Landor's Tower - Iain Sinclair

 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.

The Wolf and the Watchman - Niklas Natt och Dag

An extraordinary achievement, fully deserving all the hype it has received, The Wolf and the Watchman is certainly the historical novel of the year, possibly the best since The Name of the Rose, back in the Eighties.

The story itself is startlingly original. In Stockholm, in 1793, the one-armed watchman Mickel Cardell pulls a dead man from the water. I was originally going to say body but that is somewhat of an overstatement in the case of this man. His arms, legs, eyes, tongue and teeth have all been removed, in stages, before death. The under-pressure police chief summons his friend and sometime investigator Cecil Winge. Winge has solved potentially unsolvable cases before, and if he doesn't succeed this time, he has nothing to lose, given that he has already outlived expert estimates of death from consumption.

Cardell and Winge join forces, the former providing the physicality to the latter's brains. Of course they eventually find out the dead man's identity and who killed him, but not before the author has opened up the story in an amazingly bold way.

The story starts in Autumn 1793 but then goes backwards in time, first to the summer. This is the story of the teenaged surgeon's assistant Johan Kristofer Blix, who we are meant to assume is the mutilated victim. Blix falls foul of the wastrel elite and builds a substantial debt which is then sold on to a nobleman who carries Blix off to his remote castle. Blix ultimately escapes and becomes part of the next section which begins in the spring of 1793.

This is the story of Anna Stina, an even younger teenager who is taken into 'care' by the authorities when her mother dies. The house of correction is really a torture chamber. Girls are whipped to death for the amusement of their guards. Anna escapes and takes on the role of one of the girls who died, the daughter of an innkeeper. She is, however, already pregnant by the guard who helped her escape. It is then she meets Blix, who redeems his sins by doing her a favour. After Blix is lost Anna plans to change her appearance with acid. At this point the story catches up with itself and we are back on the edge of winter.

The story is incredibly dark. Stockholm is corrupt, debased, and stinks to high heaven. The author is himself a member of one of Sweden's oldest families, so we must assume he has access to all the insider knowledge.

Hard to believe, but The Wolf and the Watchman is a debut novel. And what a debut it is. Again, I can only compare it with the arrival in fiction of Umberto Eco.

The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco

The Prague Cemetery is the sixth and penultimate novel by Umberto Eco, who died last year. It came out in 2010, thirty years after his first, The Name of the Rose. Eco the academic was fascinated by conspiracy, ritual and the interlocking or layered nature of hermetic texts. His gift was the ability to turn his obscure themes into potent literature without preaching or treating his readers as idiots. Here he uses the same materials that Dan Brown bowlderised in The Da Vinci Code. The end product is very different and for me much superior.


Eco takes a document like the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He traces its development from earlier similar texts. Everyone has always known that the Protocols are fake, yet they remain the foundation stone of twentieth century anti-Semitism. This is where the great international Jewish conspiracy sprang from. Eco asks the unasked questions: Who wrote it and why?


He gives us our fictional forger, 'Captain' Simone Simonini, an Italian living in France, who began his career forging wills in a lawyer's office. He lives in Paris because France in the 1890s is virulently anti-Semitic. He sells endless versions of the stories told by his half-crazed (real) Italian grandfather and these ultimately become the Protocols.


Simonini brings his talents to bear on many other forgeries and conspiracies, working for the French and Russian secret services. Indeed he becomes involved in every conspiracy in the Age of Conspiracies, not just Jews but Freemasons and Dreyfus and even. as a youth, Garibaldi.


This being Eco, there is a further twist. When Simonini walks the streets of Paris he is always in disguise - he wears a false beard and a wig. Is he really Simononi, we wonder? And who is the mysterious priest who seems to occupy another part of his dwelling? He obviously can't be the real priest of that name, because Simonini killed him in Sicily. He too wears a disguise. They never meet but they correspond by note - an extra textual layer. They both suffer from short term memory loss. Both wonder, are they different aspects of the same person?


The Prague Cemetery - a cemetery, it should be noted, that Simonini has never seen in a country he has never visited - is a magnificent achievement. I am interested in many of the things that fascinated Eco. I already knew some of the things revealed here. I wonder how accessible or enjoyable the book would be to someone less familiar with the topic. I also wonder, I must say, if Robert Harris came across The Prague Cemetery before writing his take on the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy. There is a passage in the Eco which could almost be a synopsis of Harris. Then again, they are working from the same, well-documented story. So - conspiracy or coincidence? How very Eco.

The Virgin in the Ice - Ellis Peters

This was the sixth Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters, also known as Edith Pargeter, published back in 1982.  Peters was the original author of medieval murder mysteries, a field which has now proliferated into a double sub-genre of history and crime.  I can't remember if Peters came before or after Umberto Eco's overblown In the Name of the Rose.  To my memory they were coeval.  Certainly Peters wrote a lot more of them.

In this story, it is coming up to Christmas 1139, the first year of the Anarchy - "years in which the saints slept" - when the last of the The House of Normandy, Stephen and Matilda, vied for the English crown. Cadfael is called away from Shewsbury to nearby Bromfield to tend a monk who has been beaten and left for dead.  Meanwhile the authorities are searching for a brother and sister, heirs to a great estate, who have gone missing.  And then Cadfael himself finds the titular virgin entombed in a frozen beck.

The plot unfolds smoothly.  The writing tends to the stilted, but I find that preferable to giving historical figures a version of modern speech,  Peters is immersed in her period - a similar period in which she wrote her most significant works as Pargeter (for example, the Brothers of Gwynedd trilogy) and brings it vividly to life.  The villain was fairly obvious by about halfway and the twist at the end which is supposed to make us gasp made me cringe.  Nevertheless, a minor classic of the sub-genre which gave much pleasure.