Only Iain Sinclair could glimpse Hackney in the wilds of Peru

It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer mapping ley lines between Hawksmoor churches and Ripper tours, skulking around the torque of the M25 and fulminating about the Millennium Dome and the gentrification (and gerrymandering) around the Olympic Stadium. So when I learned that his new book was about a journey to Peru, I sarcastically imagined he would be attempting to find the grave of Paddington Bear.

Not so, and this is vintage Sinclair. His great-grandfather, Arthur, was a botanist and author. After sojourns in Ceylon and Tasmania, he was sent to assess an area by the ‘corporate predators’ of the Peruvian Corporation of London. Although his interest is mostly in agriculture, and the potential for coffee plantations, there is always the lure of gold — whether trapped in geology or hinted at in the mythology of dead Incan redeemers awaiting resurrection on their golden catafalques.