Writing in the TLS in November 1950, Julian Maclaren-Ross dismissed Roland
Camberton, a London novelist who had settled into Maclaren-Ross’s Soho
bohemia, as “devoid of any narrative gift”. A year later, the TLS was kinder
to Camberton’s second novel, Rain on the Pavements, a loosely fictionalized
account of the writer’s native Hackney. At the time, the London borough
retained a strong Jewish identity – one from which Camberton, raised as an
orthodox Jew (born Henry Cohen), had long been trying to escape. Julian
Symons described this return to the novelist’s home territory as “a book of
considerable charm”. But Camberton’s second novel was his last. As far as
the literary world was concerned, he disappeared.
Camberton’s curtailed, mysterious literary life story might have been drawn up
to Iain Sinclair’s specifications. Sinclair’s output and energy take up a
lot more shelf space but, as the editor of London: City of disappearances,
the co-author of Rodinsky’s Room, a quest for a missing East End cabbalist,
and the creator of a distinctive oeuvre devoted to the vestigial, he
naturally sees the vanishing Camberton as a kindred spirit. There is
evidence, too, of a shared passion for the everyday details of urban life.
Sinclair takes a passage from Rain on the Pavements as his own “statement of
intent”:
"It was necessary to know every alley, every cul-de-sac, every arch,
every passageway; every school, every hospital, every church, every
synagogue; every police station, every post office, every labour exchange,
every lavatory; every curious shop name, every kids’ gang, every hiding
place, every muttering old man . . . . In fact everything; and having got to
know everything, they had to hold this information firmly, to keep abreast
of change, to locate the new position of beggars, newsboys, hawkers, street
shows, gypsies, political meetings."
This way of looking at the world, of combining attention to detail with
Casaubon-like fantasies of completeness, has long been Sinclair’s favoured
mode.
The identification with Camberton is further strengthened because the world
being looked at is Hackney. Sinclair has lived in the borough for forty
years. He has closely watched its reinventions, its unsteady lurching
between different roles – immigrants’ clearing house, smartened-up gentility
and perennial criminality. He is its ideal chronicler at a moment when
Hackney’s latest incarnation, as a “Host for 2012” (i.e., the Olympics) is
attracting wider attention to a long neglected no-man’s-land.
Rain on the Pavements shares one other quality with Sinclair’s Hackney, That
Rose-Red Empire. It is difficult to categorize. Camberton’s book was
described by Symons as “less a novel than a collection of
semi-autobiographical sketches about Jewish life in Hackney during the
thirties”. Give or take the Jewishness, and the date, that description goes
for Sinclair’s book, too. Instead of Camberton’s conventional recasting of
genuine experience as fiction, however, Sinclair gives us semi-fiction as
“reality”.
Much of his new book reads as a contribution to, or even a summation of,
Sinclair’s topographical writings, as displayed in Lights Out for the
Territory, which followed a V-shaped walk into the City of London and out
again, and London Orbital, which tramped a circuit of the capital dictated
by the M25. Even at his most observant, Sinclair can shade into reverie,
into what he describes in Lights Out (setting his sights with characteristic
understatement) as “an apparently scientific excuse for a glorious
clandestine folly, joyriding the trail of the cosmic serpent”. The result is
“psycho-geography”, a label Sinclair now prefers to pin on others. But in
Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, there is more than riding the cosmic serpent;
there is also making things up. The reappearance of Kaporal, the literary
private detective previously encountered in Sinclair’s straight(-ish) novels
Landor’s Tower and Dining on Stones, suggests that this memoir/topographical
meditation/political polemic is also a fiction. Sinclair’s own preferred
classification is “documentary fiction”, which allows him plenty of elbow
room: “where it needs to be true, it is”. “This is a story of fallible
memory, inaccurate or inventive transcriptions, hard-earned prejudices,
false starts and accidental epiphanies.”
It is worth dwelling on this question of category, if only because, as
Sinclair himself puts it, “my research is the book . . . . The story is
accidental. It tells itself”. Sinclair is not necessarily devoid of
narrative gift, just suspicious of narrative’s tidy arrangements, so unlike
his own refracted world-view. Yet, as all his works seem to begin with the
journey, almost invariably on foot (although bad knees force him to get his
bicycle out of storage at the beginning of this book), how does he decide
what form the “accident” of writing it up will take? In an interview with a
local free sheet, the Hackney Citizen, Sinclair mentioned that this book was
originally meant to be a novel, a sort of Hackney Ulysses, prophetically
structured around the theme of creeping debt and taking place over a single
weekend. But the notion “was entirely negative . . . and I didn’t want
really want to write on that depressing note”.
Significantly, too, it was the research that led him in a different direction,
away from the “undernourished theme” of the ravages of debt, and towards a
“cultural memoir”. He is hardly alone, and certainly not pioneering, in
blurring the bounds between fact and fiction: we have had the “non-fiction
novel” (Truman Capote), “autofiction” (Amélie Nothomb), “the news as novel”
(Gordon Burn). Sinclair appears to have combined all three, and added in his
own topographical preoccupations to create something else again, a
semi-fictional vade mecum. Out of his own patch, Sinclair has constructed a
microcosm of British society, and of contemporary obsessions, from the
credit crunch to knife crime, environmentalism to twenty-four-hour
surveillance.
Can Hackney bear this close reading? London may still be “a nation: not a
city” as Disraeli had it, but isn’t the action going on elsewhere? The money
is in the City, and points West (well, it was, and will be), the chattering
is louder in Islington and Hampstead, the politics more important at
Westminster. Even poverty and crime are more extreme in other postcodes:
Hackney is richer than Tower Hamlets and safer than Lambeth. Twenty years
ago, Martin Amis seemed to confirm the borough's failure to impinge on our
attention by naming his novel after one of Hackney’s open spaces, London
Fields, and then transplanting the action to his familiar Notting Hill, as
if Hackney didn’t exist at all. At times, Sinclair himself seems to
recognize the borough’s orphan status, when his free-associative style gives
way to a straining to find any connection back home. Thus, from Samuel
Richardson, whose novels lend their names to blocks on a local housing
estate, we leap to Peter Ackroyd, and the strictly rhetorical question, “Who
knows if Ackroyd ever slept in Hackney?”. Unlike Richardson, Ackroyd could
be asked, but that would spoil the fun. Sinclair is at it again when tracing
the engraver and William Blake disciple Edward Calvert, who did live (“Had
lived. Lives. Once there always there, the traces”) in Hackney. The disciple
isn’t enough, of course; Sinclair needs the messiah too. Hence the
inevitable “question remains: did those feet?” And the unexpectedly clerical
answer: “I have discovered no reference to a visit by William Blake to
Hackney”.
But these dead ends are the exception, not the rule. All life really can be
found in Sinclair’s Hackney, and not just because quite a lot of famous
people touched down there: among them Joseph Conrad (who recuperated in the
German Hospital, Dalston), Orson Welles (who rehearsed at the Hackney
Empire), Jayne Mansfield (who – really – presented the prizes at the East
London Budgerigar and Foreign Birds Society show at All Saints Hall,
Haggerston; though Sinclair’s picture of the Kray sidekick and local boy
Tony Lambrianou holding her coat is surely more fiction than documentary).
Sinclair’s portrait of the world on his doorstep is most thrilling when its
subject is most ordinary. His careful investigation of the way the Olympic
“regeneration” will first destroy what it is supposed to revive is scarcely
glamorous, and it is hard to imagine that Sinclair’s mooted novel could have
been any more depressing. But he is prepared to consider the hidden meaning
of even the most random events. The death of a cyclist, sideswiped by a
builder’s lorry on its way (Sinclair speculates) to the Olympic site
illustrates the way a “deadly double act has been introduced into the
borough: eco-inspired cyclists and relentless convoys of lorries, heading
east, to service the deadlines of the Olympic Park. They don’t see each
other. They don’t belong in the same dream”.
Sinclair sees, too, that Hackney is a template for other contemporary
experiences, because it has for so long been a place with a transient
population. The author himself is unusual in having settled down into family
life at the same address for four decades. That sort of stability may not
have been very common anywhere in Britain in recent years, but it has never
been the Hackney way. As one of Sinclair’s interviewees, Patrick Wright,
puts it: “This is not the East End. This is the first move out of the East
End”. Sinclair doesn’t let us forget that one of Hackney’s temporary
residents was Tony Blair, though he makes rather heavy weather of tracking
down the house the Blairs lived in before Islington and Number 10. The
passers-through represented by Sinclair’s selection of Kingsland Road barber
shops – Ghanaian, West Indian, Greek and Turkish Cypriot – are richer
pickings. At the barber’s, Sinclair’s compendious approach can range in all
directions: across time, back to the Jewish cutters like Sidney Kirsh, who
tells him “my religious beliefs are beyond belief. But it’s my tribe and I
support them”; and across space, all the way to Kurdistan, and pictures in
the window of “freedom fighters” in “the war that never ends”.
Hackney’s everyday reality provides a fine selection of curiosities for
Sinclair to ruminate on, in his familiarly pared-down, juiced-up, verbless
sentences; but the cosmic serpent hasn’t been banished. The apocalyptic
atmosphere that hangs over, or lurks under, all his writing is here too.
There is a dowser to meet in Victoria Park, a “mole man” in Mortimer Street.
Underneath the author’s own house, builders discover a “well or subterranean
shrine, a rounded arch of ancient bricks”, but quickly fill it in. At other
times, there are stories of underground prisons, a “mundus subterraneus”,
and of “some very old friends . . . buried rivers, the Templars of Well
Street and Temple Mills”. The final long walk across the borough, Sinclair’s
ritual sign-off, follows the putative course of the submerged Hackney Brook.
The sense of confusion is deliberate, the implication that “ordinary”
crookedness and council malfeasance, the world of surveillance cameras and
graffiti, is intimately connected to historical, or even mythical episodes.
In Sinclair’s hands, Hackney’s small piece of a big city is more than large
enough to encompass the world. What he knowingly describes as his “triumph
of collaged impenetrability” can find meaning everywhere. He could, he
admits, focus even more arbitrarily: “everything and everybody can be found
within 440 yards of my house. . . . All the key witnesses are within one lap
of the Olympic track”. With Iain Sinclair as pacemaker, the distance is
invigoratingly covered, though the route would be impossible to replicate.
Iain Sinclair
HACKNEY, THAT ROSE-RED EMPIRE
A confidential report
480pp. Hamish Hamilton. £20.
978 0 241 14216 5
David Horspool is History editor of the TLS. His new book, The English
Rebel, will be published later this year.
