Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones
'Spirit,' she announces, 'has no eyes. After death, in the cosmic stream, you're blind.' She touched invisible shapes, described biographies for my savagely repressed alternate lives. I felt like a child killer, aborting better selves. I suffered from ontological insecurity. I used the false avatar of city-as-body as a way of avoiding a deep-rooted conviction of impotence.
If you liked the paragraph above, then you'll probably like Iain Sinclair's Dining on Stones. If you, like me, were left with a sceptical Really?, then you most probably won't.
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.
At least, that's what it says on the back of the book. If you asked me, I couldn't for the life of me tell you what this book is about. For me it was just 450 pages of thorough and genuine confusion. I had absolutely no idea what's going on. It's a stream of consciousness more than anything else, and a fairly pretentious one at that. Apparently a lot of the characters have appeared in Sinclair's earlier books. Maybe it would have helped if I had read those before. Somehow I doubt it. I'm sure I could have made more sense of it, if I really tried. But I didn't care about it enough to try. I didn't like the style, I didn't like the characters, and I just wanted it over and done with so I could read something I actually enjoyed reading instead.
I filled a basin with cold water, splashed my face. Norton wasn't a cancer that would perish alongside me in the crematorium. Nor a double, Xerox, trial run. He hadn't filched DNA, grease from my poultry shears. Andy was certainly no parallel universe alter ego, fetch or substitute. Tanist. A simple grammatical error, shift of pronoun: he for I. Exit and out. Reality requires an even tone of voice. Fiction demands the courage to walk in other people's dreams: regime change. Know how to steal and when to keep it buttoned.
I read a few reviews of this book, just to see what the professionals critics thought about it. Most loved it, but a couple of them thought that Iain Sinclair was a bit too much Iain Sinclair. And, without having read anything Sinclair has written previously, I got that impression too. It just seems like the author has found a style that really works, and then just overdone it. There are three characters who are authors in the book, and they all seem to be shadows of Sinclair himself.
The (rather dystopic) atmosphere is set by listing things.
The click of a shutter would alert the minder who watched over the contraband peddlers (the Albanian women, the man with one world of English, his mantra: 'Cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette, cig-ar-ette'). The unrequired flash reflected in the dark glasses of the Black Muslims with their sinister suits and bow ties. The hooded tollers on bikes. The fat man, on his knees behind the video stall, unpacking two carriers of hardcore. The loungers in the doorway of the Kurdish football-club café. The rock sellers yawning outside the newsagent. The police, in in their white van, eating pies, ignoring the ratty scavenger who is making off with black bags of clothes donated to Oxfam.
Just reading that bit now, I don't mind it. In fact, I like it. But when the author uses it over and over and over again, just listing things, however well it's described, it gets a little bit tiring. In fact, tiring, maybe even exhausting, is a good description of this book. It's hard work reading it!
Still, I have to admit, sometimes it's really, really good. Sometimes it just drew me in, and I read in fascination for a couple of pages, wanting to know more, and then... nothing. That particular storyline just ended in nothing and was never heard from again.
And I fear the relationship between me and Iain Sinclair will end in the same way, in nothing.