Pariah Genius

"In this compelling novel, Iain Sinclair follows in the footsteps of John Deakin, famed Soho photographer, kept man, primitive painter and secret witness. Lying on what will be his deathbed in a seedy hotel in Brighton, the photographer relives his many past lives, and journeys back into his own mythic underworld. Framed by the broken landscape of a devastated post-war Europe, Deakin's memories summon up the ghosts of a picaresque group of friends--lovers and enemies, spies and poets--whose desperate measures and entangled lives flare briefly and vividly, before fleeing back to the shadows. The result is an engrossing fiction, an invocation of a vanished era, and a unique portrait of a man some thought was a fallen angel, and others the Devil himself."--Front flap of jacket.