Product Description

In 1841, the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead...In 2000, Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #67803 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Synopsis
In 1841, the poet John Clare fled an asylum in Epping Forest and walked eighty miles to his home in Northborough. He was searching for his lost love, Mary Joyce - a woman three years dead...In 2000, Iain Sinclair set out to recreate Clare's walk away from madness. He wanted to understand his bond with the poet and escape the gravity of his London obsessions. Accompanied on this journey by his wife Anna (who shares a connection with Clare), the artist Brian Catling and magus Alan Moore - as well as a host of literary ghosts, both visionary and romantic - Sinclair's quest for Clare becomes an investigation into madness, sanity and the nature of the poet's muse.

About the Author
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters, London Orbital and Dining on Stones. He lives in Hackney, East London.

Customer Reviews

Fragmentary: good bits, but not firing on all cylinders
On the face of it, it's a logical progression: Sinclair's explorations of London lead him out to the M25 circuit of "London Orbital", the final leg of which takes him through Epping Forest and past the start of John Clare's walk home from the asylum, the walk at the core of this book. This ought to be fertile territory for Sinclair and indeed he writes on the empty countryside of Bedfordshire and Huntingdonshire with the same sardonic vividness he brought to the inner city. However, it's a book of fragments that don't cohere. Clare's walk is retraced, and this is recounted in fractured timescale; but we also get a walk along the Great Ouse in the company of the artist Emma Matthews who is revisiting the site of her father and sister's drownings, a tour of Northampton with the graphic artist Alan Moore (centring on the asylum that housed Clare and also James Joyce's daughter) and an exploration of Sinclair's wife's family history, centred on the village next to Clare's: different strands linked only by geography, which Sinclair fails to weld into an artistic whole.
The family history quest involves some well-described explorations of the Fenland landscape, but also rather too much detail of which William begat which Robert - family history here, as always, being more interesting to the researcher than to the outsider who has it recounted to them. It's a touching tribute to a marriage, and a more human and domestic side to Sinclair than we've seen before, but it could have been edited down: until now I would have said that Sinclair couldn't write a dull line if he tried, but his description of what people ate at a surprise anniversary meal for his wife manages it - doubly a shame given the Dickensian verve with which Sinclair can write about food, and with which he blowtorches the diners at a Chinese all-you-can-eat buffet elsewhere in the book. Furthermore, the family history never really gels with the Clare material: and James Joyce's daughter Lucia seems to be crowbarred in there, the facts that Anna Sinclair's family also included a James Joyce, and that Lucia ended up in the same asylum as John Clare, failing to justify her presence.
The book is worth exploring - as everything Sinclair writes is - and it does some interesting things with the sheer weirdness of the Middle Level landscape, but it's a bit of a mixed bag, and not the place to start on this important writer.