Colin Barrett’s name usually appears on those lists that get published from time to time of up and coming Irish writers. The Irish fiction scene is thriving these days, so that’s quite a tribute. I read and enjoyed one of his earlier short story collections, so I was interested to see what his debut novel, Wild Houses, would be like.

It is an enjoyable yarn set in rural Ireland (Mayo, specifically) and its community of minor criminals. What distinguished it for me was the sensitive depiction of the central character, Dev. A gentle giant, bullied at school, mourning the death of his mother and the incarceration of his father in a psychiatric hospital, Dev lives alone and isolated in the deep countryside in the family home until the local gangsters come calling. Barrett communicates with real empathy and tenderness Dev’s trauma and the passivity that is one of its main symptoms. That, for me, was what made an otherwise unremarkable novel worth the time.

Great artists have always attracted coteries of hangers-on, sycophants, and spongers. The members of the clique that surrounded Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud in Soho in the 1950s and 1960s have attained a minor celebrity status without ever achieving much distinction or success of their own. Would anyone know or care about the likes of Dan Farson, Henrietta Moraes, Isabel Rawsthorne, and David Archer if they hadn’t pedaled stories, true or false, about Bacon and Freud or if they hadn’t had walk-on parts in the lives of arguably the most celebrated British painters of the 20th century? Probably not. But I would make an exception for John Deakin, the subject of Iain Sinclair’s “psychobiographic fiction” Pariah Genius.

Deakin’s reputation as a photographer has had a resurgence in recent years. That has helped to re-balance his legacy, or at least correct the one-dimensional portrait of him as a much disliked, scarcely tolerated drunk who sat for Freud and provided photographs for Bacon that became source material for some of his greatest portraits.

Iain Sinclair’s book is not a biography in any conventional sense. It certainly isn’t a critique of Deakin’s photography. The author and publisher describe it as a novel, only because, I suspect, there is no better way to categorize this unclassifiable, imaginative re-telling of Deakin’s personality and character. In the final analysis, it doesn’t really matter what it is. Just enjoy it – a characteristically ingenious and enthralling piece of writing from one of the most distinctive and original voices around.