclair’s dense (at times almost too dense) prose fashions poetry from the bleakness and occasional beauty of the road. Grey skies and Kentish marshes filled with the history of prison and smallpox ships, Epping Forest recast as Fangorn (complete with crisp packets and burnt-out cars). London is seen and defined by its margins and the travellers uncover a fascinating history of ‘insane asylums’, military institutions and new glass shards of buildings whose purpose is not revealed. It is all considerably lifted by the incongruous comedy of a bunch of scruffy, camera and pencil wielding walkers attempting to traverse a landscape that has long submitted to the imperative of the motorcar. It took me a long time to read this book, picking it up and putting it down in favour of other things (as well as leaving my first copy in an appropriately greasy spoon in Archway) but it repays patience and persistence and subtly changes the way things are seen. For me most chilling is the way Sinclair’s leitmotif of the failing, flailing asylum seeker prefigures the transformation of Harmondsworth and Colnbrook from lost villages subsumed by road and flight-path into grim twin Immigration Detention Centres – London has not stopped trying to hide its dirty laundry at the fringe. A book that fills up your senses with the sound of the road.