Seabrook lives in the county from the autobiographical glimpses he provides, he seems to have done so all his life. What he finds fills the pages much better than you might imagine. Now Seabrook has crept round the blustery coast of Kent from Rochester to Broadstairs via Margate with his notebook. WG Sebald has written about Suffolk, Philip Hoare has written about Southampton, Sinclair himself is finishing a book about the M25. Yet recently, as London has become an over-familiar subject for non-fiction explorations thanks to the success of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, so this hybrid genre - part travelogue, part history, part gothic speculation - has turned its attentions outward from the capital. Its car parks, its roundabouts, its high streets lined with identical chain stores - any visiting writer with romantic ideas about probing this landscape would surely not persist for too many drizzly afternoons. Modern small-town England, and especially its suburban southeast, is a place that seems firmly resistant to quests for dark secrets. He returns with a remote control which he aims at the video recorder. As if infected by my excitement Gordon jumps up and walks past me, looking for something. "I sit up and shift forward," he writes as Meadows begins a particularly tantalising digression.
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