First off, the book comprises two sections, a long story by B. Catling and an essay by Iain Sinclair and I've read only Catling's 'Scales' so far. (I've enjoyed Sinclair's essays about London and I expect I'll enjoy this one as well.)

'Scales' alternates between two accounts: One is of Robert Peary's struggles, long before his supposed trek to the north pole, with a task in Greenland and the other tells of a Dutchman's strange life in the most godforsaken imaginable place in the American West.

This story is the most dream-like bit of fiction I've read since The Head of Vitus Bering, though it's only the oneiric & the Arctic that the two works have in common. Reading it (late nights in a dimly-lit & silent room so as to keep it unreal) drew me into the state I associate with the first stages of a nap taken on a sunny & still afternoon behind drawn curtains--that drowsy state just short of hypnogogia when shreds of remembered images and scraps of unknown music and flashes of inexplicable fancies dart in and out of one's mind. I'm not certain how Catling creates this effect; certainly the book is highly atmospheric most especially in the depiction of storms and fog, desert and snow, and as well some details seem almost supernatural; indeed, one episode is in fact the apparent emergence of a gathering of the shipwrecked who dissipate when they realise that the sand desert on which they find themselves wandering is actually the sandy beach on which their bones lie. Perhaps it's simply Catling's choice of the details in and organisation of the short work that make it impressive.

I was a bit disappointed to find that at least one strand of the story was, bizarre though it be, taken from life. Whether the other was, I don't want to know; I don't want history dispelling the mood of unearthliness. In fact for me the major drawback was the ending, which because it seems very much like the wrapping-up of an historical account jars with all that precedes it.

Catling's writing is very occasionally awkward but given the context of the seeming lapses--the confusion of homophones e.g.--I don't know whether those lapses were deliberate or whether they're something an editor should have seen to. And it's possible I suppose that were I to re-read Scales six months from now it would seem ordinary. But at the moment it seems an altogether taking story of which fragments will be coming to mind now and then for more months than six.