White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Book Reviews

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings by Iain Sinclair Book Summary

‘In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a sort of spiritual inquest or seance into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with another plot-thread, done in hectic picaresque, of a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period. These ruined and ruthless dandies appear and disappear through a phantasmagoria – Dickensian London gripped by cholera, the shambles of a Victorian surgeon’s operating theatre, vultures flapping around the Farringdon Road bookstalls as the ropes come off – interspersed with occult conjurings and reflections on the nature of fiction and history.’

So wrote a critic for London’s Guardian newspaper, which chose Iain Sinclair’s brilliantly original debut novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), as runner-up for the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize. This first-ever American edition features a new introduction by Alan Moore, whose graphic novel From Hell was partly inspired by Sinclair’s novel.

‘Iain Sinclair, in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, has provided much more than a brilliant debut ... a manifesto for a future literature that has more blood, more brains, and more mysterious beauty ... Those who aspire to understand what’s happening in modern writing should start here.’ – Alan Moore, from the Introduction

‘A work of integrity because it constantly takes serious risks ... I only wish there was more writing like this.’ – Kathy Acker

‘A stimulating and idiosyncratic visionary novel, full of lively characters and bizarre humour.’ – Michael Moorcock

‘Sentence for sentence, there is no more interesting writer at work in English.’ – John Lanchester, Daily Telegraph

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