All the Devils are Here Book

All the Devils Are Here is a tour of the coastal towns of Kent, mingling reportage with historical and literary anecdote. In Pickwick Papers, Mr Jingle remarks, "Kent, sir--everybody knows Kent--apples, cherries, hops and women." This is not the Kent that Seabrook knows or presents. He has no interest in the county created for the tourist, the Kent of the heritage industry. Seabrook's Kent is a Garden of England that is overgrown with weeds and blighted with decay, decadence and death. In the present, he finds run-down city centres filled with the unemployed and the hopeless, and heavy with a sense of poorly suppressed violence. When he travels back into the past, the stories he unearths are dark ones. Rochester and Chatham, peopled by Dickensian ghosts, are also the setting for Seabrook's account of the life of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd who murdered his father because he thought he was the devil and spent the rest of his life in a lunatic asylum. Broadstairs provides the backdrop for pro-Nazi networks in the 1930s and for the sinister William Joyce, later to be better known as Lord Haw-Haw. Deal is the stage on which the Carry On star Charles Hawtrey plays his last role as a drunken old queen, bouncing from pub to pub and rent boy to rent boy. Seabrook's style, a kind of Iain Sinclair-by-the-Sea, is compelling and his first book is one to admire. Some parts do not work well. The autobiographical passages and the hints of a personal revelation that never quite materialises often seem forced and unnecessary. But the book has an undeniable power as an unveiling of the nightmares that co-exist with the dreams of "apples, cherries, hops and women".--Nick RennisonRead More