The Thames may still flow through the heart of London, but life along its shores has dramatically changed. The inhabitants of London's Docklands - crafty Cockney miscreants of yore - have lately been shoved aside by an onslaught of sleek condos and chic cafes. In Downriver, Iain Sinclair's first book to be published in the United States, the author traces the ruins of Thatcher's reign, through the lens of a fictional film crew that has been hired to make a documentary about what's left of the river life that was. Downriver is a savage, satirical quest to understand how people's lives, a government's policies, and a legendary urban waterland conspire together in a boggling display of self-destruction. As ghosts of past and present appear, the action becomes a palimpsest of the real and surreal, historic and fantastic, luscious and seedy. Fredrik, the writer, "fretted by a restless and finger-jabbing energy"; Roland, an actor friend, "weathered, fit, tanned; beached, safely, on the far shore of thirty" who lives with his mother in a poshly restored riverside basement; Milditch, a rank book dealer cum fish monger-property dealer-two-bit actor; and Edith, the conceptualist stripper who comes to life from a vintage photograph to become one of the most startling and compelling women in modern fiction - these are a few of the motley bunch that accompanies the narrator on his Carrollesque tour along a demented and seductive riverscape. Swiftian in its scope and humor, Downriver is a darkly comic tour de force. Sinclair leads us through fractured dreams and a nostalgia for better times that is as suspect as it is inevitable. Winner of Britain's prestigious Encore Award for best second novel, Downriver has become celebrated in England for its astonishing energy and inventiveness. The novel's brilliance resides not simply in its luminous thoughts and plucky characters, but in its feverishly driven prose - all of which give its readers the sense that, as Angela Carter put

Sinclair, Iain

Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers

Random House AudioBooks

1st U.S. ed., New York, United States, 1993

United States, United States of America

Di 1 ban, New York, 1991

1st ed, New York, c1993

Reissue, 1993

[curator]associate-francis-boyer@archive.org[/curator][date]20170403135839[/date][state]approved[/state][comment]199[/comment]

"Swiftian in its scope and humor, Downriver is a darkly comic tour de force. Sinclair leads us through fractured dreams and a nostalgia for better times that is as suspect as it is inevitable. Winner of Britain's prestigious Encore Award for best second novel, Downriver has become celebrated in England for its astonishing energy and inventiveness. The novel's brilliance resides not simply in its luminous thoughts and plucky characters, but in its feverishly driven prose - all of which give its readers the sense that, as Angela Carter put it, it is "necessary to go on." Contemporary on one hand, a classic novel of social mores on the other, in the line of works by such writers as Lawrence Sterne, George Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis, Downriver is one of the most courageous and enjoyable works of fiction to be written in recent times."--BOOK JACKET

2023-06-28