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Dining on Stones

Author: Iain Sinclair
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book

Buy Used: Ł22.49

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Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

1 reviews
Sales Rank: 454923

Media: Paperback
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 1.3

ISBN: 0141014822
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141014821
ASIN: 0141014822

Publication Date: April 28, 2005
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars

Excursions into Alien Territory December 22, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

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 atall? Or atleast mostly true? Sinclair loves to blur the lines, bend the rules, attempt to bewilder. He walks the twilight zone. Real meets false and 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, all the usual props, obsessions and characters are reliably present - for example, what would a Sinclair be without the hovering presence of David Rodinsky, Joseph Conrad or JG Ballard (who does the West ot Sinclair's East) - but you do sense that Sinclair has kept much of the excessive facts and 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 and Kenneth Noye (or perhaps his doppelganger) to the mix and 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 and 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 and Leyton in one.

Listen to him love, hate, praise and 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 and hate for urban territory perfectly, uniquely. Mess with the landscape and you're messing with minds. Pen brandished like a knife. A f*** you attitude. It's all in the riffing, all in the rap, the rhymes.

In "Dining on Stones" the journeying heads further afield - Hackney to Hastings via the A13 to Purfleet and Grays (for an old copy of Dracula, what else?) - exile territory where "London has shifted", spewed away its undesirables: the flotsam and jetsam, the out-priced. Sinclair's writing is like a call to arms ("Territory" and "Orbital" providing the key, or map, if you like). It doesn't so much inspire as actually 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.