Ghost Milk: Recent Adventures Among the Future Ruins of London on the Eve of the Olympics

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[ing] 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. (July 24)