Downriver

Hired to film a documentary on what's left of old-time life along the now-trendy Thames, a filmmaker finds his most interesting subject in Edith Cadiz, a nurse, performance artist, and whore who comes to life from a vintage photograph. 10,000 first printing.

In his U.S. debut Sinclair, a British poet, filmmaker, rare book dealer and jack-of-all-trades, puts his varied background to work in a dextrous, multifaceted novel of the London docklands. The narrator, among other sordid locals, has been hired by a movie production company to ferret out the "real" old-time docklands. Told as 12 stories set in the near future but riddled with spectres of the past, this novel attempts to do for this down-and-out area what Joyce did for Dublin: eulogize it with language so abstract and imagery so densely allusive as to simulate the layering of historical detail upon a specific locale. The result is nearly incomprehensible, but that's part of the fun; and Sinclair goes out of his way to entertain. His separate narratives introduce a bizarre assortment of sexual encounters and violent deaths, each as vivid and incoherent as any nightmare. Filled with the ghosts and wrecks of London history, inhabited by grubby barflies and Cockney wharf-rats, this teeming novel seems as rich, fecund and ultimately mesmerizing as the muddy Thames. Downriver won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel; Sinclair's first book, White Chapel , Scarlet Tracings , has not as yet been published here.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Winner of the 1992 Encore Award in Britain, Welsh-born poet and antiquarian-bookseller Sinclair's second novel (but first US publication): a tumultuous, frenzied, and mercilessly critical story of London past and present. Constructed as a series of interlocking stories, the primary focus is on the Docklands, a rundown wharf and warehouse district that was targeted for upscale redevelopment in the boomtime of the early-80's, but that the subsequent recession has reduced to an unfinished folly. The author as narrator, along with a handful of eccentric companions, accepts the task of uncovering whatever items of historical interest might exist about it, ostensibly for a documentary film, exploring the area by rail and by river in search of clues that will unlock its secrets. The 19th-century tales of a champion aboriginal cricketer, King Cole, who came from Australia to clobber his English opponents only to succumb to the London air shortly thereafter, and of a disastrous collision on the Thames that left hundreds of holiday pleasure-seekers dead are among many historical motifs woven into the saga, with futuristic scenarios of satanic rites enacted on the Isle of Dogs by papal and corporate conspirators being equally vivid. The depth of erudition and full- scale incorporation of book-, film-, and folklore are certainly impressive, but a troubling lack of cohesion in such diverse, unfettered flights of fancy is ultimately admitted by the narrator himself, who finally turns the story over to his fellow traveler rather than attempt to tie it together himself. Lavishly phrased to a point of self-indulgence, restless, and wild: less a novel than a frenetic tour of a city and culture that, unfortunately, leaves one coolly appreciative at best. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Sinclair won Britain's Encore Award for best second novel for this mixture of fiction, history, travel memoir, and autobiography. It is ostensibly the story of a crew of writers and filmmakers who try to document the passing of a way of life in the gentrified Thames basin, the history they uncover, their attempts to develop a way to record it, and the problems Sinclair (who is both author and character) encounters in writing the script and the novel itself. Denizens of the basin, including a prostitute and a scavenger, appear throughout, and dogs and Masonry play important roles. The style is rich but often difficult, especially for a non-British reader (e.g., "The effete whiggery of the neo-Palladian concourse was coming in for some foot-first roundhead aggro"), though Sinclair includes more accessible wit ("They were encrusted with enough badges to subdue a college of semiologists"). Recommended for literary collections.
- Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib., New York
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.