It is interesting, though not essential to the enjoyment of the novel, to know a little of the history of Robinson the literary character. He seems to first turn up in 1932 in Louis-Ferdinand Celine's masterpiece, Journey to the End of the Night. He then goes underground for a while before emerging over a decade later in the strange and electrifying poems of Weldon Kees. Another disappearance, along with Kees's own, a gap of a further 30 years or so, and Robinson emerges in the poetry of Simon Armitage.

Petit has used the slowly emerging Robinson mythos to good advantage, adding and building on it, creating a novel that h as much in common with the tone of Celine and the Kees poems; here also is a novel that journeys through the night. Robinson is beguiling, mysterious, strangely familiar, charming, deceitful, dangerous, tragic and wilful. Petit's narrator slowly allows himself to be sucked into Robinson's seedy world, permitting Robinson's will to manipulate his own. He becomes a willing sidekick to Robinson's increasingly dangerous and depraved enterprises.

Petit intended the novel to be set in the near future and certain parts of the later stages of the novel read like Briti sh news summaries from the autumn of 2000. It is a credit to Petit's keen eye for all that is monstrous and messy in British society that this is so. It is also slightly worrying, for one is left with the nasty feeling that some of the other dark events he has imagined might also lurk up and intrude on our daily lives. --Iain Robinson

It was my habit then, and still is on certain days, to judge unknown titles on the strength of their first lines. Petit's tale of the underbelly worlds of second-hand books and porno films seemed, like Robinson himself, to be one step ahead of the game and hooked me in from the start. Christo too - the veiled autobiographical narrator - senses something both familiar and inevitable in the enigmatic Robinson even before they first meet. Destiny, it seems, is taking a hand. We - the readers- feel it too and are half-willingly dragged along for the ride; similarly thrilled and disgusted by where we find ourselves descending. Told with an air of distracted remembrance, the book charts the all too easy shift from drunken roistering, through petty crime, into serious sexualised depravity. Christo's progressive withdrawal from his job, home and wife into a twilight world of late night drinking dens, shady deals and criminal behaviour is worryingly easy despite his apparent lack of moral censure. Unsure of whether he is an observer or an accomplice he treads an uneasy path through the games Robinson plays with him and the other members of his menagerie of 'friends'.
Petit writes with a film lover's (and maker's) hand. Robinson, all Harry Lime in the darkened doorway; shiny shoes and irresistible charm, strides across this novel in the same way that Orson Welles dominates The Third Man. He is the mover and shaker, the wheeler-dealer behind whom all the other characters struggle to keep up. But he is flawed. He is the mirror into which we all look and judge ourselves. How much is too much? How far is too far?
A great 'London' novel, "Robinson" offers unease and disquiet at every turn. From Soho to Kilburn, from Paddington to Clerkenwell, Petit's writing reads like an accident waiting to happen - we read open-mouthed, unable to avert our eyes from the page.
It is rare that a novel which raises so many questions, can be so satisfying. Most of the questions lie outside of the novel's immediate narrative scope (which is conventionally linear with a recognisable Beginning, Middle & End), and are hidden in between the lines. For me, this is why "Robinson" remains so interesting. Self-consciously interested in the possibilities of Identity and Enigma the book reads like an extended clue to a greater truth. Since first reading the book in early 1998 I have become a committed 'Robinson-hunter', slowly seeking out the web of connections which seem to radiate out from this character. I don't think this is the last we shall hear of him...