Read It In Books:Downriver.

In Iain Sinclair's 1991 novel Downriver, Henry Milditch and his wife Sabella's house overlooks Victoria Park. Set during the time of the Wapping riots and when the narrator was reading lots of De Quincey, Milditch "haunted the dead zones of the city looking for connections that only he could activate", his "survival depended on his anonymity", he dabbled in property, sold cold fish, and dealt in books, and he persuades our narrator, presumably Iain Sinclair himself, to join him on a train from Fenchurch Street to Tilbury. His own motives, he admits, "opaque and spiritually unsound". 

Regarding plot, that's as far as I got with Downriver. For the most part I had no idea whatsoever what was going on. I recognised many of the names mentions. Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, Zurbaran, Francis Bacon,William Burroughs, William Blake, Canaletto, Turner, Rimbaud, Anthony Gormley, Harold Wilson, T.S.Eliot,  Clement Attlee, Joseph Conrad, Paul Klee, Ken Loach, Lindsay Anderson, John Minton, Julie Christie, Terence Stamp, Chips Channon, Mantegna, Peter Ackroyd, Gilbert and George, Mack Sennet, Peggy Ashcroft, Waldemar Januszczak, the Elephant Man, Anselm Kiefer, and Captain Kidd. 

But I'm not really sure what they had to do with Milditch and Sinclair's ever more obscure vision. Other things I simply didn't understand at all:-  Blodeuwedd's Invitation to Gronw Pebyr, Gelert the Faithful, hermetic sexuality, Tupperware Buddhism, Although a digression into the world of the New Apocalyptic poet Nicholas Moore and his bath full of "lumber and detritus" proved reasonably interesting.

Often it's hard to understand who the characters are and what they represent. Edith Cadiz, the actor Roland Bowman who owned Oscar Wilde's old fireplace, William Gull the masonic Magus, and what of the nineteen year old computer operator Paul Green who simply spontaneously burst into flames while walking through De Beauvoir Town?

The book worked best as some sort of esoteric travelogue of a London, and the surrounding areas, that has changed much, and yet not changed at all, in the last three decades. Canvey Island is described as "a gulag of sinking caravans, overlooked by decommissioned storage tanks", Tilbury as a place so full of minicab offices that its "chief industry" is "providing the means to escape from" itself. A place where blue collar mansions take in panoramic views of Essex's most expansive rubbish dumps - usually full of broken washing machines (Hoover, Bosch, Zanussi, Hotpoint) - and where the legions of Claudius once arrived from the Kentish shores to the south.

Ferries head back across the Thames to the "decayed Regency splendour" of Gravesend. Further upstream where the Princess Alice went down in 1878 - over six hundred people lost their lives - pensioned trading hulks rot in the docks, their days of international travel gone forever, and cranes are culled for scrap. Bombed huts, dereliction, "bald stone flags", the loss of Empire is keenly felt in these areas.

Rotherhithe looks "foreign, and somewhat estranged from itself", places in Wapping (Tobacco Dock, Sir Thomas More Court, Anchorage) "plated nostalgia" and sold shares in "our maritime history". North Woolwich is a "graveyard of engines", "a Museum of Steam", or a "tamed mirror-version that would deny its own madness".

Spitalfields "is a zone of 'disappearances', mysteries, conflicts, and 'baroque realism'". It meant "gay vicars swinging incense" and "New Georgians promoting wallpaper catalogues", "bulldozers, noise, dust; snarling angry machines" with a "hair gelled noddy in a pin-stripe suit at the controls", "Aztec fantasies of glass and steel lifting in a self-reflecting glitter of irony from the ruins". Most of all it "meant lunches". The Hawksmoor church there is a "magnificent threat", its staircase an "inaccessible ladder in time".

Interestingly, Hoxton, back then, is described as "dead ground:botched social experiments, beyond the wildest fantasies of developers" and Leyton is "complacent ruralist calm" though its High Street is "an embolic flutter of muddied Transits, resprayed Cortinas, and an angry boil of citizens scouting for the first rumours of the bus pack". Stratford "stagnant pools, car dumps, and portakabins".

The area around Devons Road DLR station was, to Ackroyd then, "the final killing fields of the welfare state, bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity", Silvertown "makes little attempt to live up the glory of its name" where "inspissated droplets fall without fear or favour, like a sleet of poisoned nostalgia". and, of course, the costive Thames itself, can be seen "flaunting the posthumous brilliance of its history"

Other interesting turns of phrase includes a person who squeaks "like a cheeky cartoon mouse being dubbed by a seventy year old actor who has not yet been told the polyps in his sinuses are malignant", there are "weasel-twitching Goebbels clones who breakfasted on razor blades and seven week embryos" and "bum faced nonentities in Savile Row" as well as a man whose teeth "dazzled like Mexican bone dice".

But did I understand what was going on in the book? Not really but it still made, initially, for a pleasant and interesting, if often challenging, read - as long as I broke it up into bite sized morsels. Which I did. I dipped in and out as if going on short daily walks to see how things change with the weather, with ageing, and with the passing of time in general.

Although, as with a long walk, eventually I tired of it. About halfway into the book I found it hard to motivate myself to even pick it up and read a few pages. I'll think I'll leave Iain Sinclair alone for a while now and read something different.