ABSTRACT
This essay considers Iain Sinclair’s collaboration with Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy (Sinclair and McKean 1997), doing so by way of certain ‘detours’. I do not propose to offer anything amounting to a reading. Instead, I wish to highlight ways in which Sinclair’s writing is traced by, responds to and is illustrative of millennial interests. In focusing on this particular text as the singular expression of Sinclair’s millennial fantasies, as these in turn are read and written around the subject of London and its occluded histories, the essay orientates itself by addressing a series of contiguous relationships. In attempting to understand Sinclair’s writing and its representations of London, it has to be said that such a project is fraught with difficulties, not least because no critical language is adequate to Sinclair’s excessive texts, even if one does delimit, however violently or unreasonably, the scope of one’s inquiry to the consideration of such excess as it is informed by, or may be read through, the notion of the millennial. Indeed, I would like to begin by making the remark that a sign of the millennial is a certain excess, while observing reciprocally that that which we perceive as excessive is but one aspect of the millennial.
