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London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (Hardcover)

~ Iain Sinclair (Author), Dave McKean (Illustrator) "It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome..." (more)
Key Phrases: Waltham Abbey, Lea Valley, Epping Forest (more...)

5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

At first glance, this may appear to be only a book of observations about walking alongside the M-25, the roughly 150-mile highway that encircles London, but it is actually a complex, literary meditation on crime, urban sprawl, the effect of automobiles, British politics, the relationship between history and modernity, and perhaps not least, the importance of good footwear. Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory) writes in a hyper, staccato style that in a single passage can run the gamut from Beat poetry ("Narrative fractured. Verbals didn't stand up. Confessions wouldn't cohere. The motorway was loud with Chinese whispers") to the paranoid, embellished worldview of Hunter S. Thompson ("When dusk fell, villains took to their [borrowed-without-the-owner's-consent] cars. On the cruise. Tooted up with hand guns, machetes, petrol cans, monkey wrenches"). As with Thompson, one gets the sense that Sinclair's hyperbolic descriptions get at the truth better than a more conventional portrayal ever could. Sinclair is an artist with no patience for cheesy development, shopping malls or the very highway on which he walks, slicing past beautiful countryside and abandoned factories alike. The writing is often enjoyable, but at times heavy-handed and replete with references that will escape those not conversant in British culture: "An excuse to sample oysters in Whitstable (Notting Hill prices)," he writes, "to swim at Walberswick (Southwold: the new Hampstead)." The book is both fascinating and exhausting, and readers will find themselves rewarded even if they need to put it down frequently just to stretch their legs.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

British writer Sinclair's earlier works, including White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, have been compared to works by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. In his latest release, Sinclair and several companions take to the road, specifically, the M25. This beltway, which circumscribes London, is considered by some to be the boundary of the city. As he walks the areas through which the M25 travels, the author delves into the past and present of places that may be overlooked in a city so large. Where Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory explored inner London, London Orbital looks at the more remote locations once used for, among other things, asylums, hospitals, homes, and vacations from the industrialized city. The book contains both humor and interesting tidbits of history, but to reach these, the reader must wade through dense prose. Recommended only for libraries whose patrons are serious Anglophiles or are fans of the author's previous works.
Sheila Kasperek, Mansfield Univ. Lib., PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 400 pages
Publisher: Granta Books (October 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1862075476
ISBN-13: 978-1862075474
Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.9 x 1.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds

Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,353,883 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
"It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome." Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Waltham Abbey, Lea Valley, Epping Forest, Enfield Chase, New Labour, Joyce Green, Samuel Palmer, Queen Elizabeth, Long Grove, Marc Atkins, Mill Hill, South Mimms, New River, Millennium Dome, Bill Drummond, Potters Bar, Capel Manor, Enfield Lock, Abbots Langley, Mary Caine, Myddelton House, Peter Carpenter, Temple Bar, Valley of Vision, Fleet Street

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 100 books:

The War Of The Worlds (Great Illustrated Classics) by H. G. Wells on 5 pages
War of the Worlds( in German) by Wells on 5 pages
The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells on 5 pages
The War of the Worlds (Penguin Classics) by H.G. Wells on 5 pages
The Body Artist: A Novel by Don DeLillo on page 44, page 166, and Back Matter

See all 100 books this book cites

21 books cite this book:

Iain Sinclair (Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature & Culture) by Robert Bond on 16 pages
Reading the Everyday by Joe Moran on 4 pages
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry by Esther Leslie on 4 pages
New Europe: Imagined Spaces by Donald McNeill on page 168, page 170, and Back Matter
Urban Ethnic: Design in the Contemporary City by Eamonn Canniffe on page 123, page 124, and Back Matter

See all 21 books citing this book

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	67% buy the item featured on this page: London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 5.0 out of 5 stars (1)
	16% buy London: City of Disappearances $22.80
	6% buy Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London 4.0 out of 5 stars (6)
	5% buy Family Matters 4.3 out of 5 stars (65) $10.85

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5.0 out of 5 stars Carmageddon?, November 19, 2002

By	John Joss (Los Altos, CA USA) - See all my reviews

LONDON ORBITAL is more than just a book. It's a world model. Circumferential roads permit regional traffic flow around cities while reducing inner clog, a worldwide effort beyond London's M25--other cities, other orbitals: Paris' Peripherique, Washington's Beltway. Many others exist.

Iain Sinclair circumambulated London's M25 over months, with friends, in seven distinct bites. The M25 is a 125-mile creation, reputedly the world's busiest highway, traveled over the years by millions. It transforms not just the immense geography and culture of Greater London, as complex and diverse as Los Angeles or Calcutta of equivalent populations, but the inner and outer landscapes of residents and visitors, wherever they live and however they travel.

Sinclair's world view engages all six senses, back through the history of England and Europe, across the sepctrum of human experience: past and present, art and architecture, law and literature, horticulture and horror movies, geology and geography, politics and poverty, road and rail, medicine and military technology, even the psychopathology of asylum dwellers/victims and their external brethren: obsessive-compulsive walkers . . . and some writers. Name it, he does it. Well.

He works in ways that push the reader from rapture to rage, his global asides reaching all the way to California and beyond. He starts and finishes with Greenwich's Millennium Monstrosity, the Dome, which he detests ("Prejudices Declared"), showing how roads rearrange world geographies and cultures, putting people into a psychogeographical (his word) tumbe-dryer set on HOT but with no 'off' switch. As long as motor vehicles move, he implies, the effects will endure. Carmageddon?

Sinclair employs a diverse, sometimes mind-numbingly hyperbolic range of verbal acrobatics, inventions, riffs, jump cuts, phrases and words standing alone, summoning up the intellectual spirits and curiosities in ways that make him one of today's most readable but occasionally infuriating writers. If jazz is the metaphor, think Sonny Rollins or Charlie Parker with new and improved chemical influences. If cooking, it's bouillabaisse notched to new novelty, minestrone reinvented by a master chef toying with our taste buds. The flavors keep coming, onrushing, unstoppable. He's an intellectual shock-jock, messing with our minds and emotions. Breathless. Amazing. Often fun.

Sinclair's overwriting is exuberant, shameless, quite unlike the self-conscious, preening equivalent of Tom Wolfe, his nearest match this side of the Atlantic, or maybe Christopher Hitchens, who tries to finagle both sides of the pond. Sinclair longs to inform, indulge his curiosity, obsess with back-story research, earn our attention; Wolfe and Hitchens only want to impress, flaunt their superiority, plumb the shallows of their personal conceits, provoke our adulation. Guess who wins? Right!

This is a Big Read, the writing sustained from start to finish, all 457 pages. On balance its dense information content and lyrical prose make the journey worthwhile. Sinclair admits, in the credits, that some of the book appeared earlier in the London Review of Books, The London Magazine and The River; parts were also, as he puts it, 'rehearsed' in a sequence of books going back to 1999.

Whatever Sinclair is doing (the San Francisco CHRONICLE has called him "a prose stylist almost without peer"), he pushes the limit of modern word usage. The reader, beguiled by the lyricism, is drawn into his labyrinth, his orbit, a never-ending trip like the circular M25 itself. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs or you might not escape.

No Sinclair metaphors were used in writing this review. Granta's strictures prohibit it.

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