downriver

The best books tell a compelling story and they do so without effort. The best writing is transparent. As the reader goes through the pages, the ideas filter straight into the brain. The printed words, the ink, even the pages themselves are invisible, mere vehicles for the communication of thought that have no substance themselves. The blood and sweat that inevitably went into the writing cannot be felt.

Iain Sinclair's Downriver doesn't fall into that category. It is the antithesis of it, with every sentence deliberately penned to inflate the presence of the author. The reader never penetrates beyond what is written and how the sentences are crafted. The novel is set in East London, but that is irrelevant. There's a nominal plot, but the writing isn't driven by it, nor does it much advance it. Sinclair uses elements of narrative as nothing more than a scaffold from which to flaunt his writing. The dramatic element is lacking entirely.

The characters are ephemeral and their actions arbitrary. One character "once made basecamp for a three-part miniseries push-on-the-pole; which was routed, for the convenience of the Money Men, through Amgmagssalik, Greenland". The sentence is typical in that, out of nowhere and for no apparent reason, it lands on the page and baffles the reader, then disappears quickly and without a trace. Neither the miniseries nor the moneymen or Greenland make another show in the book. And the person so described? I don't remember, and it doesn't matter.

The novel opens with a question spoken – no, "insisted" upon – by the improbably named Sabella. I almost stopped reading right there. This is wrong on so many levels: the unusual name betraying ideas of creativity lifted from a textbook, the stilted dialog tag, the "and" that starts the question. But the worst offense is that Sabella never returns after that initial scene. The book is phony from the start and sticks with it determinedly.

I didn't know that and stumbled on, hoping that what I perceived as superficial creativity was Sinclair's surplus of creative powers naturally oozing from saturated lines and not a deliberate effort at distracting from fundamental flaws. I was sadly mistaken but quickly disabused.

For its vacuousness and artifice, the novel would be lethal, were Sinclair not such a skilled wordsmith. But the read is intriguing and captivating despite the shrouded subject matter. Sinclair paints colorful pictures with his words, erects sophisticated verbal edifices that rise improbably and stuffs the reader's brain with circumlocution. The breadth of the employed vocabulary would assure the book's success, were it a dictionary, and lingophiles will feel curiously entertained. But the practice is hollow. Every penned construct is quickly abandoned and left to rot when another mighty tower of wordsmithery cross-fades with Apple-like ease onto the scene, with no substance whatsoever underlying the polish.

I almost gave up on encountering "suppurating light". Maybe you're as confused as I was with the phrase. The parts sound familiar but their association grates. The context didn't help. The context never helps in Downriver. It is always subordinate to the words in this novel. I consulted the American Heritage Dictionary that's enjoying a state of semi-retirement on my shelf. On the topic of suppurating, it says, "forming or discharging pus", just as I had thought.

To make sure there are no obscure secondary meanings to the word pus, I checked that as well. Says right there: "A generally viscous, yellowish-white fluid formed in infected tissue, consisting of white blood cells, cellular debris and necrotic tissue." Sound like something I would read in a clinical research paper, but where's the connection to light? Yellowish I can see, but viscous, fluid, infected, tissue? Even in a book with outrageous similes and strained metaphors, this one stood out. It's just nonsense. Light doesn't suppurate, and there's nothing pussy about it.

It was at this point that the essence and origin of the novel dawned on me. Take any five pages, and they read like an assignment from the second week of a creative writing workshop. Maybe Sinclair read it to the group. His teacher was excited. Creativity, agility with language, boldness! Slowly, over the following months, the initial breath of fresh air was turned it verbal halitosis, a writing program's graduating work that's self-conscious and self-important in the extreme.

A reviewer's blurb quoted on the back cover declares the novel "the reader's delight and the reviewer's nightmare" when it is in fact the exact opposite. Reviewers will admire the ornate writing, the cultural and historical references, and the fact that they can pick a few randomly chosen pages and extract a comprehensive and relevant review in half an hour, quickly earned bucks if that's how you make a living.

Readers, in contrast, will struggle in the maze of affected pompousness, trying to extricate some sense from beyond the wall of impenetrable wordiness, reading on in the belief that a novel deserves a bit of effort. It's a struggle they're bound – and lucky – to lose. After about 300 pages, a bit beyond the halfway line, I put Downriver aside one final time, drained and exhausted.