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Dining on Stones
Dining on Stones is Iain Sinclair's sharp, edgy mystery of London and its environs.
Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest - for both writer and reader.
'Exhilarating, wonderfully funny, greatly unsettling - Sinclair on top form' Daily Telegraph
'Prose of almost incantatory power, cut with Chandleresque pithiness' Sunday Times
'Spectacular: the work of a man with the power to see things as they are, and magnify that vision with a clarity that is at once hallucinatory and forensic' Independent on Sunday
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
Andrew Norton, poet, visionary and hack, is handed a mysterious package that sees him quit London and head out along the A13 on an as yet undefined quest. Holing up in a roadside hotel, unable to make sense of his search, he is haunted by ghosts: of the dead and the not-so dead; demanding wives and ex-wives; East End gangsters; even competing versions of himself. Shifting from Hackney to Hastings and all places in-between, while dissecting a man's fractured psyche piece by piece, Dining on Stones is a puzzle and a quest - for both writer and reader.
'Exhilarating, wonderfully funny, greatly unsettling - Sinclair on top form' Daily Telegraph
'Prose of almost incantatory power, cut with Chandleresque pithiness' Sunday Times
'Spectacular: the work of a man with the power to see things as they are, and magnify that vision with a clarity that is at once hallucinatory and forensic' Independent on Sunday
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
464 pages, Paperback
First published April 29, 2004
9 people are currently reading
1825 people want to read
About the author
Iain Sinclair
121 books341 followersIain Sinclair is a British writer and film maker. Much of his work is rooted in London, most recently within the influences of psychogeography.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
Sinclair's education includes studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he edited Icarus, the Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), and the London School of Film Technique (now the London Film School).
His early work was mostly poetry, much of it published by his own small press, Albion Village Press. He was (and remains) closely connected with the British avantgarde poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s – authors such as J.H. Prynne, Douglas Oliver, Peter Ackroyd and Brian Catling are often quoted in his work and even turn up in fictionalized form as characters; later on, taking over from John Muckle, Sinclair edited the Paladin Poetry Series and, in 1996, the Picador anthology Conductors of Chaos.
His early books Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979) were a mixture of essay, fiction and poetry; they were followed by White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), a novel juxtaposing the tale of a disreputable band of bookdealers on the hunt for a priceless copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet and the Jack the Ripper murders (here attributed to the physician William Gull).
Sinclair was for some time perhaps best known for the novel Downriver (1991), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1992 Encore Award. It envisages the UK under the rule of the Widow, a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher as viewed by her harshest critics, who supposedly establishes a one party state in a fifth term. The volume of essays Lights Out for the Territory gained Sinclair a wider readership by treating the material of his novels in non-fiction form. His essay 'Sorry Meniscus' (1999) ridicules the Millennium Dome. In 1997, he collaborated with Chris Petit, sculptor Steve Dilworth, and others to make The Falconer, a 56 minute semi-fictional 'documentary' film set in London and the Outer Hebrides about the British underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It also features Stewart Home, Kathy Acker and Howard Marks.
One of his most recent works and part of a series focused around London is the non-fiction London Orbital; the hard cover edition was published in 2002, along with a documentary film of the same name and subject. It describes a series of trips he took tracing the M25, London's outer-ring motorway, on foot. Sinclair followed this with Edge of the Orison, a psychogeographical reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Dr Matthew Allen's private lunatic asylum, at Fairmead House, High Beach, in the centre of Epping Forest in Essex, to his home in Helpston, near Peterborough. Sinclair also writes about Claybury Asylum, another psychiatric hospital in Essex, in Rodinsky's Room, a collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein.
Much of Sinclair's recent work consists of an ambitious and elaborate literary recuperation of the so-called occultist psychogeography of London. Other psychogeographers who have worked on similar material include Will Self, Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association. In 2008 he wrote the introduction to Wide Boys Never Work, the London Books reissue of Robert Westerby's classic London low-life novel. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report followed in 2009.
In an interview with This Week in Science, William Gibson said that Sinclair was his favourite author.
Iain Sinclair lives in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney, and has a flat in Hastings, East Sussex.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 7, 2018
While there may not be monsters, there is no plot here--which in itself isn't bad, but what remains is turbulent and opaque, a bundling of doubles and their unedited transcription. All this links across spouses and walks along the A13 to the coast. Kubrick and Conrad reappear as leitmotifs. But not the rain.
Sinclair isn't for everyone. Staccato references, few verbs.
Roads are traversed and often repeated via different protagonists--who may be the same person or a literary construction. Interspersed are found manuscripts.
Sediment prevails. As does rust.
And rot.
Sinclair isn't for everyone. Staccato references, few verbs.
Roads are traversed and often repeated via different protagonists--who may be the same person or a literary construction. Interspersed are found manuscripts.
Sediment prevails. As does rust.
And rot.
March 23, 2019
"Everything that had happened to them... had been refracted through Norton’s fiction, his voice. The unplaceable accent. The half-truths. The bending and warping of a simple event, a walk."
Boy when you finish a Sinclair book you certainly know you've been in a fight... wait maybe that isn't how your supposed to feel while reading :P ?
Some prior material that might help with this one includes Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and the film Performance. They won't help entirely though as there are innumerable film, book and art references in this one, more than usual i felt. I would also recommend the art of Max Beckmann but looking at that actually seemed to make the references to it make less sense :lol .
All of Sinclair's books tend to be about an author trying to write a book, the search for narrative presented as the narrative itself. The books end up somewhere between Lost in La Mancha and Adaptation.
I actually made it to the 2/3 point with a decent grasp on things but everything after that is pretty spotty. I think you might need to be an artist of somesort or have a degree in art/literary criticism to get a lot of that final 1/3.
The plot such as there is involves i think 3 different author avatars all of them trying to write versions of the same story or at least involving some of the same characters. Bits of gangster plots, documentary, doppelgangers and recovered notes and photos from a 19th century doomed trip to the amazon.
There are certainly elements of enjoyment but too messy, too long and too much Art for my rudimentary taste.
Boy when you finish a Sinclair book you certainly know you've been in a fight... wait maybe that isn't how your supposed to feel while reading :P ?
Some prior material that might help with this one includes Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and the film Performance. They won't help entirely though as there are innumerable film, book and art references in this one, more than usual i felt. I would also recommend the art of Max Beckmann but looking at that actually seemed to make the references to it make less sense :lol .
All of Sinclair's books tend to be about an author trying to write a book, the search for narrative presented as the narrative itself. The books end up somewhere between Lost in La Mancha and Adaptation.
I actually made it to the 2/3 point with a decent grasp on things but everything after that is pretty spotty. I think you might need to be an artist of somesort or have a degree in art/literary criticism to get a lot of that final 1/3.
The plot such as there is involves i think 3 different author avatars all of them trying to write versions of the same story or at least involving some of the same characters. Bits of gangster plots, documentary, doppelgangers and recovered notes and photos from a 19th century doomed trip to the amazon.
There are certainly elements of enjoyment but too messy, too long and too much Art for my rudimentary taste.
April 2, 2016
Sinclair's novel is the perfect epitome of a non-novel. The psychogeographer is a dab hand at depicting the ruined landscapes which surround the outer zones of London, lands which are populated by equally ruined and morally ambiguous characters. The plot, however, is incredibly difficult to follow. The reader is presented with several uncertainties that you would probably need a few flowcharts to understand what is happening. We are also presented with multiple protagonists, schizophrenic narrators, and the unnerving thought of "Has this actually happened?". Sinclair draws heavily on literary theory to pad out his works which, whilst being interesting, dilutes the narrative possibility of the work (works?) itself.
Some parts will charm you. Other parts will frustrate. Extremely frustrate.
Some parts will charm you. Other parts will frustrate. Extremely frustrate.
May 30, 2011
I mostly found myself skimming this book, rather than really paying proper attention to it. It definitely seemed like yet another book on the 1001 list where the author was more interested in being clever than crafting an actually readable book.
Not my thing at all..
Not my thing at all..
November 24, 2015
Sinclair moved house, or to be more precise, purchased a second dwelling on the coast; this is the product, in words, of the consequences. Reading like a clash of civilizations, two London-eye scale groupsets of eccentric cogs meet head-on, sometimes meshing, sometimes not. The reader, the derailleur in this mad marriage, prances nimbly to apprehend the leads into familiar Sinclair territory, aligning and formatting amid the deluge of data.
The Conradian companion to the text, Nostromo, is a departure from the grand project iron lung, Heart of Darkness, and thus also marks a colossal shift. The hunt for the madman in the bush gives ground to a whodunit over grand theft, refracted of course through numerous narrative frames.
But it is the assumption that sits with the decampment to the coast (the amniotic return), of retirement, that haunts this text. Leaking autobiographical titbits (photographs even), there is a sense that the game may be up (or at least not be too far away) and the most eminent Professor (unofficial) of London's postmodern sublime may finally be ready to declare his hand.
The Conradian companion to the text, Nostromo, is a departure from the grand project iron lung, Heart of Darkness, and thus also marks a colossal shift. The hunt for the madman in the bush gives ground to a whodunit over grand theft, refracted of course through numerous narrative frames.
But it is the assumption that sits with the decampment to the coast (the amniotic return), of retirement, that haunts this text. Leaking autobiographical titbits (photographs even), there is a sense that the game may be up (or at least not be too far away) and the most eminent Professor (unofficial) of London's postmodern sublime may finally be ready to declare his hand.
November 15, 2024
Does anyone actually enjoy Iain Sinclair novels? Honestly? There can’t be many out there, given I accidentally managed to buy a pristine second hand signed copy of this book for 2.99 online.
These books are just written for people far too deep into certain subsections of literary culture that I don’t inhabit. So many references to other novels and obscure pieces of art, so little in the way of narrative. The women are all manic pixie dream girls, and although having Brexitland as a main character was almost fun for the first fifty pages, it just dragged on and on and on.
A novel to make yourself feel superior when you catch a reference or understand an obscure annotation. Not one I will returning to.
These books are just written for people far too deep into certain subsections of literary culture that I don’t inhabit. So many references to other novels and obscure pieces of art, so little in the way of narrative. The women are all manic pixie dream girls, and although having Brexitland as a main character was almost fun for the first fifty pages, it just dragged on and on and on.
A novel to make yourself feel superior when you catch a reference or understand an obscure annotation. Not one I will returning to.
September 14, 2007
When I started reading the book I recognised the building Sinclair talks about. I used to live in Hastings and walked past the apartment block which from the sea looks like a cruise liner. However after this I rapidly grew bored, didn't really like any of the characters and was relieved when I read the last page. Fortunately it was from the library so I could give it back.
August 8, 2014
This was a strange journey. But I found myself enjoying it and regretting having to put it down. Definitely more style than substance, but engaging nonetheless. I wish I knew more about the physical space London occupies (and some of the history regarding this), but the ideas were understood regardless.
June 29, 2007
It is forever associated for me with sharing a train compartment with three strangers, on the way to Stockholm from Ostersund. I guess the book was okay.
December 2, 2007
I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. It was interesting and the writing was pretty brilliant, but I just couldn't sustain the interest. And left it 1/3 in.
April 21, 2016
I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13973483
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13973483
August 4, 2019
Opaque, allusive and digressive, this is a text where the reader may be better off going with the flow rather than attempting to unravel its many obscurities with a close reading. Plot and characters are only dimly perceptible through complex chains of (carefully constructed, although made to look free) association that are variously intriguing, clever or simply baffling. One of the book’s eccentricities is that a story paying homage to East London and the A13 route into Essex is somehow also centred on Hastings, which sits on the English Channel in East Sussex rather than the Thames Estuary. Presumably this is one of the many “doublings” of character and place in the story – a device so confusing that the reviewer in the Scotsman erroneously wrote of “the A13, the road which runs from Hackney to Hastings”.
It is unlikely that anyone but Sinclair himself will “get” all or even most of the hundreds of asides that run through the fractured protagonist’s head (heads?), and that make up the tangled and frequently broken threads of what passes for the story. These range from the literary and cinematic canon (“Orson Welles and Graham Greene arguing over the provenance of a wisecrack about cuckoo clocks” is a typical example) through to (mostly male) cult authors (Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock; Alexander Baron and Stewart Horne; J.G. Ballard), assorted (mostly male) “characters” (the “mythic book-runner” Dryfeld; David Litvinoff; David Rodinsky) and criminals (the Krays and Lambrianous; Kenny Noye and the Brinks Mat robbery). Some name-checks are ephemeral: the controversial seaside property owner Marcel Sulc gets a reference I suspect purely because of a 2002 exposé in the Observer (the national paper, not the Hastings one). Many of these individuals are off-stage, although Howard Marks and Allen Ginsberg put in appearances. And not everything that is present is correct – Eadweard Muybridge (horses in the air, feet on the ground – Philip Glass not on the radar, apparently) is posthumously libelled as having killed his wife, rather than her lover.
And that’s before we get onto the local colour. Perhaps inevitably, given Sinclair’s interest in the occult, the ultimate “alternative” Hastings cliché of Alistair Crowley looms large, but there’s also William Le Queux, Fred Judge and Keith Baynes (and, for a more contemporary angle, Christopher Priest, Storm Constantine and the late Roy Porter). Those familiar with the town during the time the book was written will remember the elderly lady pushing around a doll in a pushchair, and the curry house that advertised itself via a faded photo of Lord Londford at a window seat. The restaurant (now gone) was in one of the units on the ground floor of Marine Court, the 1930s liner-inspired apartment block that appears on the cover of the book, and which is renamed “Cunard Court” in the text (hacks of a certain age may know it as the former home of the Westminster Press Training School, later the Editorial Centre). Sinclair’s observations about the town are still largely valid for today, despite a bit of DFL gentrification and regeneration: “Regency terraces (restored at front, decayed at rear) … charity shops that clustered around the station, preying on incomers”.
Of particular fascination to Sinclair is the murder and dismemberment of a local vicar in 2001, here fictionalised as “Reverend Freestone”. In Sinclair’s version, the murderer committed suicide on remand, although the real-life story is more interesting: some years after the book was published, the killer’s explanation that the vicar had made a sexual advance was deemed sufficient grounds in post-Savile Britain for his release from prison. He found a second local victim not long after.
It is unlikely that anyone but Sinclair himself will “get” all or even most of the hundreds of asides that run through the fractured protagonist’s head (heads?), and that make up the tangled and frequently broken threads of what passes for the story. These range from the literary and cinematic canon (“Orson Welles and Graham Greene arguing over the provenance of a wisecrack about cuckoo clocks” is a typical example) through to (mostly male) cult authors (Alan Moore and Michael Moorcock; Alexander Baron and Stewart Horne; J.G. Ballard), assorted (mostly male) “characters” (the “mythic book-runner” Dryfeld; David Litvinoff; David Rodinsky) and criminals (the Krays and Lambrianous; Kenny Noye and the Brinks Mat robbery). Some name-checks are ephemeral: the controversial seaside property owner Marcel Sulc gets a reference I suspect purely because of a 2002 exposé in the Observer (the national paper, not the Hastings one). Many of these individuals are off-stage, although Howard Marks and Allen Ginsberg put in appearances. And not everything that is present is correct – Eadweard Muybridge (horses in the air, feet on the ground – Philip Glass not on the radar, apparently) is posthumously libelled as having killed his wife, rather than her lover.
And that’s before we get onto the local colour. Perhaps inevitably, given Sinclair’s interest in the occult, the ultimate “alternative” Hastings cliché of Alistair Crowley looms large, but there’s also William Le Queux, Fred Judge and Keith Baynes (and, for a more contemporary angle, Christopher Priest, Storm Constantine and the late Roy Porter). Those familiar with the town during the time the book was written will remember the elderly lady pushing around a doll in a pushchair, and the curry house that advertised itself via a faded photo of Lord Londford at a window seat. The restaurant (now gone) was in one of the units on the ground floor of Marine Court, the 1930s liner-inspired apartment block that appears on the cover of the book, and which is renamed “Cunard Court” in the text (hacks of a certain age may know it as the former home of the Westminster Press Training School, later the Editorial Centre). Sinclair’s observations about the town are still largely valid for today, despite a bit of DFL gentrification and regeneration: “Regency terraces (restored at front, decayed at rear) … charity shops that clustered around the station, preying on incomers”.
Of particular fascination to Sinclair is the murder and dismemberment of a local vicar in 2001, here fictionalised as “Reverend Freestone”. In Sinclair’s version, the murderer committed suicide on remand, although the real-life story is more interesting: some years after the book was published, the killer’s explanation that the vicar had made a sexual advance was deemed sufficient grounds in post-Savile Britain for his release from prison. He found a second local victim not long after.
October 11, 2020
You know you’re in for a rough ride when the book you’re about to read is recommended by the lamentable Will Self.
When everything else fails, fall back on doctored autobiography.
p76
While this is ostensibly one of the musings of our protagonist, I believe this also provides us with an insight into exactly what Sinclair has done here.
Basically, Sinclair wandered the Ballardian wastes of Essex, came up with nothing worthwhile for a novel and then just decided to write what happened to him instead. Sadly for us, that was pretty much nothing.
One of the worst novels you’ll read in a good many years. For some reason, Sinclair (and apparently his publisher) thinks that he can write a novel.
Characters, plot, development… forget all that. They’re far too mundane for the great Sinclair. How anyone edited this is beyond me. Single. Word. Sentences. Abound.
Come now, I hear those of you who haven’t yet read it argue, many classic experimental novels lack the traditional ingredients for a novel. That is true.
But in the same way that I could make an experimental cake by substiting sperm, talc and tangerines for butter, flour and eggs, it would hardly be considered worthy of consumption by anyone except the most brown-nosed of my diners. It’s almost as if the title is a metaphor for what his readers will go through.
In an era which churns out more novels each month than the entire 18th century managed, surely there’s more need than ever for a title to justify its existence. Perhaps Stones does that by aiming to be the worst novel ever published.
He not only picks what is arguably the ugliest part of Britain to write about, he writes about it in prose that is barely recognisable as lucid. If you want to tell me that that is precisely the point, then fair play to you, but the resulting mess isn’t worth anyone’s time at all.
When everything else fails, fall back on doctored autobiography.
p76
While this is ostensibly one of the musings of our protagonist, I believe this also provides us with an insight into exactly what Sinclair has done here.
Basically, Sinclair wandered the Ballardian wastes of Essex, came up with nothing worthwhile for a novel and then just decided to write what happened to him instead. Sadly for us, that was pretty much nothing.
One of the worst novels you’ll read in a good many years. For some reason, Sinclair (and apparently his publisher) thinks that he can write a novel.
Characters, plot, development… forget all that. They’re far too mundane for the great Sinclair. How anyone edited this is beyond me. Single. Word. Sentences. Abound.
Come now, I hear those of you who haven’t yet read it argue, many classic experimental novels lack the traditional ingredients for a novel. That is true.
But in the same way that I could make an experimental cake by substiting sperm, talc and tangerines for butter, flour and eggs, it would hardly be considered worthy of consumption by anyone except the most brown-nosed of my diners. It’s almost as if the title is a metaphor for what his readers will go through.
In an era which churns out more novels each month than the entire 18th century managed, surely there’s more need than ever for a title to justify its existence. Perhaps Stones does that by aiming to be the worst novel ever published.
He not only picks what is arguably the ugliest part of Britain to write about, he writes about it in prose that is barely recognisable as lucid. If you want to tell me that that is precisely the point, then fair play to you, but the resulting mess isn’t worth anyone’s time at all.
August 17, 2013
This book contains familiar themes involving a journey to the coast, which a writer takes in search of a package in the ownership of a woman, where music, the criminal underworld, dangerous places and hidden gems merge. Is the book that he trying to locate his writing or someone else's? You may join his journey, but might feel a bit disappointed. This book had some interesting journeys and places that may resonate, but not enough to keep the reader hooked in parts. He has written better books. Best to start with something else by him, 'Lights Out For Territory' instead.
March 20, 2020
I probably should of opted for an easier read while the world around us just seems to be a bit mad with this damn virus. I read it, ok I may have skimmed some of it. I have no idea what it was really about and probably should of given up, it did cross my mind many times. I’ve found some gems reading books from the 1001 list, this however wasn’t one of them.
August 31, 2010
Eugh....the first couple of pages were enough to put me off...
June 22, 2015
A struggle to get through from start to finish, as if the author intentionally made it indigestible to match the possible pun in the title.
January 29, 2016
Found this book - which I suppose was a crime & travel novel, to be very long and very tedious. The stream of consciousness writing was difficult to interpret.
November 23, 2018
I guess this guy isn't my cup of tea. Pretty simple review actually. This book was a terrible disjointed mess.
May 3, 2020
I am not going to get any further with this just now. An interesting book I think but ......
August 3, 2024
Iain Sinclair at his best though, like Marmite, you either like him.....Writing fiction seems to allow him to present his dystopian visions and cultural name-dropping in a variety of genres. (Not sure which)!
Good luck to anyone who tries to follow plot!
Good luck to anyone who tries to follow plot!
June 24, 2020
Always a pleasure to immerse myself in Iain Sinclair's prose, but I found the storytelling in this one a little too disorientating. Will need to revisit.
September 13, 2025
Apparently celebrated for its exploration of psychogeography and the impact of place on humans.
Didn’t connect for me.
Didn’t connect for me.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews