American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light – review

Hackney author Iain Sinclair

Three years ago I experienced a brief spell of Beat delirium whilst travelling in South America. I devoured Naked Lunch and Howl in fewer than 48 Peruvian hours, skipped through On the Road and dedicated no less than half a day to researching the fatal game of ‘William Tell’.

Since my trip, Hollywood has taken a keener interest in the Beats, and their mysterious, seductive appeal has faltered somewhat. Thank God then for Iain Sinclair, whose latest book reminds us of all that’s beautiful about bad journeys, social and literary experimentation, and a life against the grain.

American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light marks a departure from the author’s typical stomping ground. A formidable poet and chronicler of all-things-London, Sinclair has traded the Big Smoke for the sprawling unfamiliarity of the US.

We set out aside the travelling wordsmith on a pilgrimage that begins in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the home of the enigmatic Charles Olson. Along the way we delve into the lives of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Malcolm Lowry and Roberto Bolaño, among others.

Through the movements of Kerouac, the epitome of what it was to be Beat, Sinclair’s affiliation with his subjects is perhaps most aptly unveiled: “Infiltrating the set of a Massachusetts mill town was in so many ways a raid on my own past,” he confesses.

The Beat poets’ distaste for conventional linearity is echoed in American Smoke. With complex, meandering sentences, Sinclair’s mystifying digressions can be a challenge to keep up with. Combined with an uncompromising overestimation of the readers’ knowledge, the thought of being lost in a magnificent fog springs to mind.

Despite his transatlantic vantage point, Sinclair rarely loses sight of Hackney. Of Northampton, Massachusetts, he writes: “There were more joggers than dogs. And you can take jogging, as I knew from the parks and canal paths of Hackney, as an accurate indicator of a vertiginous upward sweep of the socio-economic curve.”

Reading American Smoke feels like a feverish trek across a dreamscape littered with obscure and fascinating characters. But Sinclair catches fragments of his heroes in passing gusts, immortalising them in a swirl of glorious ambiguity. Read this book at all costs.

American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light is published by Hamish Hamilton. ISBN: 9780241145272. RRP: £20 (hardback)