London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (Hardcover)

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.