I picked up a copy of The Gold Machine: In the Tracks of the Mule Dancers, by Iain Sinclair, in the local library. This book was published in 2021, and in it Sinclair relates how he and his daughter travel through Peru in the footsteps of his great-grandfather who led a rather ill-fated, in terms of outcomes, expedition there many years previously.
Being about travel in Peru, it was the last place I expected to find material about the Highland Clearances, but there it was, before I’d even reached page 50. Sinclair’s ancestors were from ‘discounted’ Scottish Jacobite stock, had possibly (Sinclair can find no evidence either way) fallen on hard times as a result of agricultural improvements, yet when they eventually ventured far into the interior of Peru and saw the economic possibilities of exploiting the place, had as much sympathy for the locals as Patrick Sellar had for the smallholders and cottars he cleared from Sutherland straths.
Let us not get too distracted with the Clearances, however, even though regular readers of this blog will know how tempting this would be for me, and, thankfully, neither does Sinclair. Sinclair writes with a wonderful, unique style that engages the reader. I loved the following quirky sentence:
A few miles out of Santa Ana, where rainy season landslides had turned the river to a ditch of red, mud-coloured rocks, we had to cede a little of our headlong velocity to avoid jolting over a ragged man sleeping in the middle of the road like a performance art traffic-calming device.
Sinclair is a clever writer. He’s not afraid to write very short sentences, for effect. Sometimes very short sentences. Sometimes without verbs. Or other usual components of sentences.
Sinclair’s great-grandfather, Arthur, was an estate gardener in Aberdeenshire with a liking for exotic plants, reading, and an urge to write. Sir John Cheape visited the gardens and was so impressed with Arthur that he shipped him out to his estates in what was then Ceylon. Arthur was immediately in his element. While recovering from a near fatal bout of dysentery he visited the Peradeniya Royal Botanic Gardens, where he saw the first cuttings of Cinchona ever introduced to Ceylon from Peru. Cinchona was to change the political map of the world, as the bark of several species yields quinine. Quinine enabled Europeans to venture into the interior of previously unhealthy regions. Arthur liked adventure and saw commercial possibilities wherever he went.
Iain Sinclair writes in a unique style. He sometimes mixes information from Ceylon, Scotland, Peru and Tasmania together, and introduces characters with very peculiar descriptions. This meant that sometimes I had to pay careful attention to the text to figure out what was the point in question, for example when the character ‘The Advocate’ is introduced, but I didn’t mind this at all. In fact, it was refreshing and mentally stimulating.
It’s not until page 135 that Sinclair’s trip to Peru actually gets going. He lands in Lima, and his descriptions of his surroundings are offbeat and superbly written. He juggles extracts from his great-grandfather’s writings with occasional quotes from Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet, who also made a similar trip decades earlier, and sometimes mentions other relevant travel writings, such as Harry L. Foster’s The Adventures of a Tropical Tramp published in 1922, without dropping a ball. He doesn’t manage to visit the botanical gardens in Lima that were so important to his great-grandfather, because the gatekeeper won’t let him in. Then he and his daughter, Farne, catch the tourist train from Lima to Huancayo. His guide in Huancayo is Lucho, who has been sending travel advice to Sinclair for some time. Exhausted and suffering from soroche…
We are so comprehensively out of synch, now, that we struggle to recognise our own bags among the mounds flung on the rapidly emptying platform. And we have to admit that we are relieved, in this creeping exhaustion and confusion, to be putting ourselves in the safe hands of Lucho, the local operator who has promised to meet us.
He isn’t there and he doesn’t come.
This is mainly because the train has arrived a whole hour earlier than scheduled. At their hotel…
And then our misplaced guide burst in, ordering us not to apologise for the train’s early arrival.
The guide in question, Lucho, is featured in this video at this point of a trip made by Miles Kington and the BBC in 1980 (Great Railway Journeys of the World: Three Miles High). The complete video is worth watching. Also, if you are interested, Iain’s daughter Farne has made a series of podcasts about the trip to Peru with her father. Here is a description of Ginsberg’s time in Peru (English translation is after the Spanish version) and in fact Iain Sinclair met Ginsberg in the UK. There is a movie about the Peru trip, made by Grant Gee, who accompanied Iain and his daughter, called The Gold Machine. Iain Sinclair has a personal website, of course, and there’s also a Beat Scene chapbook.
I particularly like some of Sinclair’s imagery. For example:
We woke to wonder, it’s true: the wonder of difference. The fine spiders’ web of mosquito netting around my plank bed imposed a mesh filter of monochrome over the insistent colours of morning.
Sinclair retraces some of the steps of his ancestor, Arthur, who travelled within Peru in the 19th Century. He feels some guilt in revealing details of Arthur to the locals who have been hosting him, because it was Arthur who, by writing about his journey, helped to usher in the exploitation of Peruvian resources which has not only created so many problems, but which also resulted in great loss to the local traditional culture. This guilt is compounded because Sinclair feels that, with the book that will result from his own travels, his daughter’s podcasts and his friend who has been filming the entire trip, he has in effect been a part of a modern cultural colonisation.
The various twists towards the ending of this book are superbly entertaining, and for a final reminder of clever writing, there’s this – Sinclair gifts Lucho, his guide, a present:
Our Andean guide was moved by the gesture. He tucked the milagro away, safely, in one of his many pockets, along with the blades, ointments and scavenged pills. And he made me a reciprocal gift, a bag of coffee grown on his own land. This proved to be a challenging drink, but excellent compost for tomatoes.
I can’t vouch for the occasional word, phrase, sentence and reference that due to personal limitations and knowledge I could not fully comprehend, but the more I think about it, the more I reckon that The Gold Machine is a bit of a masterpiece.