It is best to read Iain Sinclair's work out of the corner of your eye. The action takes place on the peripheries; it disintegrates if you concentrate too hard on the middle. Dining on Stones, a postmodern thriller for geeky pedestrians, doesn't really have a story; Sinclair's idea of a plot is a walk. Andrew Norton, a disillusioned flâneur, novelist and bookseller lives in Hackney. Dover St Gallery commissions him to write a commentary on the artist Jimmy Seed, who paints pictures of motorways: 'Bucket of whitewash, slap in a few lorries with fine badger brush and leave the rest misty and impressionistic. Let the buggers see what they want to see in a tribute to absence.' This is the opposite of Sinclair's turbulent narrative, in which little is left for the buggers to work out, and the buggers still can't work it out.

LRB 18 November 2004 | PDF Download