Slow Chocolate Autopsy - Iain Sinclair & Dave McKean

This is a fascinating oddball volume, combining Sinclair’s typically sparkling prose with McKean’s dark-hued comic work. The linking thread of the various episodes is Norton, a lowlife trapped in London geographically but able to move through time, and thus witness Marlowe’s murder, the Krays, Jeffrey Archer and other such characters.

The authors create a world of mythologies and self-mythologies, with Sinclair’s usual shout-outs to his old buddies. Despite being narratively all over the place, the results somehow cohere into a fine work, and some of the sloganeering is irresistible:

“Treat London like an autopsy catalogue.”

“Surveillance is the art-form of the millennium.”