Radon Daughters [Paperback]

Iain Sinclair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 9, 2001

Radon Daughters is a comic and alarming epic about a city and a society torn by random violence and uncontrollable compulsions. Todd Sileen, a rage-driven cripple, ekes out a living in a wasted East London borough. He spends his days foraging in the pubs and abandoned lots of this ghetto, contending with some of its most menacing inhabitants. Seduced by increasing violence and vices, Sileen endeavors to sustain a life he deems not worth living.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'Sinclair is an authentic visionary. Only at the end of the book, however, do we realise we've also been in the power of a genuine wizard, someone capable of tracing patterns and designs only barely perceptible to most people and, more to the point, able to reveal them to us' Michael Moorcock --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 458 pages
• Publisher: Granta Books (September 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862072086
• ISBN-13: 978-1862072084
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,189,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Calyx Of Our Dreams, October 22, 2009

By 

Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Radon Daughters (Paperback)

What exactly this book is about I'm not at all sure that I have any plausible notion. One should certainly acquaint oneself with at least a smattering of the Whitechapel to Oxford to Cambridge geography and history before picking the book up. Also, it becomes necessary to come to know something of a (justifiably, to my mind) forgotten writer by the name of William Hope Hodgson. Further, the book is, in general, very challenging. If you aren't well-versed in many poets and writers and their most abstruse works, you will miss out on much that is of significance in this dark, meandering work.

But, aside from these ambiguous prefatory remarks, the thing that grabs the reader is Sinclair's mastery of the English language. His striking poetic descriptions are worth the rest of the occult muddle. Here are a few of these lines and passages:

"Night air hit their shamed, flushed faces like a cerebral insult. Rumours of tyre smoke and wet leaves. The smells by which Sileen navigated, the stink peculiar to this locality: a shed of maggots bred for fishermen, badly cured leather, forgotten dead things left on the hook."

"Massive ironwork gates. An agitation of leaves: ovate, deltoid, elliptic. Promiscuously mingled..."

"The curse of winter sunlight illuminating silted tributaries and overgrown paths."

"...the rusty nape of evening light."

"Their back-up, Rhab Adman, was scanning a low sky; a millrace of iron clouds, proletarian smoke, bad script, warnings. The beauty of horror chilled him. Destitute buildings with insurance-mascara windows, bricked entrances. A shifty, local moon with acid-erased features."

"Willows to the waterline. Melancholy. A lost hour between dusk and darkness. Shadows of the advancing dead."

If Sinclair's robust, poetic use of the language doesn't strike you, then I really couldn't recommend this book. It's too full of quirkiness, Brit-slang, arcana of all sorts to be appealing to most readers. - I'm not surprised at all that I'm the first to review it. - But, for what it's worth, the following passage seems to encapsulate the book's wayward theme to me:

"We are the calyx of our dreams. But are they our own? In dread, we fall victim to random nightmares. Outfalls of melancholy. We fear to close our eyes."