King of the City (Paperback)

Michael Moorcock at his unbeatable best: King of the City is a thunderous 400-odd page salvo that is another great London novel as well as a scarifying picture of excess and corruption, seen through the eyes of sleazy photographer Denny Dover. For those who relished Moorcock's massive (and massively entertaining) novel Mother London and enjoyed his epic literary novel Gloriana, King of the City will be manna from Heaven.

Since the demise of Princess Di brought about a change in the English soul, the new thinking has kicked tabloid paparazzi photographers like Denny out of work. He fetches up in the benighted wastes of Skerring on the south coast of England, only to sink into dreams of his days as a substance-abusing, sexually omnivorous rock star and existential maverick. Denny is galvanised when his childhood friend, massively wealthy magnate John Barbican-Begg, proves that rumours of his death are greatly exaggerated. Denny has to deal with both his collusion in Begg's avaricious ambitions and--far worse--the apparent seduction of his beautiful cousin Rosie. Comparisons with Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities will be thrown up but although this shares the same glittering surface (and is couched in language that is similarly elegant, demotic and malignantly witty), Moorcock essentially concentrates on four characters rather than the more scattershot approach of Wolfe. This is a shame, as Moorcock could have fleshed out some of the minor characters. No matter: for those who lived through the 1960s, this will be the definitive document. For those too young to remember it, a trip in this particular time machine will plunge them into a dizzying and phantasmagoric world in which anything goes.

The treatment of modern Britain is equally vivid, etched with a razor-sharp scalpel. The mixture of fictional and real-life characters is brought off with the kind of panache we have come to expect from Moorcock and the more serious issues he takes on (imperialism, greed, personal integrity) are perfectly integrated into the Dickensian canvas. But, finally, it is the language that will soon have people quoting wholesale from the book:

The one big lesson American consumerism taught Europe is how to strip your own psychic assets. How to sell your self-respect in return for a handout and the chance of a class-action court case. How to squeeze a handsome buck out of a murdered ancestor, maximise the profit on your birthright ... now we're all plodding through the same toxic haze of urine, grease, carbon monoxide and degenerated plastic that has eaten away the city's deregulated gilt and left us coughing up crap.

--Barry Forshaw

Michael Moorcock's Mother London remains one of the best 20th century novels about the city. Twelve years on the author makes a welcome return to the matter of London, seen this time through the eyes of hard-bitten journalist and sometime rock guitarist Dennis Dover. Looking back over his upbringing in the inner city London area of Brookgate, Dover talks about his relationship with his beloved cousin Rosie and describes the unscrupulous rise to power of another cousin, John Barbican Begg. Through Dover's boozy, drug-hazed memoirs, Moorcock addresses the confused, corrupt, mythical and historic post-Diana London into which are woven local hard men, ex-boxers, South London music halls, rock and roll stars, lovers, ancestors and empire building corporate tyrants. In his vivid portrait of contemporary London, Moorcock conveys forcefully many of the city's mistakes and tragedies, yet never forgetting its often obscured but underlying magic. (Kirkus UK)

Shortlisted for the Whitbread, nominated for the Booker: another fabulous ride through London's recent history-here, the last four decades-that manages to be as sprawling as a Victorian social novel and as vigorous as an 18th-century picaresque. Author of more than 70 novels (including the SF trilogy begun with "Blood", 1995), Moorcock here picks up where he left off-artistically, not literally-with "Mother London "(1989). The story concerns three lives. Narrator Dennis Dover, son of the last Londoner hanged for murder, started out as a documentary photographer and ended up a sleazy paparazzo-and now, in newly sensitive, post-Di England-is unemployed. From this miserable perch, he takes a long, bitter, nostalgic, backwards look. Then there's Rosie, Dennis's cousin, whom Dennis dearly loves and who also, like Dennis, managed to pull herself out of working-class Brookgate. But most importantly, there's John Barbican Begg, who has evolved, through genius and ruthless avarice, into a media magnate, one of the world's wealthiest men. As these three move through the pop-riddled '60s, through the years of drugs, assassinations, and social upheavals and on to Thatcherite England and the present day, Moorcock fills the tale with real characters and situations, made-up characters and situations, and those somewhere in between. Americans at times may feel they could use a concordance-presumably the Brits could figure it out for themselves when it was published in England last year-but you soon give up caring. Moorcock's storytelling is just too powerful in a novel more than likely to invite comparisons to Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities". Certainly Moorcock strikes his big themes: sojourns to Africa and the Balkans echo with imperialism (both cultural and corporate) while contemporary London loses its soul to American-style consumerism. Yet at the same time "King of the City "is far more idiosyncratic than Wolfe's book-and more successful because of it-with a strongly autobiographic feel. Dennis, Rosie, and John Begg never illustrate the fable, as Moorcock calls it, but it emerges completely through them. One of our topmost novelists writing at the peak of his powers. (Kirkus Reviews)