Fiction: Andrew Norton, described by the book blurb as "poet, visionary and hack" but exposed through the meandering narrative as an aimless writer, ego and self-important bore, undertakes a journey.
He is not exactly trying to find himself, his real concern is to locate something to write about. His route is the A13, not as interesting as the course of the Danube or the Rhine, but then you may think, initially, that Sinclair is making the point that just as the great rivers of the world were the motorways of the past, now in our age of towering ugliness, a pilgrim has nothing to look to, except - a motorway.
Iain Sinclair, whose books include Downriver and Landor's Tower, has always been preoccupied by London - rather like Peter Ackroyd, but without the humour and obsession with the past. Nor is Sinclair sufficiently interested in characterisation to look towards Graham Swift, a writer drawn increasingly - since Last Orders - towards the London voice.
Instead, Sinclair aspires more to the great surrealist, J.G. Ballard, and defers to him throughout this book, although no-one could say this novel is remotely Ballard-like. While Ballard is a cult genius and prophet, Sinclair is more of a wayward original who has never much liked conventional narrative. And never before has his always risky originality looked so thin, so tired - and, curiously, so testy and so unforgivably self-indulgent.
Late in this novel he issues a swipe at the critics who scratch their way through 400 pages, searching for a plot. "If critics have to wade through 400 pages to tease out a storyline, they'll kill you." Well, the reader is free to scratch for eternity but Dining on Stones does not offer much of anything except that it provides Sinclair with extensive space to fill. This he does partly with statements such as "History has ended. It was (and remains) a TV channel", literary references, repeated musings on Conrad and pats on the back for his fellow British writers, led by Ballard.
Dining on Stones emerges as an accurate title - there is not much to eat, or even remember, despite its 449 pages. It is neither quest nor odyssey. The references to W.G. Sebald serve only to offend. Sinclair could not seriously be offering himself as a kindred spirit of the inspired German writer who could handle diverse, apparently loosely connected material, and confer it with a philosophical and elegiac artistry utterly beyond Sinclair.
Why is this wordy, insignificant reverie so difficult to read? Why does it appear so irrelevant? Why is it divided into three books, each in effect a variation of the others? Why is it so long? Why is the narrative tone that of petulant harangue? As early as page one, the narrator announces: "I was waiting for something. And it was slow in coming." It provides an accurate summation of the entire book, a deliberate hotchpotch of fiction and non-fiction. The geography of London has always appealed to Sinclair, and this has been among his strengths as a writer.
This time, that strength drifts. There is a sense of the narrative being suffocated by the density of description - not that the descriptions are particularly lengthy or loving. Each observation is dispatched in a spat-out stream of consciousness that appears half-hearted, random and lazy. "Prisms of remembered sunlight. Kitchen passions, summer parties. Old film, 8mm, flickering on a dirty sheet. Prized babies crawling through uncut grass. Wine in wedding-present goblets. Cider in petrol-station beakers. Picnics under the cherry tree. Table as tent." Elsewhere, we are informed "the gull had the face of Virginia Woolf".
Billed as a "road novel", Dining on Stones is more like a motorway stopover for the disillusioned and disconnected. By page 23, the game is up. "That was her project, gathering random images for a book that Marina hadn't finished, might never finish. A book that seemed to anticipate the road trip we were never going to complete. Never begin." Preoccupied by the hijacking of his work, the self-absorbed narrator, with his memories, his lists of books, lists of movies, topical asides and random observations, also has time to ponder his lost wives. There is Hannah, his terrifying second wife, a tough professional and a bit of a caricature, and the lovely Ruth, his first love, the wife that got away, the beauty at whom women as well as men stared. Then there is the third girl, a new one, who may be wife number three, or should it be daughter?
Anticipation has a great deal to answer for. This big but empty narrative had the potential to be one of the novels of the year. It seemed that this would be the time for Sinclair not only to deliver, but to be discovered for the original voice he is.
Instead of excitement, reading this tedious slap-happy book amounted to an endurance test. On reaching the final page, the sensation was neither of relief or achievement but of irritation at having committed so much time and discovered so little.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
