Sinclair's fictions are like his non-fiction: complex, deeply layered, psychogeographic, and filled to overflowing with arcane knowledge. The latter is what we come for, the rest then seasons the mix. As elsewhere, we begin with the book-runners, nomadic eccentrics scouring the country for bibliophilic rarities. On their fringe is Norton, who is a writer on the side. Some plucky soul has commissioned him to write a novel about the Victorian weirdo-aesthete Walter Savage Landor and his doomed attempt to recreate manorial life in a Welsh valley.
Sinclair is famously the psychogeographer of London. He was born and raised, however, in Wales. For Norton, who is really Sinclair thinly disguised, returning to Wales means returning to childhood and a long Welsh prehistory. Time is irrelevant. The narrative hops back and forth, action mutates into memory and vice versa. Again, this is what brings Sinclair fans to the party. Many of the characters he encounters are or were real. Celebrity drug-dealer Howard Marks, for example, and a whole troop of American beat poets, many of whom I will now be checking out. Norton falls for a woman in Hay on Wye who might be real or might be several different women. Norton spends time in a psychiatric hospital with a bookish doctor who happens be called Vaughan. One of Norton's manias is for the Georgian Vaughan twins, one a poet, the other an alchemist. There is also the matter of the club foot which the owner bequeathed to Norton's father, a doctor in General Practice.
It sounds complicated and absurd because it is. Sinclair is like Umberto Eco, only more so. Polymath, poet, prose-wrangler and, first and foremost, a psychogeographer. I find him and his work endlessly fascinating.
