Ghost Milk
Calling Time on the Grand Project
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
In Ghost Milk Iain Sinclair exposes the dark underbelly of the Olympics 2012
Burrowing under the perimeter fence of the grandest of Grand Projects - the giant myth that is 2012's London Olympics - Ghost Milk explores a landscape under sentence of death and soon to be scorched by riots. This is a road map to a possible future as well as Iain Sinclair's most powerful statement yet on the throwaway impermanence of the present.
'Wonderful, sharp, amusing, grippingly atmospheric. One of our most dazzling prose stylists' Daily Telegraph
'A scorching diatribe' Independent
'Sinclair views London through a distortingly surreal lens; a striking visual poetry and tart black comedy are extracted from even the most hopeless of London locations. For those unfamiliar with Sinclair's work, Ghost Milk is a good place to start' Spectator
'Inventive, dazzling, arresting. Sinclair lays bare the human consequences and mourns the disruption of communities, the erasure of history and of a sense of place and continuity. This is Sinclair at his best. He is the archetypal whistleblower, a pricker of vainglorious and self-promoting hyperbole. A superb chronicle of an improbable dream that has descended to a nightmare. It is essential reading for all Londoners curious about their city' Dan Cruickshank, New Statesman
'Be warned: Ghost Milk reads like some whimsical meld of the poet Allen Ginsberg, comic books writer Alan Moore and an anarchists' message board. Highly alienating' Evening Standard
'A wounding assault' DJ Taylor, Independent on Sunday
'Sinclair's literary excavations of London's memory go deeper than anyone's' Time Out
'Brilliant' Robert Macfarlane, Guardian
Iain Sinclair is the author of Downriver (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Encore Award); Landor's Tower; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; Lights Out for the Territory; Lud Heat; Rodinsky's Room (with Rachel Lichtenstein); Radon Daughters; London Orbital, Dining on Stones, Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire and Ghost Milk. He is also the editor of London: City of Disappearances.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The 2012 Olympic Games bulldoze soulful working-class London in this lively if labyrinthine urban travelogue cum cultural jeremiad. Sinclair (Lights Out for the Territory) decries the "manifest horror" of Olympics-instigated stadiums, condos, and malls, the evictions of anarchist squatters and immigrant shopkeepers, the ubiquitous security checkpoints and surveillance cameras, the promotional "CGI visions injected straight into the eyeball" and the "orgies of lachrymose nationalism." (He had readings at municipal libraries canceled for " diss the Olympics.'") It's all the epitome, he complains, of a contemptible civilization of soulless corporate fascism, real estate scams, glitzy spectacles, and elitist privatized spaces that he finds everywhere hiking up the Thames, busing around Liverpool, surveying past Olympic outrages in Berlin and Athens. Sinclair's fragmented narrative whirls through impressionistic observations, snatches of history, film allusions, sketches of literary cronies novelist J.G. Ballard, bard of apocalyptic suburban blandness, is vividly appreciated and personal reminiscences. His critique of Olympic-sized inauthenticity isn't terribly novel, and his stereotypically English landscape intimate, slightly claustrophobic, strewn with cultural referents that Americans won't get may leave Yanks feeling a bit lost. Still, the acerbic panache of Sinclair's prose makes for a lively ramble. Photos.
