All the devils are here

A short piece put together as a snap tribute to the late David Seabrook (who appeared in 2 of the films I made with Chris Petit: ‘The Cardinal & the Corpse’ & ‘Asylum’).

The book about ‘place’ to which I return, as often as I venture along the banks of the Medway or roll-up my trousers for a paddle in Ramsgate, is All The Devils Are Here(Granta, 2002) by David Seabrook. This is no comfortable travelogue, but a motormouth elegy, an Ancient Mariner rant, as compulsive, deranged and inspirational as the topography it describes. Cultural memory for Seabrook is a stand-up routine, an hysterical conspiracy. The man is a rottweiler for truth. He knows and loves the thing he describes: the secret history of T.S. Eliot on Margate sands, drunken carry-on orgies in Deal, John Buchan counting the steps in Broadstairs, Nazi bankers, patricidal artists. And the microclimate of Chatham, where Dickensian spectres cohabit with youthful prostitutes who ‘pound locked cars like gibbons at Longleat’.

Seabrook, hustling through the arcades, brushing against hedges, diving into charity shops, never lets up. He gives his readers an ear-bashing they won’t forget. I swear that book talks in my sleep. Off-message, downriver Kent is rescued, definitively, from the heritage pirates, the development-pitch scammers, the theme-park cowboys. Here is documentation as rich and strange as the fictions of Nicola Barker (who has done her bit for the same territory). When Seabrook died, earlier this year, it was a horribly premature loss: now this mysterious author is fated to become part of the zone he described to such effect; an anecdote, a rumour, a legend.

— Iain Sinclair