Ian Sinclair is dense. Not in the mentally subnormal meaning, but in the other meanings, many meanings.
The writing attacks you from page one and just refuses to let you go, it is an assault on the mind. Apparently it is around the quarter of a million word mark, I am not going to verify that. The small group approach the 122 miles of M25 as section hike, day walks.
To be honest, those first few pages, I had serious misgivings as to the chances of finishing the walk with him. When I first read Stephen King it felt like my IQ had been cut in half. Short blunt sentences, easily digested words. When I read the only Jeffery Archer novel I will ever need to read I wished my IQ would be cut in half. Sinclair makes you wish you could borrow Stephen Fry’s brain for the week.
The idea is simple enough, walk around the M25 getting as close as possible to the road. Sometimes that is actually walking along the hard shoulder.
Ian Sinclair and his walking companions are made of more urban desire than me for sure. The text seems to rejoice in the blat of traffic which is their guide. I try to avoid it, they seem lost without it, the walk losses it’s purpose.
The suggested reason as to why they are walking it is too find out where it leads. They walk it anti-clockwise, although they are not sure why, Ian thinks it has something to do with winding back the clock.
By now you might be beginning to get the idea, this books is jammed with ideas that have no real resolution.
Really “because it is there” would do the project justice. The book is shot through with political spleen venting. Maggie gets it in the neck, "Margaret Scissorhands" opens the road in 1986, the exact location kept as official secret. Blair gets it in the neck. The failure of the Millennium Dome is given as a motivation for the walk and is continually referenced. The timescale is to walk the M25 before 1 Jan 2000, it is a year for them to do it in.
The area they walk is richly layered with history and Ian does not miss any of it, or seems not too. He is a psycho-geographical exponent and is admired by Will Self.
A lot of the walk is in transitionary landscapes, old buildings with secret pasts awaiting the developers to re-invent them. Mental asylums closed by Thatcher being re-imagined by property developers, the water towers remain to give the game away.
Sometimes the lunacy in the way we treated the “mad” takes your breath away. A friend of mine went into the field of mental health treatment at the fag end of the 1980’s. There were elderly folk there who had spent entire lives in mental institutions because they were high spirited youngsters. Parts of the book touched a nerve with me having seen the old walls in lost rooms.
Sinclair feeds into this constantly, referring to the walk as a fugue. It seems the French went through a stage of fugue walkers, maybe best illustrated recently with that passage in Forest Gump where he just sets off walking till he stops. In a typical bit of thinking it is described as not walking to forget but walking to forget the walk.
Layer upon layer of knowledge is heaped onto the reader, it builds continually, even encompassing a visit to one of his companions vaguely remembered grandparents house which is partly on the route. They meet security guards along the way, travelling as they are in a half-world where walkers are looked upon with suspicion, not to be trusted. There is a lot that is circular about this book, including the revisiting of themes continually.
The central concept of the book is a challenge to walkers, there is more out there to be discovered than the hills. There is more to be considered than what is on the menu. Walking is as absorbing and as diverse as you are willing to make it. What you can learn is only limited by your capacity to seek out and accept knowledge.
I really enjoyed this book and suspect it will be re-read one of these days. Like any great walk it can be done again and again and new things discovered.
In the meanwhile, I have other books of his to read and re-read, it might well be I am on my own circular route around his literary output.
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