Customer Reviews
Excursions into Alien Territory - By: M Keenaghan, 22 Dec 2006 
What's interesting about Iain Sinclair's fiction is the question of its categorization. What is it? What you read is true, surely? Not fiction atalll? Or atleast mostly true? Sinclair loves to blur the lines, bend the rules, attempt to bewilder. He walks the twilight zone. Real meets false & false is real - if you get my drift. Self-caricatures blur into actual doppelgangers (that follow you round as you endeavour to find yourself). Dark-night-of-the-soul diary entries merge into reality, actual events, real people with real names. Stories within stories. Murders, kidnappings, expulsions, quests.
'Dining on Stones' is a great read. A jump forward (or backwards - but in advancing fashion). Sinclair's writing seems to have sacrificed much of the erudite-esoterica that gorged his earlier 'fiction' for a breeze into Kerouacian terrain: the freeflowing accessibility of real street poetry. No bull***t sentences that strike like a match. In the face. More Ray Chandler than Samuel Pepys. Crack-eyed muggers rather than ancient spectres. The industrial fringes of Essex as New Jersey (Sopranos credits). Of course, alll the usual props, obsessions & characters are reliably present - for example, what would a Sinclair be without the hovering presence of David Rodinsky, Joseph Conrad or JG Balllard (who does the West ot Sinclair's East) - but you do sense that Sinclair has kept much of the excessive facts & figures to himself. Gone Beat, you could say. First-take notebook scrawling on the c2c, Fenchurch Street to Grays. Throw in Robert Mitchum, Max Bygraves & Kenneth Noye (or perhaps his doppelganger) to the mix & you're done.
And it works. The guy is down with it, on the pulse, putting mainstream 'hipster' (a contradiction in terms, I know) London writers to shame (Zadie, Will - back to your champagne parties if you please). This Hackney boy knows his subject & rhymes it well. An old guy that's to be feared (cross the road if you see him): he could out-rap the estates of Bow, Stratford & Leyton in one.
Listen to him love, hate, praise & gripe. Romanticise then denounce. That's London. You hate the decay, the dereliction, but you want it there, existing. To the point of loving it. Needing it. Get it? As for the Fairview-Barratt colonies that sprout like overnight mushrooms by railway lines, canals, on wastegrounds - don't even go there. Sinclair records the simultaneous love & hate for urban territory perfectly, uniquely. Mess with the landscape & you're messing with minds. Pen brandished like a knife. A f*** you attitude. It's alll in the riffing, alll in the rap, the rhymes.
In "Dining on Stones" the journeying heads further afield - Hackney to Hastings via the A13 to Purfleet & Grays (for an old copy of Dracula, what else?) - exile territory where "London has shifted", spewed away its undesirables: the flotsam & jetsam, the out-priced. Sinclair's writing is like a calll to arms ("Territory" & "Orbital" providing the key, or map, if you like). It doesn't so much inspire as actuallly demand interaction: he walks the road, you walk the road. The books are only half written; your participation completes them. That's their design, their secret. Their demand. Beware.
