An exploration of a contemporary city and the historical and mythical patterns that it hides. The churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor, built to a strange plan in a London ravaged by fire and plague, are the sites of mystery and energy that animate this story of post-war England.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
'A wonderful poem' Peter Ackroyd 'Lud Heat combines researches into the sinister dotted lines which link up the Hawksmoor churches of East London - complete with a very fine diagram displaying the pentacles and triangulations which connect churches to plague pits to the sites of the notorious Whitechapel and Ratclyffe Highway murders - with a broken sequence of breathtakingly lovely modern freeverse lyrics' Jenny Turner, London Review of Books
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must for anyone interested in modern UK literature.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lud Heat: And Suicide Bridge (Paperback)
This book is particularly interesting because it is probably the first book using what Sinclair later came to call 'psychogeography', an obsession he shares with his two close friends Michael Moorcock and Peter Ackroyd. Ackroyd made very free use of this book for his own splendid supernatural mystery story Hawkwsmoor and Moorcock introduces it, offering his own spin on the talented Mr Sinclair, as well as a few passing amiable swipes at half his famous contemporaries. Ackroyd's own riffs on Doctor Dee and a Platonic view of London (both fromMoorcock's own fantastic London novel Gloriana) find echoes in Sinclair's rich reflections on the underlying sense of a city's history reflected in her earth, stones and architecture, written when he was still working as a municipal gardener in London's East End. What Sinclair and Moorcock offer is the raw stuff of their own experience and observation whereas Ackroyd's views are slightly more academic, more enthusiastic at a distance than close-up. But all three writers should be read together to get a sense of another, very different, strand of English fiction which occasionally feeds the imaginations of people like Rushdie, Amis and Self but is hardly recognised in its own right as a vigorous and ultimately far richer canon. This kind of literature has little to do with the consumer age and is built solidly to last, I'd guess, a few centuries. Get this as an introduction to Sinclair and the school of writers he represents, but get Downriver to enjoy him at his finest.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
THE OLD MAPS present a skyline dominated by church towers; those horizons were differently punctured, so that the subservience of the grounded eye, and the division of the city by parish, was not disguised. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Christ Church, Isle of Dogs, Ratcliffe Highway, Brick Lane, Howard Hughes, Old Street, Victoria Park, Bunhill Fields, Old Horns, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Cannon Street Road, Carpenter's Arms, Druid Street, Kerry Downs, King George's Fields, Sir Thomas Browne, Stan Brakhage, The Gemstone File, Truman's Brewery, Waltham Abbey New!
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Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
THE OLD MAPS present a skyline dominated by church towers; those horizons were differently punctured, so that the subservience of the grounded eye, and the division of the city by parish, was not disguised. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Christ Church, Isle of Dogs, Ratcliffe Highway, Brick Lane, Howard Hughes, Old Street, Victoria Park, Bunhill Fields, Old Horns, Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Cannon Street Road, Carpenter's Arms, Druid Street, Kerry Downs, King George's Fields, Sir Thomas Browne, Stan Brakhage, The Gemstone File, Truman's Brewery, Waltham Abbey New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 17
books:
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13
books
cite this book:
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- Radon Daughters by Iain Sinclair in Front Matter (1), Front Matter (2), and Front Matter (3)
- On Murder (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas De Quincey on page 13, and page 22
- Lud Heat by Iain Sinclair in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge Monographs on Mathematical Physics) by Stephen W. Hawking on page 159
- Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Iain Sinclair in Front Matter
See all 17 books this book cites
- Deconstruction - Derrida (Transitions) by Julian Wolfreys on page 140, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair in Front Matter, and Back Matter
- Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture S.) by Robert Bond on page 23, and page 55
- On Murder (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas De Quincey in Front Matter (1), and Front Matter (2)
- Radon Daughters by Iain Sinclair in Front Matter
See all 13 books citing this book
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