Loved and lost

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years. This book is a lot of things: autobiography, local history, macabre fiction and poetic representation, all glued together by Sinclair’s neurotic, fetishistic obsession with Hackney. It reads as a tribute to the borough, but also as an agonised lament for its ‘disappearance’.

One of the hardest things to accept about Sinclair’s work is his tendency towards the occult. He is a certified ley line enthusiast, and has an only partly ironic passion for Hollow Earth theory, the pseudo- scientific belief in an underworld kingdom, accessible via various ‘openings’ on the Earth’s surface. But where in his previous work this supernatural (perhaps ‘subnatural’ is more accurate) motif can grate, in Hackney it seems all too appropriate. One of the ghosts that haunt the book is the Hackney Brook, a river that once babbled freely from Highgate to the Lea, but is now submerged, lost forever in the subterranean maze of London’s sewage system. Then there’s the Mole Man, a mad Irishman who spent decades digging tunnels underneath his home in Dalston. He was eventually evicted after the chorus of complaints from neighbours, terrified of subsidence, grew too loud. Sinclair sees the Mole Man’s urge downwards as one that is shared, metaphorically, by the borough at large, and by himself.