A writer, who has lived for years in London, reluctantly acknowledges his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Commissioned to write about Walter Savage Landor's disastrous attempt to set up a senatorial estate around Llanthony Abbey, he is sidetracked by more recent conspiracies: a bizarre series of twenty-seven suicides in the secret defence industries and unreliable witnesses who claim to have uncovered the truth about the Thorpe case. A burnt-out media bum called Kaporal, employed to research these events, sends the narrator taped reports from his journeys up and down the M4, tapes that come to seem like messages thrown over the side by a lost and fraudulent round-the-world sailor - are they evidence, or deranged fictions, contrived to keep Kaporal on the payroll? The valley is revealed as the site of persistent attempts to found or imagine utopian communities, all fascinated by the mythology of the west. The narrator is accused of one of the murders that Kaporal is researching. Incarcerated in an asylum on the River Usk, long-suppressed memories of his childhood in Wales return to haunt him.
British writer Sinclair is best known on this side of the Atlantic for two cultishly popular works of nonfiction Lights Out for the Territory, a virtuosic London travel narrative, and Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein), the history of an obscure Jewish scholar. This is Sinclair's U.S. fiction debut, and it is as distinctive as his inimitable nonfiction, distinguished by the same vital, labyrinthine prose. The novel's multiple plots are rooted in the plight of Norton, an overcommitted London poet and general hack, assigned to write a study of the half-forgotten Victorian writer, Walter Savage Landor. Since Landor attempted a utopian experiment in Llanthony, Wales, Norton makes an investigative journey there. Meanwhile, he is barraged with tapes from an investigator named Kaporal, who is trying to find the key to the mystery of Jeremy Thorpe, a real-life '70s Liberal leader who was disgraced when he was accused of conspiring to murder his lover, a male model. After Norton has a brief affair with a bookstore owner named Prudence, who disappears, he himself is apprehended by the police for Prudence's murder. Norton doesn't recognize the victim as Prudence, though he does recognize the details of the murder, which imitates a bootleg snuff film starring Britt Ekland and various political worthies shown to him by Kaporal. Finally, the Thorpe conspiracy somehow begins to dovetail with a slew of suspicious suicides in the West Country in the '80s. Sinclair is reminiscent of Pynchon in both his encyclopedic set of references and his discomfort with the palliative function of plot. Rather than resolving the complications of his story, Sinclair is determined to ramify them until they form a dense counterworld of memory and chance. B&w illus. (Sept.)Forecast: It remains to be seen whether Sinclair's fiction will hit the same nerve as his nonfiction, but Sinclair's U.S. profile will undoubtedly rise upon publication of Landor's Tower. Major review attention may safely be expected, and Granta is sending the author on a U.S. tour.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
In his first novel in eight years, Welsh-born author Sinclair turns his fictive eye from London, site or subject of much of his work, to the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales, where nineteenth-century author Walter Savage Landor established an estate. In the thinnest of plot lines in this dense collage of a book, narrator Norton, commissioned to write a novel about Landor, traverses the area, getting field reports about conspiracies and a series of defense industry suicides. Charged with murdering Prudence, his paramour of an evening, Norton is institutionalized then reunited with the woman. All the while there are interactions between fictional characters and historic personages. Peppering his prose with mostly British cultural, historical, and literary allusions, Sinclair is like a researcher unable to omit a single fact. There are gems of insight, wit, and wisdom here, but unearthing them may not be worth the effort except for fans of the author and well-read Anglophiles with a high tolerance for flights of imagination and ambiguity.
Michele LeberCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reservedBritish literary biographer Peter Ackroyd has called Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London) most inventive; he is also relentlessly self-referential and wildly allusive. In his latest, Sinclair simultaneously plays the roles of author and narrator critiquing his own fiction. The narrator of this tale is writing a fictional version if the life of volatile poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864), author of Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. Landor's life is bracketed by earlier artists (twins Thomas and Henry Vaughan) and later ones (Robert Frank, David Jones), as well as by politician Jeremy Thorpe. These figures are all related to the bleak landscape of the Wales/England border, where 25 suicides in England's defense industry have recently happened. Provocative ideas regarding the permeability of time can be teased out of these stories, but not without difficulty. Occasional blasts of outrageous humor enliven; biographies of the myriad figures in this Byzantine tale are appended. Recommended for libraries whose readers are familiar with Sinclair's earlier work and those who wish to immerse themselves in postmodernism.Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
