About book Edge Of The Orison: In The Traces Of John Clares Journey Out Of Essex (2006)
The trick with Iain Sinclair is not to try too hard to take in everything, mentally wander with him and his friends through the landscape and if at times your attention wanders or you get a little tired that's really okay. Sometimes you'll perk up like when he meets Alan Moore, at other times you'll probably stifle a yawn as parades of dead relatives (his wife's) names start to blur into one another. This is his tale of searching for John Clare in the luminous empty landscapes of East Anglia but also a story of looking for lost family in old abandoned churchyards and provincial record offices, with no real plan just stumbling from clue to clue grubbed out of the landscape. Psychogenealogy. The search for Clare was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the book. History and poetry unearthed. The search for his wife's relatives began to lose me a bit by the end, so many names the same, so much repetition of the 'wives of farmers' theme without much insight into whether this searching for roots had much meaning for his wife, so I enjoyed this book less than his walks around the M25. Nevertheless, as you'd expect from Sinclair the book is full of snippets of information about the past, unexpected illumination of a familiar landscape and funny observations of modern life. Sinclair is an engaging companion and worth accepting an invitation to follow through the landscapes of modern Britain.
I don’t like to abandon a book unfinished, but every attempt to read more of this book results in me becoming so bad tempered that I really have no option.I have reached page 99, and it has been a battle. I have stumbled over many a sentence that re-reading several times fails to unscramble. I have got lost in the wandering of the prose, from the past in Claire’s time, to the present, then back to Sinclair’s wife’s families time, then back to Claire. And I have gritted my teeth over the punctuation. I know I do not punctuate perfectly, but I trust punctuation to help me make sense of prose, and reading a book as madly punctuated as this is hard, hard work. I think that in the 99 pages I have read the statement that punctuation is unimportant has been made about three times. I disagree.This kind of writing works for some, but not for me.
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