Familiar streets transformed
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Like Neil Gaiman (Gaimanesque?), the supernatural is everyday in Mother London. And like Anthony Burgess (Burgessian?), the authorial voice here is unlike that of any other Moorcock work, despite thematic (and political) resonances with the histories of the Pyat Quartet. This is London describing itself through the glimmering weirdos that love it. Indeed, the London of Josef Kiss, David Mummery, Mary Gasalee and their lives is at both fantastical and familiar, a new world and a common one revealing some old scars. I cannot think that these streets will look the same again after this fragmented little joy of a book. It misses a little something, but not much. It is worth both your time and your money.
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Flotsam and Jetsam
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I loved the structure of this novel. The chapters in each book ebb and flow through time, mirroring London's great river, revealing the flotsam and jetsam of the book's voices and inhabitants. The magical realism bit of this book tends to idealise London, but only in the most humane of ways. If you want to see the flip side and get deep down and dirty however, I'd recommend anything by Iain Sinclair.
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Wonderful novel
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This is a wonderful novel. Rich, complex and genuinely humane. Michael Moorcock's ability to create realistic characters often in the most fantastic situations is here seen at its finest, where he is describing ordinary Londoners in an ordinary city.
Only the device of using 'voices' -- a sort of Londoners' chorus -- makes this book in any way fantastic. He takes a triangle of disparate people -- a music hall performer, a reclusive writer and a woman who has awakened from a coma after many years -- and describes them, their relatives and friends during the years from 1942 (the Blitz) to 1988, but it is not the typical 'family saga'. Its picture of an entire city is loving and at the same time profound. It could be read in conjunction with Peter Ackroyd's non-fiction about London and give you a very thorough picture of the city. I came to Michael Moorcock recently and have read his fantasy (though I am not much of a fantasy reader) as well as his literary fiction and I find that whenever I feel like a thoroughly satisfying read I reach either for a new Moorcock (one I haven't read) or Mother London, which always delivers more than the first, second or even third time I read it. It has my heartfelt recommendation!
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A joy....
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I've always had a 'fondness' for Moorcock, and read all, and I mean all, his Eternal Champion series as a teenager, but would find it hard to recommend any to anyone other than teenagers now.
This novel, however, is a joy to read, Complex, deep, but always with a wonderful sense of the love of life that clearly infects Mr Moorcock to this day if you read his website. I cannot recommend this book highly enough and the ending is an elegy to better days ahead.....
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Victorian virtues, modern obsessions
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This is probably my favourite novel by a living English author.
I recently bought my third copy because I keep lending it and not getting it back. Anyone interested in the history of contemporary London but who wants to read a novel with a cast of characters and variety of scenery as rich and complex as Dickens should get Mother London. My only advice is not to go lending it to anyone. You'll probably find you have to buy
another!
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