Review of "Slow Chocolate Autopsy" by Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean Item 16 - Finish 30 21 books

(Source)

I sought out this book (it doesn't appear to be in print in the US) for a few reasons. I became aware of it as a result of Alan Moore's "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"books. I loved the concept of the prisoner of London, a man trapped spatially in London but not temporally. But the book wasn't content with one high concept and pushed for even greater oddity with it's free-form-nearly-to-the-point-of-stream-of-consciousness writing. The results are mixed for me.

The book is a collection of stories tied together by Norton, the aforementioned prisoner of London and nearly every review I could find of it refers to the book as a work of Psychogeography (which may be because they all cribbed from Wikipedia). It opens with a story about the death of Christopher Marlowe and ends with a bit about William S. Burroughs. It's appropriate, since much of the book is concerned with how the writer views himself and his art. Not just Sinclair, but writers in general. Norton is, I believe, at least at some level a stand-in for Sinclair and his frequent dips into self-loathing ring fairly true for anybody that has ever attempted to write anything for the sake of writing it.

The problem for me was the free-form style did become distracting. I know that this is more an indictment of my own tastes rather than of the any of the books merits, but this sort of style has always been rather hit or miss for me. But Sinclair is artful with his words and when he hits you feel it. One of my favorite bits from the text popped out at me and I knew I would have to use it end this appraisal: "The vagrant was a fine old man, one of the resources of the city, a living fossil; put some bone in the pouch of his cheeks, compost in his boots, he'd be a dead ringer for the Duke of Kent. One of them. Proof positive: there is no such thing as 'absolute poverty', except of the imagination."