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Downriver

(London #2)

Iain Sinclair

3.59 · Rating details · 222 ratings · 26 reviews

Downriver is a brilliant London novel by its foremost chronicler, Iain Sinclair.

WINNER OF THE ENCORE AWARD AND THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE

The Thames runs through Downriver like an open wound, draining the pain and filth of London and its mercurial inhabitants. Commissioned to document the shifting embankments of industry and rampant property speculation, a film cre ...more

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Paperback, 544 pages

Published April 29th 2004 by Penguin Books Ltd (first published January 1st 1991)

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The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction

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Feb 22, 2017 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing

“What does Eliot say? ‘We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree Are of equal duration.’ Everything we say parrots words that have already been spoken. We speak in quotations.”
Downriver is evenly the book of the dead and the book of the living. It is a surrealistic Gothic tale of the present and the past where sinking of Princess Alice, Jack the Ripper and Rodinsky’s abandoned room are the recurring nightmares.
Life ...more

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Aug 07, 2010 Szplug rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Downriver—Or, The Vessels of Wrath sports a smoky frontispiece of a dozen curious black-and-white photographs: one each of the twelve is subsequently attached to the opening page of the twelve narrative tales that subdivide the book. These photos are of various locales in and around the Congo River at the turn of the previous century: native blacks sport Western apparel; West European merchant travelers take turns going native; modernity and tribal primitivism warily circle each other, releasing Downriver—Or, The Vessels of Wrath sports a smoky frontispiece of a dozen curious black-and-white photographs: one each of the twelve is subsequently attached to the opening page of the twelve narrative tales that subdivide the book. These photos are of various locales in and around the Congo River at the turn of the previous century: native blacks sport Western apparel; West European merchant travelers take turns going native; modernity and tribal primitivism warily circle each other, releasing strange and powerful currents and energies. Behind and below it all the Congo river, a sinuous jungle-black, winding serpent omnipresently looms—along its steaming pathways rationality was introduced into equatorial darkness, but concurrently madness slithered its way through rational defenses and stirred the inky depths of the unknown. Joseph Conrad, an explorer of the margins, haunted by the crepuscular Congo, probed the effects of this intermingling of the new with the ancient and how it unleashed horrors to accompany its wonders.

Sinclair follows in the footsteps of his literary forebear some nine decades later, shifting the locale to late-Thatcher England at the dawn of the nineties and focussing upon the Thames river in-and-around London—a stretch which had undergone a whirlwind of change during the market-marvelous eighties, tearing down long-standing structures and neighborhoods to make way for temporary speculative sparkles; dispossessing former residents to create a new indigent class that was shuffled around and away from shiny new (and empty) office towers and cocaine-fueled entertainment districts. Thatcherite England—energy without soul in Sinclair's words—sought to impose a new history overtop of centuries of established tradition and legend. This superficial façade, hastily plastered and smoothed over, stirred up roiling clouds of ash and dust from a history demolished; and the tidal ebb-and-flow of the shimmering Thames, lidless and sleepless, regulated the eternal watch the river kept upon this newest frantic and manic folly perpetrated by that always-innovative and enterprising creature that so brashly dared its liquid demesne.

Within a very loosely conjoining metafictional conceit of Sinclair roaming the Thames waterfront to capture narrative ideas for an always-looming BBC documentary, this spectacularly imaginative London-based Welshman has crafted a phantasmagoric, weird, disturbing, cryptic, and wildly, satirically funny masterpiece. Thatcher—labelled The Widow in these Wrathful vessels, a hairless, soulless market chief apparatchik and fluffer who is determined to refashion Britain into a redoubt of glittering, steely speculative frenzy, unrecognizable under its eternal makeover —is the focal point from which flows the occult, nightmarish energies that have broken and rent the London districts surrounding the Thames waterfront. As Sinclair has it, history has soaked into the buildings of the riverine metropolis, into the soil—and nothing bears the ghosts and memories of forward-marching time like the Thames; indeed, its continually churning silt and mud dredges up phantoms and phantasms from the past with alarming regularity, intruding its keepsakes before Sinclair's riverbank ferreting—the author narrator accompanied by a zany crew of artsy misfits and down-on-their-luck rogues. The concrete-and-grime waterfront, with its creepy, ocular deep-water docks and intestinal pipelines is linked via the railway—deregulated and privatized into a multitude of circular and ambulatory lines that crisscross the East London neighborhoods that haunt, and are haunted by, Sinclair and his Unmerry Men; maze-like warrens and open-field transport all sloping downwards towards the bending liquid spine of the transfigured city.

The past blends seamlessly with the future into confounding and displacing the present—the occult materializes from the commonplace in nightmarish vignettes, the river coughing up bloated, deformed bodies and spirits that unassumingly take part in driving Sinclair and Company to the very edges of madness—a madness mirrored in the maelstrom of change and destruction enacted by the greedy moguls who hoover up the cash shaken out of broken buildings, relics, livelihoods and dreams. This brilliantine apocalypse exists both in reality and within the paranoid, despairing sanatorium of Sinclair's febrile mind: how much of the tale is the former, and how much the latter, can never quite be determined. Each of the dozen episodes unwinds a new madness, a new sanguinary mystery or mystical disappearance in which the characters come to understand that history, as commonly understood, is as fictional as the wildest novel; that what is held to be the truth depends far more upon one's particular point-of-view, one's agenda, than on what actually occurred; and that time cryptically links individuals separated through decades and centuries, that ripples from the past may have been set in motion to answer an urgent need or desperation from an occluded future. We can become trapped within these bonded and created realities, unaware of how we are imprisoned and both desirous and terrified of the prospect of sudden and irrevocable change, of preconfigured coincidence.

I absolutely loved this book—however, I recommend it cautiously, as I can also understand that others would find it maddening and frustrating. By the time I had finished, though still stunned and bedazzled by Sinclair's verbose brilliance, I was also becoming weary of the endless and exhausting authorial shenanigans, and could see how others might have been tempted to abandon ship long before. Sinclair is also a poet, and it shows in the effortlessly beautiful style he wields. He can shift from the comical to the sinister, from grim drudgery to luminous sublimity in a heartbeat and without any disturbance to the narrative flow—in many ways, it reminded me of Gravity's Rainbow filtered through a mind more attuned to symmetry than entropy. The macabre intrusions of the occult, the flowering of dream and nightmare take place within the modern setting in a way that disjoints the reader and confuses what is the result of each character's madness with the mad ends and means of Britain's market enthusiasms. An apocalyptic fever burns throughout the stories—settling to a low hum in some, blazing forth in tempestuous insanity in others—while Sinclair's narrator detective chases down the rendered actuality behind the lives of a sultry and provocative Canadian exotic dancer; a transplanted aboriginal cricketeer; a Rosicrucian-fearing beggar; the ghostly dead from a terrible century old Thames River collision; a Norman knight slain by his murdered steed's vengeance-bearing bones; a pink-capped English aristocrat's shell-shocked destiny with paddle and wicket and window-lowered basket; a Vatican Mafia takeover and transformation of the Isle of Dogs into a guard-towered magnet for penitents and anchorites; a snail-shell-armored Wicker Man conjured forth by mound-light pathways to do battle with the Widow's dead (murdered?) consort's inflated Halicarnassian memorial; and a crippled, destitute Jew whose life-force dispersed into the molecular structure of his rented room above an abandoned synagogue. Characters come and go, appear and re-appear, some returning for a starring role, others fading away into left-behind pages—the connecting link is Sinclair, driven ever nearer the abyssal brink as he uncovers further evidence of the madness and delusion inherent in time's passage and fiction's conception; and, always, the Thames. The wending, arterial river, like its African counterpart, daily buries, afresh and anew, the bodies and creations of humankind, entraps these dampened spirits within the charcoal layers of grimy and grasping muck. A voyage downriver can serve as a journey into the past—but the traveler may not always gain from what he uncovers, let alone comprehend how the river never remains the same after you've breached it the first time. ...more

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May 21, 2018 Lisa rated it really liked it

Has it really been 3 whole weeks since I finished this? I still haven't returned it to the library, and every time I see its pleasing turquoise spine on the bookcase, I feel a fondness for it. It's a maddening species of novel-like thing, as the other reviews attest, gorgeously lyrical and so funny. Unexpectedly so.

There are books that annoy you with their dense allusions to people and places you've never heard of. Not this one, thick as it is. Its page count is even longer if you count all the ...more

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Jun 09, 2009 Adam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: black-comedy, horror-disguised-as-literature, literature-disguised-as-science-fic, literature-fantastique

Insane, bizarre, flowing nightmare of book. Goes from bizarre reporting to freak-out Blakeian visions as it documents London and its people. The past, future, and the present flow freely into one another as Sinclair delivers his freak dream logic in some of the most visceral and strange prose being written today. Fans of Burroughs, Moorcock, and Angela Carter(find her review of it also) need to find this exasperating but brilliant book.

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Feb 26, 2019 David M added it · review of another edition

8/17/19 - Finished this book earlier this year, and then, to be perfectly honest, tried selling my copy at Green Apple for store credit. They wouldn't take it, however, as my copy turned out to be in too shabby a condition for them to shelve even in their Used section. I was slightly disappointed at the time, but keeping this book around has turned into a great boon to my reading life this year...

I would characterize Downriver as a pretty decent book to read from cover to cover, but a really stu 8/17/19 - Finished this book earlier this year, and then, to be perfectly honest, tried selling my copy at Green Apple for store credit. They wouldn't take it, however, as my copy turned out to be in too shabby a condition for them to shelve even in their Used section. I was slightly disappointed at the time, but keeping this book around has turned into a great boon to my reading life this year...

I would characterize Downriver as a pretty decent book to read from cover to cover, but a really stunning, in fact incredible, book to open at random and read for little nuggets of inspiration. Just this morning:

Sileen spoke from the throat: abrupt, punched sentences. He coated each syllable phlegm, like craftsman varnishing a dubious Old Master.

How the fuck does someone learn to write like that?

***
Imagine if the opening prose poem of Suttree went on for over 400 pages, rather than quickly yielding to a novel with characters who are continuous over time. That's sort of what this book is like. Sort of, but not exactly. I confess I found huge chunks to basically be gibberish. It may help if you come to it already familiar with the psychogeography of London - personally I've only been to the Big Smoke* once, briefly, during the day. Much of the content here simply went over my head. Still, impossible to deny moments of profane illumination...

A hallucinatory love song to a suppurating whore.

I earn my keep here in San Francisco by giving tours, but then do I really have it in me to love this horrifying place the way that Iain Sinclair loves London? Doubtful, I'd say, very doubtful.

There is no monument to civilization that is not at the same time a monument of barbarism, and nowhere is this more true than at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.

Things had improved; my guardian, and familiar, had lost his collar - but not the weals that reminded him of its once-irritant presence. The cur waited at the head of the stairs, hieratic, dribbling in the dirt, posed for me to appreciate its startling defect it had no eyes. I do not mean that it was blind, or that its eyes had been gouged out by handlers preparing it for some specialized dogfight. Coarse hair covered the place where the sockets should have been. The skull was smooth as wood. The animal had never possessed eyes, and did not appear to miss them.

An answer - the wrong one - came to me, in response to Sabella Milditch's oracular riddle. "What is the opposite of a dog?" "An Andalusian dog": the "encounter between two dreams."

Relatable content. In San Francisco, I would say, the dogs are actually over-civilized; if I became mayor tomorrow I would make it illegal for all but the homeless to have dogs. I'd then be forced to have some grudging respect for the few yuppies willing to sleep outside rather than lose their canines.

*I literally just googled "nicknames for London." ...more

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Sep 08, 2012 Cath Murphy rated it it was amazing

This isn't a story, it's a journey. The river is the Thames and the journey is through the psyche of the city the river bisects. What does the Thames mean to London? If you had to describe that meaning through fictional characters, who would they be and what would they do?

Sinclair is a psychogeographer - he's interested in how cities affect the minds of the people who live in them. Downriver is his attempt to capture the essence of London wharf-life. It's surrealist, captivating, inspiring, deep ...more

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Oct 09, 2016 Mark Joyce rated it did not like it

Prose poetry, and not in a good way. I couldn’t make head nor bleedin’ tail of it, as one of Sinclair’s own characters might say. The majority of reviewers seem to think Downriver is some sort of stylistic tour de force, so maybe it simply went over my head. Either way, there was nothing in the first hundred pages or so that gave me the slightest inclination to keep reading and I quickly abandoned it to flee back into the comforting arms of John le Carré. ...more

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Jan 28, 2020 Rachel Stevenson rated it liked it

This is not a novel so much as a fever dream. There is no plot or character development. Apart from an aborted river journey that's part Three Men In A Boat, part Heart Of Darkness, it’s not even about the Thames; it starts off in Tilbury but soon turns into a ramble through Ian Sinclair’s obsessions: Hackney, David Rodinsky, railing against institutions (this time the BBC rather than Hackney Council), mental asylums, ambitious outsiders, forgotten (and eccentric) writers, the Whitechapel murder This is not a novel so much as a fever dream. There is no plot or character development. Apart from an aborted river journey that's part Three Men In A Boat, part Heart Of Darkness, it’s not even about the Thames; it starts off in Tilbury but soon turns into a ramble through Ian Sinclair’s obsessions: Hackney, David Rodinsky, railing against institutions (this time the BBC rather than Hackney Council), mental asylums, ambitious outsiders, forgotten (and eccentric) writers, the Whitechapel murders, the folly of grand regeneration projects, and the blokey friendship between men (women have three choices: a) stay invisible, at home, tolerant of the menfolk’s ways, b) be a permanently nude prostitute-slash-nurse (hey, a “mother” and a whore! I see what Sinclair did there), or c) become a murder/rape victim) - the book features film-maker Chris Petit disguised as “Frederik Hansbury”, Sinclair’s loyal retainer/outsider artist Renchi as Joblard, local historian obsessed with Sutton house Davey Clarke is probably Patrick Wright (somewhere in a not yet closed down humanities department of a new university, an MA student is completing their (or more likely his) thesis on the Sinclairverse) and other friends, imaginary or real (I’m guessing Drummond is in there somewhere).

That said, as always with Sinclair I learned things: hidden histories, geographical oddities. Meath Gardens in Mile End, now a park, was once a graveyard that housed King Cole, a cricketer who died in England during the first tour of Britain by an Aboriginal team, several years before a tour by white Australians. The Victorian arch entrance to Meath Gardens was built from stone salvaged from the old London bridge.

The book is classed as a novel because some of it is libellous (the corrupt, prostitute-visiting Hackney MP is surely based on LibDem defector Brian Sedgmore) and some of it has been fiddled with: Homerton hospital is renamed Hackney Hospital, Whitechapel Mission as The Big Doss house. Other times, it’s just Sinclair making stuff up, coercing London into the shape he wants it to be. The men he meets in pubs are visionaries, prophets, not just piss-heads and chancers. Sinclair is chronicling an apocalyptic city rather than just wandering around and banging on about things in his own Sinclairian fashion.

...more

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Feb 15, 2018 Andrew added it

Shelves: british-fiction, british-fiction-since-2000

On the face of it, Sinclair's fiction doesn't seem too different from his nonfiction -- there's the same obsession with the gritty details of London, with every broken pub window, every spray of political graffiti, every needle in an alley mattering. And likewise there's this almost too-clever use of words, a sense of verbal mastery and an ability to sum up every one of these aforementioned gritty details with a witty, smirking turn of phrase. So, much as I adored Sinclair's Lights Out for the T ...more

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Mar 04, 2012 Laurence Thompson rated it really liked it

With a prose style equal to anyone alive and a modern sensibility, it's tempting to call Iain Sinclair the William Faulker of London with this book. But, considering his analytical mind which is also capable of mystic universalism, alongside the best deconstructive and reconstructive tendencies of the Situationists, it's best just to call him Iain Sinclair. ...more

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Mar 15, 2012 Deanne rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001bookstoreadbeforeyoudie

Twelve stories which are connected, Sinclair shows his knowledge of Londan. Areas are mentioned like Tilbury, Greenwich, Isle of Dogs and the Isle of Sheppey.
There's lots of weird and wonderful characters, but sometimes the stories seem to come straight out of left field, do have yo concentrate on what's happening. ...more

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Aug 31, 2008 Sav rated it did not like it

I couldn't get on with this at all. It's very rare that I give up on a book but I could only get halfway through this. Some of the interwoven stories were just about to break out then we'd fly off somewhere else and I'd lose the thread. Possibly just a bit too bonkers for me. ...more

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Aug 03, 2011 Tobias added it · review of another edition

I skim read this in order to get all the throwaway comments in which Iain Sinclair displays his deep knowledge of east central and riverine East London. Sometimes with Sinclair the throwaway bits are more interesting than the plot..

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Oct 24, 2009 Michael rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction

This was a very funny and at times slightly bonkers book about London,Tilbury and many familiar places inbetween. The usual mix of mad characters and Sinclair himself make for an absorbing read.

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Mar 09, 2007 Andrew Thompson rated it it was ok

Dense, allusive work from Sinclair. Not an altogether successful novel, but passionate. I found you have to read the majority of his sentences twice. Hence why it only got two stars.

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Sep 13, 2014 Erik added it

Shelves: fiction

Not entirely pleasant, or even sensible, but frequently brilliant.

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Feb 28, 2015 Donald rated it it was ok

Urban criticism in novel form. dense, funny, a little too non-linear even for my taste.

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Mar 06, 2020 Tej rated it did not like it

You will LOVE this book IF 1. you know everything there is to know about world literature, music, movies, history, and British pop culture, 2. you like books with no plot or memorable characters, and 3. you like vaguely-worded sentences with lots of non sequiturs (think Samuel Becket). I thought I knew a lot about the things I listed in #1, but not nearly enough to catch all of the references. (I also think it's funny that there's a blurb on the back by Peter Ackroyd praising the book, and he al ...more

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Aug 26, 2019 Alex Clare rated it it was ok

I tried with this book, I really did but could not take the sheer volume of imagery which, despite the blurb's promises, did not all seem to connect. There were themes here but I couldn't follow them. ...more

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Jun 22, 2020 Gregoire Jones rated it it was ok

I really tried but it's very much like Burroughs at his most difficult to read ...more

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Jul 12, 2017 Plasmad rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2017

Awe-inspiring use of language. Dense and unwelcoming, but the dark, surreal setting and characters reward the effort.

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Mar 04, 2020 Anne rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Nobody, not even Iain Sinclair's mother

Recommended to Anne by: Peter Ackroyd's book "Thames: The Biography"

Shelves: english, fiction, uno-2020, river-thames

I don't know what I have just read. It is not a novel. It is more of a travelogue. The author travels round the East End of London describing his journey. But it is not like any travelogue I have ever read. All the places mentioned exist - I looked them all up on Google. I did enjoy exploring the area with Mr. Sinclair and my knowledge of this part of London has been greatly increased by my research on the side. Most of the events may have happened in some form or another, although I doubt that ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Brent Hayward rated it really liked it

Difficult to get through, but pockets of light in the density. The writing was beautiful. Not too sure what it all added up to. One star knocked off because I don't think Sinclair needed to write 530 pages. Memorable, like an epic nightmare. ...more

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Jul 13, 2011 !Tæmbuŝu marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: gr-friend-rec, contemporary-fiction, united-kingdom

KOBOBOOKS ...more

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Panacik2025 rated it it was amazing
Nov 24, 2019

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Dec 21, 2020

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Nov 29, 2020

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Nov 04, 2018

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About Iain Sinclair

Iain Sinclair

234 followers

Iain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.

Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).

His early work was mostly poetry, much of i Iain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.

Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).

His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.

His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).

Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.

One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.

Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.

In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.

Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.

...more