Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 11 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
I notice that all the books you’ve chosen are set in the period between the mid-19th century and the 1980s. What is it about this period – from Charles Dickens to Michael Moorcock – that speaks to you so much? Is this the golden age of London?
Well, it begins just as London is emerging as an imperial city, with the pomp of the late 19th century – when it’s complacent and rich. London fulfils itself as a world city at this point, and at the same time we have the rise of the novel as a form (it really comes into its own, I feel, between the late 19th century and the 1920s – after which it’s become something else, because people don’t have the time to negotiate these old, complicated structures). So I’ve picked a couple of things that fit in the classic period, and a couple of things that deal with London as it changes dramatically. I think to create a modern book about London would be a very complicated process; it would have to use different technologies.
Over the course of this period, would you say that changes in literary form, in particular the development of the novel, mirrored changes in the city?
Definitely, yes. Writers are simply part of the organic identity of a city. They have a function. They pick up on intonations of the past; they re-adapt elements of stories that were already there and convert them and shape them and make them new, using the spirit of the moment. In a sense, I think that’s what I was trying to say with my book choices: these are the kinds of books that are present in my own take on a city, so anything I would write myself would have absorbed these books and made them part of that palimpsest.
Do you think the novel, as a literary form, is particularly well suited to London? More so than a travelogue or a history book?
Yes, I think so. But I think the very definition of what a novel is must be the result of a complex decision. It’s not a question of some kind of fabulation or fictional projection or pastiching of a historic period. I think a novel, now at least – and certainly the way I try to work it – is a complex work of documentation, listening to voices, using images, accepting the nature of what’s been done, anticipating what’s still to come… and creating a completely hybrid form. I think the new novel is not necessarily a fiction, in the classic sense. It’s not a construction; it’s something else. We’re just seeing these forms begin to emerge.
Let’s discuss the first book you’ve chosen, Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s London Bridge.
I chose London Bridge because I love the idea of a totally non-Anglicised consciousness looking at our city as a construct. Because Céline is a deeply French writer, in a totally different tradition, he sees London mythologised as a fictional entity – and he treats it with a dynamism and an energy that I don’t find in English writing. Also, he makes these wonderful, crazy trajectories across the city, from Willesden down to the docks and so on, as a way of trying to configure how he would escape from the incredible density and multitude and magnificence of this mad place in which he finds himself. For me, that’s a wonderfully inspiring way to look at London, as compared to the account of a local writer, who might tend to stratify society and deal with its movements in the classic sense that you find in Thackeray or Dickens or Trollope.
Céline came here at the time of World War One, with shrapnel wounds in his head, recovering from the madness of the conflict and looking at the city as a post-traumatic city – in a way, it’s similar to what TS Eliot does in The Wasteland. That sort of London is the London of the imagination: the dream city.
In much of your writing – including your upcoming work, Ghost Milk – you discuss London’s great modern construction projects (for example, the Millennium Dome), and the negative effects you think they will have. It’s doubtless true that they do damage by paving over historic neighbourhoods and underworlds. But can these new projects ever have a historical or cultural validity in themselves?
I really think that this is the biggest battleground London has seen since the age of the railways. When the railways were first put in, there was devastation, because there were so many competing companies who just ripped up houses right, left, and centre. In the name of catching the spirit of the age and indulging in this technological process (and the idea of progress through science), London was savagely remade. It took a long time to absorb, recover and discover itself through that. At the moment, we’re in this sort of management age – an age of the virtual – in which you can change reality by looking at digitised, computer-generated images and projecting a fantastic city of the future, like a science fiction. People have come to believe that this is reality, even though they are contradicted by observation, which shows you devastated fields, radioactive materials buried in the ground that have been ripped up fast, and absolute destruction. I mean, I just walked round our local Victoria Park this morning – it looks like a war zone! The lake has been drained and the wild habitat of the island has been stripped bare, all in the name of this sort of cosmeticised version of the future. So it is a devastating moment for the city, which I don’t think has ever been under such a prolonged form of invasion by the virtual.
To deal with all this, you have to come up with different forms of writing.
Iain Sinclair is a writer of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. The Spectator calls him “our greatest guide to London”. He is the author of London: City of Disappearances, and lives in Hackney in east London
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