Flak Magazine: Review of Rodinsky's Room, 07-28-00

Iain Sinclair is probably London's greatest living chronicler. He doesn't just set books there, like someone might set a novel in New York; his writing inhabits the city, and illuminates it. His two latest works are both good, though oblique introductions to his vision and style. They are "Rodinsky's Room" — a non-fiction collaboration with artist Rachel Lichtenstein (Sinclair is an avid collaborator, with the likes of fantasist Michael Moorcock, photographer Marc Atkins, guerrilla filmmaker Christ Petit and neo-ambient rock band Labradford) — and the audio CD version of "Downriver," his best novel so far.

What Sinclair does goes by the name of psychogeography, but don't let that put you off. For him, this is a method of cultural investigation and imagination that works through a subtle accretion of meanings in and on any given patch of the city. Think of it as the work of a maverick archaeologist, quite happy, if he can't find what he's looking for, to put it there himself. History, literature, modern folk tales, art gossip, underworld rumour and underworld myth, ley lines and Egyptian temples — he'll pile them all on top of each other until he's built the city he wants. Faithful documentation? Wild invention? Who cares? His fiction grows from the rich mulch of an unrivalled knowledge of his subject. His non-fiction reads like fiction.

"Rodinsky's Room" is a classic example. David Rodinsky was a real person, a hermetic Jew who lived in the garret room above an old synagogue off Brick Lane, that part of East London that has been invaded — over the centuries — by French exiles, Jews, Bangladeshis (it's currently the best place in the capital for a curry) and now even artists and finance whiz kids. One day, in the late '60s, he disappeared. His absence was not so much noticed by the people who knew him (they were few) as by the accumulation of cabalistic ephemera he'd left behind. The room, left pretty much untouched for 20 years, was piled high with newspaper, notebooks, jottings, clothes, rubbish. What was left in Rodinsky's Room, for those that came after, was Rodinsky.

Various people had been tempted by the Rodinsky myth since he made himself invisible, but it took a young Jewish artist to make it her own. With grandparents who lived and worked in the same street, and an obsession with the idea of the vanished Jew as an encapsulation of the Holocaust, this would be Rachel Lichtenstein's life-work. In her chapters (alternating with Sinclair's) she files the junk, qualifies the writings and seeks out Rodinsky's remaining family and acquaintances.

But for every fact Lichtenstein turns up, Sinclair casts a spell of his own. He is here not to clarify, but to remythologize Rodinsky, even as Lichtenstein is fixing him down. He evokes David Litvinoff (footnote to the '60s and provider of 'additional dialogue' for Duncan Cammell's psychedelic crime-pop magnus opus "Performance"), the Prague golem, New York writer Kathy Acker, all in a vain attempt to keep the mystery real. Theirs is a great double act that lays down as many false trails as it finds real clues.

To take in the full effect of Sinclair's mythologizing zeal, however, turn to "Downriver" his breakthrough novel of a decade ago, now reborn as a spoken word CD, read by the author. "Downriver" is a dirty, gritty reworking of Huck Finn for the dirty, gritty Thames. Ostensibly about a documentary film crew researching a portrait of London's vanishing river life, it is an excuse for a full workout of Sinclair's prejudices and preoccupations. Like a miniature inversion of "Heart of Darkness", the book journeys downstream, picking over the past of the re-emerging Docklands — the brainchild of Margaret Thatcher, here demonized as The Widow.

The book is too big to condense (a full reading would be a numbing, hallucinatory event), but Sinclair gives us a natty taster, interspersing the final, cataclysmic trip of the book with various apposite meditations. His gentle, precise enunciation renders the vivid, restless prose quite hypnotizing.

— Jonathan Gibbs (jonathangibbs@mail.com)