Iain Sinclair’s latest book was reviewed with widespread admiration, yet didn’t figure in the Christmas ‘10 best-by-category’ recommended reading lists. But then, how to classify Sinclair’s work? Travel? Memoir? Fiction? Biography? Literary criticism? Edge of the Orison - In the Traces of John Clare’s ‘Journey Out of Essex’ is all of these things. First and last, though, it is a kind of oblique love letter to the author’s wife.

Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus, asked if he knew any emotion stronger than love, responds with capitalised conviction: ‘Yes. INTEREST!’ Few writers are more interested than Iain Sinclair; few pursue their interest with such an inexhaustible ‘compulsion to be on the hoof’. His interest always flourishes into obsession - with an unorthodox assembly of both canonical and pulp fiction; detective movies; eccentric outsider artists; occultism; and, most famously, with the ‘psychogeography’ of London (Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital…). The walk that forms the basis of Edge of the Orison sees Sinclair ‘escape’ from the gravitational pull of the capital, in the footsteps of another long-standing obsession: the Romantic ‘mad poet’ John Clare. But Clare’s story is related to that other interest mentioned by Dr Faustus: there is a possible family link between the poet and Sinclair’s wife.

In July, 1841, Clare escaped from High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest and walked 80 miles to Glinton, Northamptonshire in the hope of a reunion to with his lost love, Mary Joyce. Clare ‘imagind that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison & that a days journey was able to find it…’ That conflation of ‘orison’ (prayer) with ‘horizon’ not only speaks of the indivisible closeness of Clare’s vision with a sense of place (even the name, Clare, is ‘of’ the land, probably deriving from ‘Clayer’). Not only the ‘orison’, but Mary too, was out of reach: she was, alas, three years dead. Rehoused at Northampton Asylum, Clare nevertheless recorded his journey in a letter to Mary in the hope of ‘diverting’ her ‘leisure hours’: a ’Pilgrim’s Progress revamped ... as a single, breathless sentence’, celebrated by Sinclair as ‘one of the marvels of English prose’. Clare’s short, posthumously published letter is woven into Sinclair’s narrative almost in its entirety, and a brief extract illustrates its quickening, endearing intensity (as well as what Sinclair calls its ‘free-jazz spelling’):

I got here to Northborough last Friday night but not being able to see you or to hear where you was I soon began to feel homeless at home & shall bye & bye feel nearly hopeless but not so lonely as I did in Essex - for here I can see Glinton church & feeling that Mary is safe if not happy & I am gratified though my home is no home to me my hopes are not entirely hopeless while even the memory of Mary lives so near me God bless you my dear Mary Give my love to your dear beautifull family & to your Mother

Sinclair set about recreating this pilgrimage, characterised as a ‘shamanic quest for a more persuasive reality’, in July, 2001. With his characteristically compelling voice, combining wisecrack (‘stay away from hospitals, you might catch something’) with portent (‘Journey as metaphor’), Sinclair carries out his work in the guise of a kind of hard-boiled druid, both incisively sceptical and visionary. As Sinclair treads in Clare’s footsteps, these two sides allow him to look beneath and revivify the commodified Clare, established and undone by literary London as a ‘precursor of the Elephant Man’, a ‘Peasant Poet’ in and then out of vogue, securely placed in a ‘cabinet of curiosities’. That ‘in life and in death, Clare fell victim to self-serving Victorian patronage’ is epitomised by his epitaph. Clare’s composition - ‘HERE Rest the HOPES & Ashes of JOHN CLARE’ - was rejected by the village community of Helpston, and replaced with ‘BORN NOT MADE’ from Horace (A poet is born not made’). But Sinclair finds that the weathered, lichen-blotted tomb-lid has lost the E, to read: BORN NOT MAD.

Simultaneously, Sinclair researches Anna Sinclair’s family history (though a little nervous about this ‘genealogical truffling’: ‘When a subject is presented [on TV] by Bill Oddie or Alan Titschmarsh, it’s time to duck out’). Anna’s family, the Hadmans, also from Glinton, ‘laid claim to kinship’ though ‘no details of this connection were revealed’. This possible link allows Sinclair to twin Clare’s letter to Mary with his own indirect letter to and ‘biography’ of his own wife and the ‘accident of [their] forty-year association’. As the narrative develops, this allows Sinclair (whose name near-contains Clare’s - ie Sin-Clare) to become more of an alter-ego or double of the poet. The process is described most directly with reference to a former book, London Orbital: ‘we were transformed. On a molecular level. Very gradually, and with considerable reluctance on their part, forgotten ancestors acknowledged our feeble interventions. We re-lived their histories and remade our own.’

This almost anti-Enlightenment, folkloric approach makes some readers nervous. The gatekeeper-in-chief of contemporary fiction, James Wood, takes this line: ‘So purely is he a stylist that he returns prose to a state of decadence: that is to say, one can find Sinclair’s mind limited, his leftish politics babyish, his taste for pulp writing tiresome, his occultism untrue, and forgive all of this because the prose, gorgeously amoral, is stronger than the world it inhabits. It consumes the world it inhabits.’ Wood is astute about the ‘amoral’ quality of the writing. But can style be so neatly separated from idea? And would Sinclair have it as ‘stronger than the world it inhabits’? Isn’t the point precisely that the language does not ‘consume’ its most revered subjects?

Walter Benjamin once speculated that disappointment with a ‘view’ might be most likely in those in whom the linguistic faculty is most pronounced: language can usurp landscape in the imagination. Utter the word ‘Rumplestiltskin’, as the fairy tale goes, and Rumplestiltskin himself will disappear in a puff of smoke. Sinclair’s ‘amoral’ relish of language, however, is in contrast to his obsessive reverence for that for which he is the medium, not the consumer. And it is precisely through style that Sinclair embodies this ethic: one of literature’s prerogatives is that it does not have to explain its meanings; it can perform them.

The full-stopped sentences seem almost the syntactical expression of footsteps, and performs the idea that ‘Duration is truth.’ In keeping with his viewing himself as ‘volunteering’ to ‘transcribe and interpret’ the ‘chorus of oracular whispers, prompts, mangled information’ emitted by the environment, those staccato phrases suggest each thought occurs to him, is picked up like a signal (performing the idea that the ‘M25 means’). Sinclair is not ‘consuming’ these signals: just as he doubles himself with Clare, he fashions a parallel world in fiction that refuses to colonise the world he walks in. It is precisely this deadening, labelling effect of the consumerist ‘heritage industry’ that he rails against: ‘decay is heritage too.’ Placing himself in a tradition of travellers within England running from Bunyan, through Defoe and Blake, Sinclair states his credo: ‘The reality is democratic, anyone can play. All it requires is open eyes and stout boots. Start moving and the path reveals itself.’

This ‘democratic’ quality, rather than the flashy phrasemaking, is the most unique and impressive quality of Sinclair’s work. It is there in the anarchic archive from which he draws his stock of incongruous, free-associative similes: the books opening subverts demands for the sublime with a ‘horizon soft as milk in a contact lens’ and the lines of comparison throughout are as motley as the crew of oddball artists and stragglers who accompany our guide on his travels. It is there in the acknowledgement that ‘who you walk with alters what you see’. And it is there in that cheekily rebellious parodying of aristocratic titles: ‘Octavious Gilchrist, gentleman grocer, and Edward ‘Ned’ Drury, bookseller, proprietor of circulating library, cousin to the London publisher John Taylor’.

But, in Edge of the Orison, the biggest acknowledgement to its democratic quality goes to Anna - to whom (rather than for whom) it is dedicated. Sinclair writes that the ‘dazed admirers’ who turned up at his home claiming to share one of his obsessions, were not in fact ‘acknowledging my remarkable talent, my brilliant conversation. They wanted the chance to feed, however circumspectly, on Anna’s aura’. And goes a little further still, in a parenthetical aside:

(She is a poet still, without the fuss. The writing. She operates by momentary abdications of attention that never have to be explained. We trade in such exchanges. I front the business, stick my name on the spine. And wait to be found out.)