Landor's Tower

London: Granta, 2001. First ed, New in dj,. Dave McKean. London: Granta:, 2001. First ed, New in dj, 345 pp. Cover artwork by: Dave McKean It might well be impossible to figure out just what in the hell Ian Sinclair is doing. . . but the effort is great fun in itself. "A writer, who has lived for years in London, reluctantly acknowledges his growing obsession with the Ewyas Valley on the border of England and Wales. Commissioned to write about Walter Savage Landor's disastrous attempt to set up a senatorial estate around Llanthony Priory, he is sidetracked by more recent conspiracies: a bizarre series of twenty-five suicides in the secret defense industries, unreliable witnesses who claim to have uncovered the truth about the Thorpe case, the coming together of slot machine operators and carpet-warehouse wide-boys with grandees of Liberal politics." There's more, a burned-out media bum, taped messages from up the M4 that get more and more vague and mysterious, several fervent attempts to found a utopian community in the valley, a High Anglican renegade named Father Ignatius, hippie communes, Allen Ginsberg, teepee dwellers, mushroom gobblers, narco pirates, murder, asylums by the river, and Sinclair's standard geography lesson. Fiction, history, geography, mystery, acid-tripping fantasy - you be the judge.