Biography: The urge to walk was the ultimate Romantic affliction. Among writers otherwise agitated to varying degrees by egotism, erotomania and melancholy, the ache that united them was surely this eagerness to be on the road, writes Brian Dillon.
The ur-trudger was Rousseau, in his Reveries of the Solitary Walker; next over the horizon was Wordsworth, composing as he went. Thomas De Quincey (the "English opium eater") walked from Wales to London as a youth, ruining his health en route. Even the relatively sedentary Coleridge kept up a slow stroll late in life that was as interminable as his conversation.
Iain Sinclair is the contemporary avatar of these semi-inspired, half-mad hikers; walking, in his essays and fiction, is everything: research, plot, even the spur to a style that is sometimes long-limbed and loping, sometimes hobbled by stony full stops. Whether sketching the map of a secret London in Lights Out For the Territory, or describing the circle of the city's surrounding motorway, the M25 (in London Orbital), Sinclair never stops, never swerves from his search for what Tim Robinson - in his Stones of Aran - calls "the good step".
Walks, says Sinclair, "are ways of remembering"; to walk is to keep pace with your own story, to compose "a floating autobiography". In Edge of the Orison he discovers, in the life of the poet, John Clare, a walker whose journeys seem in retrospect to have ghosted the whole Sinclair oeuvre.
Clare's biography - in part, Sinclair has written a circuitous "life" of the poet - is made up of arduous, often ill-advised journeys. He was born in Northamptonshire in 1793, to scarcely literate parents. But his poetry, celebrated in sophisticated circles as a natural emanation of his innocence, took him to London, where he was feted, then abandoned as soon as the vogue for peasant poets had passed. His mind failing, he was committed to an asylum; he spent most of the rest of his life incarcerated. But in 1841, he absconded from the High Beach Asylum in Essex and began to make his way home. He was "hungry, hobbled, deluded", and he embarked on "an expedition to recover a self he had no use for, a wife he didn't recognise, a cottage he loathed".
Clare's trek provides Sinclair, as he reconstructs the poet's route, with his own opportunities for an oblique sort of modern landscape poetry. Middle England, he notes, "is stitched together from abandoned airfields, unpeopled farms, doomed villages and uncertain tracks that are visible only if you insist on them". The provinces are untethered from the capital, but also somehow no longer themselves, mere simulacra of proper places. He reaches the glum town of Peterborough and finds that it looks like the London area of Hackney, where he lives, only "cut loose, transported into a planner's wilderness, with no prominent boroughs, no Islington or Bethnal Green, to temper its supernatural malignancy".
It's this sort of ambiguity, at the level of landscape, that allows Sinclair to set up similar confusions between Clare's life, his own and that of his wife Anna. Some are minor and fanciful: the name John Clare, for instance, is "the Anglicized version of the name on my birth certificate". Others seem, initially, quite plausible. Anna Sinclair (née Hadman) recalls that her father had claimed to be related to John Clare; a fruitless search ensues on the part of her husband, and in the process the illusory link lets Sinclair conjure up several haunting tales of the Hadmans. He handles them (and the ancient photographs that prompt them) with a sober skill that is quite new in his writing, ready as it usually is to rush to rhetorical extremes.
The most tantalising side of Edge of the Orison is perhaps the set of Irish connections Sinclair discerns. A century after John Clare's entry into the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, James Joyce's daughter Lucia was committed to the same institution (it had since been rechristened St Andrew's). Lucia was another walker, thought mad partly on the basis of her tendency, on a couple of recuperative trips, to stalk the streets of Dublin or London for hours or days on end. In that, she resembled her lover, Samuel Beckett; he in turn was distantly related to an aunt of Sinclair, who revealed the connection while he was a student at Trinity College in the 1960s; which is also when he met Anna Hadman.
Out of all these affinities - only apparently trivial; no English writer since Dickens has been so fascinated by coincidence - Sinclair has fashioned his calmest and most resonant work to date. The brilliance of Edge of the Orison is to have presented its kaleidoscopic view of poetry, life and landscape largely stripped of Sinclair's customary recourse to occult imagery or explanations. Sometimes history is eccentric and bewitching enough a journey in itself.
Brian Dillon is author of In the Dark Room (Penguin Ireland) and an editor of Cabinet, an art and culture quarterly
Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare's Journey Out of Essex. By Iain Sinclair, Hamish Hamilton, 389pp. £16.99