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King Of the City by Michael Moorcock (Scribner UK, 2000, £9.99)

Michael Moorcock's King of the City (Scribner UK £9.99) is a thematic sequel to his masterly Mother London, covering much the same history from a different perspective. Both novels are set in a romantically fantasticated yet recognisable version of London, and both reimagine the history of the Twentieth Century and reposition its pivotal points around thinly disguised autobiography. In Mother London, a trio of protagonists linked by a kind of telepathy represented different aspects of the author; in King of the City, the life story of the narrator parallels Moorcock's own life. Most importantly, both novels convey, with intimate, densely worked detail, the communities and human connections and human stories threaded through London's stone and glass and brick.

Thus, although the narrative of King of the City spans the last forty years of the last century, 'an age of myths and miracles', and half the globe, it is built around a trope much favoured by writers of contemporary urban fantasies, that of a small, secret community struggling to survive in a modern city. Like Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere or Christopher Fowler's Roofworld, King of the City is (to borrow from the terminology of Clute and Grant's Encyclopedia of Fantasy) a wainscot novel of London's secret history, lovingly portraying the city from the inside out. Very loosely tied to Moorcock's multiverse series (in the opening scene, Captain Bastable appears as a Rastafarian balloonist; and one of the vast cast of secondary characters lives in Sporting Club Square, the imaginary address of, amongst others, Jerry Cornelius), it also adds to that small body of literature which explores London's psychogeography -- books by writers such as Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and, most notably, Moorcock's sometime collaborator Iain Sinclair. Sinclair is portrayed, thinly disguised, in Moorcock's short-lived comic book series, while Moorcock has appeared in Rachel Lichenstein and Iain Sinclair's Rodinsky's Room, and as a kind of benevolent Fisher-King-in-exile in Asylum, a short film by Sinclair and Chris Petit. In King of the City, Moorcock deploys Sinclair's technique of chopped declarative prose and pithy aphorisms to liven the narrative voice of a garrulous roman à clef that's stuffed with sex and drugs and rock'n'roll, and which promiscuously drops the names of Moorcock's fabulously wide counterculture circle, from sixties cult figures such as novelist Jack Trevor Story and musician Robert Calvert, to Dylan, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Andrea Dworkin, Toni Morrison, and a hundred others.

The baggy plot turns around a real estate deal that destroys the autonomous enclave of old London, Brookgate, where the novel's narrator, Dennis Dover, grew up. Rather like the self-declared republic in the movie Passport to Pimlico, Brookgate is, according to Dennis:

controlled by her citizens (or denizens as the old journos used to call us) under the power of the Hugenot Leases which, partly because of the plague, made full ownership of the land so unclear it had been disputed in Chancery since 1670. . . . Effectively it meant we all had a say in what happened in our own patch. . . . It was our strongest civic weapon

Those Hugenot leases are, as is revealed very early on in the novel, acquired by Brookgate native and media tycoon John Barbican Begg, who steamrollers Brookgate's egalitarian democracy and replaces its mazy lanes and old-fashioned shops with shoddy, quickly disintegrating replicas: 'Those [retail spaces] still open look like film sets left out in the rain.' The novel is partly a memorial for this vanished patch of old London, part confession by Dennis of his unwitting role in its destruction. He is the son of the last Londoner to be hanged for murder, erstwhile guitarist with the band Deep Fix (most definitely to be confused with the real band The Deep Fix, in which Moorcock performed), and now a photojournalist, scarred by his forays into world's disaster areas, scorned for his snaps of the rich, famous and notorious. Dennis scores a coup by photographing John Begg in flagrante with a minor royal after his supposed death, but is unable to sell the pictures because, by a nicely worked irony, Princess Diana's Mercedes crashes on the same night. Hounded by the media, who turn him into a scapegoat for St. Diana's death, his career in ruins ('I was the next best thing to a Serbian war criminal . . . Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gadafi combined had a higher popularity rating.'), Dennis flees to an English coastal town as strange as Lovecraft's Innsmouth, and in this hiding place begins to spin his tale.

Much of that tale, switching effortlessly between present and past, describes how Dennis's life became inextricably intertwined with his scarily brilliant cousin Rosie Beck, John Begg, and Tubby Ollis, whose converted windmill home, overlooking London from the heights of Tufnell Park, location of exuberantly described parties and centre of a web of computerised surveillance, is coveted by Begg and under seige by his henchmen. It has to be said that Begg, despite his central role in the plot, is the least satisfactory of all the characters in this densely populated novel. There's a very funny and telling moment when on a whim he causes a near disaster at Tower Bridge, and his obsessive need to play with Deep Fix pays off nicely when he uses a comeback concert to stage his disappearance. But he is not a convincing media tycoon, and his empire, which supposedly surpasses that of Rupert Murdoch or Ted Turner, is never more than sketchily described. Like the Cheshire Cat, Begg's disappearance is more significant than his presence, but fortunately the plot in which he plays the ambiguous villain is nothing more than a peg on which to hang the novel's acute and deeply felt diatribes against the homogenising forces of international capitalism, and its celebration of the deeply human web of connections and language that, Moorcock suggests, forms the real heart of any city:

Nothing's important as talk. It's our city's lifeblood. It pumps in every side street and alley, pounds down every tube and drain, enriches the heart, stimulates the brain. It carries the silt of centuries in its undertow. It unites us on the most profound levels. It's what keeps the tribe together.

And in this restlessly discursive novel, nothing is as important as talk. The characters talk endlessly with each other, stoned or sober, in pubs and boxing clubs, in bed and at parties. And Dennis Dover talks directly to the reader, evoking the wainscot world of his childhood with the elegiac particularity of an exile. Moorcock, who currently resides in Texas, is particularly good on Dennis's nostalgic hunger for the cuisine of his native patch:

Taters, black carrots and parsnips. Fried broccoli with macaroni cream. Curried scullions and Killarney faggots. French beans in mint and rosemary scurd. Garlic jelly. . . . All horrid to the uninitiated.

Amidst all this talk emerges a portrait of London that's both as crowded and as ambitiously inclusive as the great Dickens novels, garnished with a sudden flourish of unabashedly utopian rhetoric. It's a very English utopia, shored up by pedigree and inside knowledge (not only do you have to like the native food, but you need to know where to find the real thing, not the sham stuff served to outsiders), cryptic traditions and shameless nostalgia. Ultimately, it is more a dream (and there's a hint that it might just be a dream) than a believable solution to the complicity of governments and multinationals and the vast tragedies as communities from Brookgate to Rwanda are ripped apart for political convenience, but that's to miss the point. Novels are not revolutionary blueprints. The point is that it is still possible to imagine that there may be a solution and a happy ending, no matter how contrived.

And so, with disarming casualness, the far-flung plotlines of this wonderful, sprawling, hectic and big-hearted novel are at last gathered up. Dennis Dover realises the extent of his accidental complicity in the real estate deal, Begg fakes his death, unmaskings take place, Dennis is wounded, healed, and delivered into love, the punchline to a joke withheld for the entire book is revealed. Like an initiation ceremony, reading the novel lets us into the secret, makes us part of the conspiracy, includes us all. And God bless us, every one.

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