Landor's Tower

Rating:
Summary: One of our best living writers
Review: Iain Sinclair is without doubt one of our greatest prose stylists and this is a wonderful piece of reading. It has a lot of narratives running through it but, like life, not all of them cry out of be resolved. As is usual with Sinclair, there are dozens of stories lurking just beneath the surface. This bizarre picaresque, in which the central character has truck with rogues and vagabonds of various description, is tremendously refreshng for those of us who had becom a bit bored with that most prominent strand of English fiction, which some Americans seem to think is all there is. Sinclair, Moorcock, Ackroyd, Carter. The so-called Cockney Visionaries. All are substantial writers, but Sinclair is the best of them all.
Try Downriver before this, if you get the chance. But get this now. You won't regret it.

Rating:
Summary: A difficult read
Review: It contains writing good enough to merit five stars but the confused plot makes it tough to read through. It helps to have read a few of the reviews first. Skipping to page 297 and reading the last part of the book first also makes it more understandable. Get some maps of South Wales and South-West England and then you're almost ready to read the book. You may notice that the the reviews have different versions of what it's about. I would say it's mainly about people trying to establish communes in Wales, and perhaps about the fate of utopian/religious communities in general and the relation between Wales and England. The main plot, told in the first person it about the author travelling from London to Hay-on Wye, on the Welsh border, which is itself a kind of commune, a town of used bookstores, to research the life of Walter Savage Landor. He has an affair with a woman called Prudence. He returns to london, and then learns that his father, a doctor in Wales, has died, and has to go back to Wales. On the way back he is falsely accused of having murdered Prudence and then incarcerated in a mental hospital. In the final chapters (which are more coherent) he is restored to sanity and there are reminiscnces of his boyhood in Wales.
The characters Dryfeld and Silverfish, the crooked bookdealers, who are travelling from London to Hay on Wye in the first chapters, later disappear from the book. The Kaporal plot is entirely separate and is mainly told in extracts from Kaporal's tapes (This part is also first person, so there are two separate first person narrators). These are partially explained after page 345 in "Files Recovered from Kaporal's Caravan"
It's full of literary allusions, especially to Anglo-Welsh writers who lived in the border area. It contains a lot of information about them but it helps if you already know who Kilvert, David Jones, Eric Gill, Father Ignatius, Henry Vaughan etc are. There are also many allusions to contemporary British writers and some of them appear under their own names, or thinly disguised, as characters.