Product Description

A brilliant voyage of discovery into the deeply unfashionable fringes of London. 'It isn't often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic, but I'm sure that "London Orbital" will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is Blair's Britain. It's a fascinating snapshot of who we are, lit by Sinclair's vivid prose, and on another level a warning that the mythological England of village greens and cycling aunts has been buried under the rush of a million radial tyres' - J. G. Ballard, "Observer".

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #803318 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 592 pages

From Publishers Weekly
At first glance, this may appear to be only a book of observations about walking alongside the M-25, the roughly 150-mile highway that encircles London, but it is actually a complex, literary meditation on crime, urban sprawl, the effect of automobiles, British politics, the relationship between history and modernity, and perhaps not least, the importance of good footwear. Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory) writes in a hyper, staccato style that in a single passage can run the gamut from Beat poetry ("Narrative fractured. Verbals didn't stand up. Confessions wouldn't cohere. The motorway was loud with Chinese whispers") to the paranoid, embellished worldview of Hunter S. Thompson ("When dusk fell, villains took to their [borrowed-without-the-owner's-consent] cars. On the cruise. Tooted up with hand guns, machetes, petrol cans, monkey wrenches"). As with Thompson, one gets the sense that Sinclair's hyperbolic descriptions get at the truth better than a more conventional portrayal ever could. Sinclair is an artist with no patience for cheesy development, shopping malls or the very highway on which he walks, slicing past beautiful countryside and abandoned factories alike. The writing is often enjoyable, but at times heavy-handed and replete with references that will escape those not conversant in British culture: "An excuse to sample oysters in Whitstable (Notting Hill prices)," he writes, "to swim at Walberswick (Southwold: the new Hampstead)." The book is both fascinating and exhausting, and readers will find themselves rewarded even if they need to put it down frequently just to stretch their legs.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
British writer Sinclair's earlier works, including White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, have been compared to works by William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. In his latest release, Sinclair and several companions take to the road, specifically, the M25. This beltway, which circumscribes London, is considered by some to be the boundary of the city. As he walks the areas through which the M25 travels, the author delves into the past and present of places that may be overlooked in a city so large. Where Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory explored inner London, London Orbital looks at the more remote locations once used for, among other things, asylums, hospitals, homes, and vacations from the industrialized city. The book contains both humor and interesting tidbits of history, but to reach these, the reader must wade through dense prose. Recommended only for libraries whose patrons are serious Anglophiles or are fans of the author's previous works.
Sheila Kasperek, Mansfield Univ. Lib., PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
The title of Sinclair's latest refers to London's infamous M25 orbital highway, or bypass, as we might say in America. Recently voted number one in a poll of "seven horrors of Britain" conducted by BBC Radio program Today, the M25's extremely heavy traffic and stifling pollution make life miserable for drivers. Bucking this trend, Sinclair declares himself "obsessed" with the road and decides to walk the 117-mile route in an effort to, as he says, "come to terms with this beast." He finds that walking the orbital isn't so easy-- time and again, he and his companions meet chain-link fences and impassable plots on the mostly industrial land surrounding the motorway. Sinclair is a witty and capable writer, and his musings on the M25 are characteristically sharp. However, his audience may be somewhat limited; packed (as densely as the M25 at 5 p.m.) with allusions to British history and pop culture, well-read Anglophiles will be delighted, but others may find this slow going. Beth Leistensnider
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Carmageddon?
LONDON ORBITAL is more than just a book. It's a world model. Circumferential roads permit regional traffic flow around cities while reducing inner clog, a worldwide effort beyond London's M25--other cities, other orbitals: Paris' Peripherique, Washington's Beltway. Many others exist.

Iain Sinclair circumambulated London's M25 over months, with friends, in seven distinct bites. The M25 is a 125-mile creation, reputedly the world's busiest highway, traveled over the years by millions. It transforms not just the immense geography and culture of Greater London, as complex and diverse as Los Angeles or Calcutta of equivalent populations, but the inner and outer landscapes of residents and visitors, wherever they live and however they travel.

Sinclair's world view engages all six senses, back through the history of England and Europe, across the sepctrum of human experience: past and present, art and architecture, law and literature, horticulture and horror movies, geology and geography, politics and poverty, road and rail, medicine and military technology, even the psychopathology of asylum dwellers/victims and their external brethren: obsessive-compulsive walkers . . . and some writers. Name it, he does it. Well.

He works in ways that push the reader from rapture to rage, his global asides reaching all the way to California and beyond. He starts and finishes with Greenwich's Millennium Monstrosity, the Dome, which he detests ("Prejudices Declared"), showing how roads rearrange world geographies and cultures, putting people into a psychogeographical (his word) tumbe-dryer set on HOT but with no 'off' switch. As long as motor vehicles move, he implies, the effects will endure. Carmageddon?

Sinclair employs a diverse, sometimes mind-numbingly hyperbolic range of verbal acrobatics, inventions, riffs, jump cuts, phrases and words standing alone, summoning up the intellectual spirits and curiosities in ways that make him one of today's most readable but occasionally infuriating writers. If jazz is the metaphor, think Sonny Rollins or Charlie Parker with new and improved chemical influences. If cooking, it's bouillabaisse notched to new novelty, minestrone reinvented by a master chef toying with our taste buds. The flavors keep coming, onrushing, unstoppable. He's an intellectual shock-jock, messing with our minds and emotions. Breathless. Amazing. Often fun.

Sinclair's overwriting is exuberant, shameless, quite unlike the self-conscious, preening equivalent of Tom Wolfe, his nearest match this side of the Atlantic, or maybe Christopher Hitchens, who tries to finagle both sides of the pond. Sinclair longs to inform, indulge his curiosity, obsess with back-story research, earn our attention; Wolfe and Hitchens only want to impress, flaunt their superiority, plumb the shallows of their personal conceits, provoke our adulation. Guess who wins? Right!

This is a Big Read, the writing sustained from start to finish, all 457 pages. On balance its dense information content and lyrical prose make the journey worthwhile. Sinclair admits, in the credits, that some of the book appeared earlier in the London Review of Books, The London Magazine and The River; parts were also, as he puts it, 'rehearsed' in a sequence of books going back to 1999.

Whatever Sinclair is doing (the San Francisco CHRONICLE has called him "a prose stylist almost without peer"), he pushes the limit of modern word usage. The reader, beguiled by the lyricism, is drawn into his labyrinth, his orbit, a never-ending trip like the circular M25 itself. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs or you might not escape.

No Sinclair metaphors were used in writing this review. Granta's strictures prohibit it.