Downriver: (Or, the Vessels of Wrath) a Narrative in Twelve Tales

I'm not even going to pretend that I really know what this book was about, all I do know is that months after reading it, I cannot get the book out of my head. Here is what I do know: the book is about London, a seedy side of London, a side of London that Dickens wrote about, only Sinclair is writing about the 20th century version of that London. The language is updated and exponentitally more graphic, the characters participate in activities that Dickens characters could not conceive of, and the plot is more convoluted, if there actually is a plot, that is. The book is divided up into 12 sections, and at first I thought the sections were connected, then I realized they weren't, then I thought they were, and then I still thought they were, but only in ways I did not understand. I was confused, enthralled, intrigued, frustrated, and fascinated, and only when exhausted did I put the book down, turning each page in the hopes that the next page woud contain the answers to the multitude of questions every preceding page produced. One thing is not up for debate, though, and that is Sinclair's ability to write. Like Joyce, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, the highly underrated William Gaddis, Sinclair does what he wants with the English language and seems to do it with ease. At times dense, other times frivolous (not many, these other times), profane in a way that hints at sacredness, Sinclair challenges your every notion about what makes a good story, what makes a good book, what makes an interesting read. I do not read books twice- there are way too many out there to waste my time on the same one twice- but this one will be the exception to the rule. Challenging- without a doubt. Worth it- most definitely.

Iain Sinclair is one of the masters of modern English prose, and he deserves to be much better known outside of Britain. If a writer's visibility were proportional to his sheer talent, Sinclair would have a profile as high as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie, two other British writers with whom his talent is--at least--on a par. "Downriver" takes us to Sinclair's familiar turf, the East End of London and eventully transports us all the way downriver to the mouth of the Thames, but the real geography mapped here is the one inside Iain Sinclair's head. This man's imagination is incredibly fertile, and it rarely flags. I would compare him to Pynchon, Grass, Kafka, even Garcia-Marquez. But I must also go further afield and compare him to Blake and Coleridge. One of his blurb writers calls Sinclair "a demented magus of the sentence." Now that I've read "Downriver," I understand exactly what that means.

For those of you who have often wondered how a deconstructionism would be expressed in a literary production, this book really does the job. It's unlike anything that I've read, and yet it seems to have triggered a resonating series of semi-familiar philosophical points from my past readings. Sinclair writes really well and seems to enjoy creating and using the literary vehicle of Derrida/Heidegger's "disappearance of a presense". Instead of reading those stodgy philosophers, take a break and read this book. You'll enjoy how the London real estate and its artistic allies can remake the unmarketable Thames river area. It figures...