3 - Ambulatory Documentary: From Stalker to Fugueur

Summary

Sinclair's novel Downriver concludes with his note expressing ‘gratitude to those twelve (unknowing) souls who accompanied me through my grimoire of rivers and railways’ (DR 408). The ambulatory structure of the research for the tales becomes more evident towards the end of the book, since it is explicitly referred to, but is nevertheless not a narrative structuring device. However, the walking with friends, no longer anonymous and less ‘unknowing’, becomes the general structure of his documentary non-fiction from the 1990s onwards, particularly in the two contrasting works discussed here, Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and London Orbital (2002), although it is central to several other works of the period (and can be traced back to the more youthful running of the oracle in Lud Heat). Indeed, the tenth tale of Downriver, ‘The Guilty River’, could have found its way into a non-fiction context with little amendment. In its use of ambulatory investigation, and in its characteristic focus upon a forgotten or non-canonical writer and the places he or she inhabits (in this case the 1940s poet Nicholas Moore in Orpington and St Mary Cray), and in its acts of documentary recording (a long taped interview about Moore with the poet Peter Riley), this chapter is a model for Sinclair's subsequent non-fiction work. While many of the fellow walkers from the fiction are granted their historical names (so S. L. Joblard becomes Brian Catling once more), the vision is still uniquely Sinclair's. This egocentric vision saturates both books with passion and enthusiasm, but undermines their usefulness as historical record, even as Sinclair is offering – through recovering the (re)forgotten artist, the lost cultural artefact, and the unvisited locale with its buried history or invisible present – nodes of a constellated alternative culture. While these books have achieved a mainstream readership, the danger is that the audience responds more to the pleasures of Sinclair discovering outrageously interesting artist-figures for it than to his sincere and repeated invocations that it should investigate their works: by reading the poems of Moore, Riley and Catling, for example. While all three have been generously anthologized in Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos, in his non-fiction they risk being turned into celebrities, albeit anti-celebrities.