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thepaige_turner's review against another edition
1.0
Honestly, the more I'm forced to read Iain Sinclair, the more I realize he's such a pretentious writer.
mscarle's review against another edition
1.0
Functionally DNF, as I skimmed aggressively from about halfway. Probably a harsh 1*, but let's be honest - I skimmed aggressively from halfway, how good could I have found it?
I've tried Sinclair before and something never quite clicked for me, but I jumped at the chance to give this a shot. I'm a huge fan of travelogues, especially walking ones. I'm an unrepentant Anglophile and a bit of a trainspotter. Rather than being the book where it finally clicked for me with Sinclair, it was instead the confirmation he's just not for me. Relatively short but dragged for ages. Aggressively, almost knowingly dull. Crammed with references and allusions that seemingly only exist for their own sake. Even with my scorched-earth skimming of the back half, it felt like it would never end. No thanks, just no thanks.
I've tried Sinclair before and something never quite clicked for me, but I jumped at the chance to give this a shot. I'm a huge fan of travelogues, especially walking ones. I'm an unrepentant Anglophile and a bit of a trainspotter. Rather than being the book where it finally clicked for me with Sinclair, it was instead the confirmation he's just not for me. Relatively short but dragged for ages. Aggressively, almost knowingly dull. Crammed with references and allusions that seemingly only exist for their own sake. Even with my scorched-earth skimming of the back half, it felt like it would never end. No thanks, just no thanks.
schopflin's review against another edition
4.0
Usual Sinclair mixture of quirky stories, obscure references and grumpy opinion. This one was slightly let down by the fact that the walk was done in a single day. By the end, they're hallucinating.
kate_can's review
informative
slow-paced
2.5
In 2012 Iain Sinclair and his walking companion, Andre Kötting (British artist, writer and film-maker b.1959) spent a day tramping around the London Overground circuit, and Sinclair recounts the journey by weaving in references to others who have come before. Processions and pilgrimages are evoked from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress, as the duo walk just for the sake of walking. He is at his best when describing the physical mechanics of motion. “Refuelling was a requirement, but sitting down would carry the risk of our not being able to rise again. Pints were delivered, swilled back, replenished, before a bowl of steaming fish pie made it from microwave to table.”
He likes to walk. He has walked around Hackney, the M25, and areas that have been cleared for the Olympics before, and written books about all of them. Understanding the needs for a hook with which to draw in the reader, he chooses routes that are frequently travelled, but by different forms of transportation. Above all, he fears bland homogenisation and he despises shopping centres, such as Clapham Junction, in a sentiment familiar from Ghost Milk.
Sinclair writes with a sense of nostalgia, and is proud of his grumpy old man status: “This old-man sourness is addictive. Period pains from the inability to accommodate change. When nature pricks and the heart engages, people go on long pilgrimages”. Resistance to progress tends towards snobbish bigotry. He dislikes popular culture; he dislikes cyclists, mothers with pushchairs, and people on mobile phones; anyone, in fact, who enters ‘his’ space.
His references are deliberately esoteric but they are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and decidedly male. The number of name drops becomes exhausting – there are 387 in 258 pages (I counted and catalogued them all, with their Wikipedia entries as interpretation). Of these 387 authors, artists, poets, politicians, film-makers, architects, actors, explorers, scientists and activists who people this particular landscape, only 43 are female: that’s fewer than 12%. Women may be mentioned as eye witnesses to events, nameless passers-by to whom he talks, or memories of previous lovers (again nameless), but they make no significant impression on this history of London.
Sinclair writes in truncated sentences, which can be punchy but soon grow tiresome: “He put his money where his mouth was. And his tongue was blistered with diamonds.” It can be difficult to tell whether the prose is clever or just obtuse: are these profound analogies or empty aphorisms?
One of Sinclair’s bugbears is the commercialisation of the environment. He notes the areas of desirable real estate: “Even a minor physical elevation comes with entitlement to upward social mobility.” He admits, “We would all live on the river if we could, waiting for the rains of Schadenfreude to wash us away. Climate is another word for conscience.”
He shuns the wealthy and the nouveau riche. “Fundamentalism of every stamp, including the fundamental decencies of the old Surrey stockbroker belt (now given over to Russian oligarchs and Premier League footballers), is suspect. Bourgeois marriage is a lie. Property is debt.”
While mourning the past, he invokes the present in poetic language, “The Thames riverbank would, in a few years, become a circus with a Ferris wheel, chair-lift rides, millennial (discon)tent on the East Greenwich swamps, and a shockheaded mayor as a public clown, swinging from wires or falling off a trick bicycle.” His associations with the city are intense, and he refutes any that don’t align with his emotions. “Maybe that’s it: the memory-place should remain fixed. The attitude to the great sprawl of the metropolis is verging on Oedipal.” London changes constantly, and while everyone is defensive of their own version, they should probably be more tolerant of the fact that there is room for many more.
laurenbowes's review
2.0
Honestly awful. The overblown metaphors left me completely confused and bored. Massive digressions about specific artists/writers made little sense if you're not familiar with their work. Not really anything to do with the overground as far as I managed to read
paperbookmarks's review
4.0
Read for Reading the Contemporary.
Sinclair is undoubtedly a beautiful writer and poet. The way that he frames his narratives in such a strikingly fragmented way makes reading LONDON OVERGROUND a pleasure. The links between a literary and contemporary London are also a very interesting aspect of this book, and I want to look further into how London has been fictionalised and imagined in the contemporary for my essay.
Sinclair is undoubtedly a beautiful writer and poet. The way that he frames his narratives in such a strikingly fragmented way makes reading LONDON OVERGROUND a pleasure. The links between a literary and contemporary London are also a very interesting aspect of this book, and I want to look further into how London has been fictionalised and imagined in the contemporary for my essay.
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