Sanderson’s Isle by James Clarke: Portrait of an England long since marginalised, brutalised and silenced

“It’s guys like me that have done the grunt work. We rigged the telegraph lines and erected the TV masts ... We laid the pipes and plastered the walls. We assembled the concrete flatpacks for the local authorities ... “: Tom Speake is a drifter, wandering through England at the tail-end of the 1960s. London is swinging and the postwar economic boom continues, there are men on the moon, and the future looks rosy: but Speake has fallen through the cracks in society – and he seems set to fall still further, when a chance meeting at a party off the King’s Road sets his life careering in a new direction.

Freewheeling, vivid, and intensely imagined, Sanderson’s Isle creates a portrait of a nation – but what a portrait is offered up here by James Clarke, and what a nation. The flat-packed new tower blocks – the “cities in the sky” that rehoused so many working-class Londoners, whether they wanted to live in them or not – have savage Alsatians living on the roof; the packed streets of Soho are haunted by vice; and that King’s Road party is no glossy affair, but rather an acid-dropping nightmare of lurid visions and social hostility.

Although set 50 years and more ago, Sanderson’s Isle has a decidedly contemporary flavour

When Speake is forced to flee London following a – shockingly evoked – accident, the narrative moves to the Lake District: but again there is little sign of any chocolate-box England: Clarke indeed observes the beauty and vitality of the natural world with an appreciative eye; but nature 50 years and more ago seems already to be degraded: a line of butchered moles have been “hung up like wet socks” on a washing line; and England’s green and pleasant landscape is compressed by motorways and rivers of concrete, and bound and gagged by electricity lines.

The novel ironises the sort of touring, soft-focus television series that celebrates all that is quirky and individual in the life of a nation: its title, indeed, is taken from such a programme; and the eponymous Sanderson, whom Speake serves as a de facto assistant, is revealed as sour, embittered and frustrated in private. And, although set 50 years and more ago, Sanderson’s Isle has a decidedly contemporary flavour: it is a letter of love to another England, one that has long been marginalised, brutalised and effectively silenced.