King of the City

By Michael Moorcock

Book Overview

More than a decade ago, Michael Moorcock's extraordinary Mother London gave stunning new breath and style to contemporary literature. With Bruce Chatwin's Utz and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, the novel was short-listed for Britain's prestigious Whitbread Prize. Now, with scathing wit and enthralling vision, the author whom the Washington Post has praised as "one of the most exciting discoveries in the contemporary English novel [in] 40 or so years" returns to a city transformed and transforming, and in peril of its life. These are the times and trials of Dennis Dover, former rock guitarist, photojournalist, and paparazzo. Denny inhabits a world of vibrant color, smell, and sound, where novel experience and unpredictability are anchored by steadfast tradition and history. Mother London's many vagaries give Denny Dover joy and succor, always seducing him home from the Earth's terrible places, where the face of death is as common as the blood that stains the local dirt. And London is where Rosie Beck is, when she isn't off elsewhere combating the planet's great ills. Denny's brilliant, beautiful, socially conscious cousin has always been an indispensable part of his being -- his soul mate and his soul. Since childhood they have been inseparable, delighting in the daily discoveries of a life with no limits. But now the metropolis that nurtured them is threatened by a powerful, unstoppable force that consumes the past indiscriminately and leaves nothing of substance in its wake. The terminator is named John Barbican Begg. A hanger-on from Denny and Rosie's youth, he has become the morally corrupt center of their London and the richest, most rapacious creature in the Western Hemisphere. Now, as their cherished landmarks tumble, conspiracy, secrets, lies, and betrayal become the centerpieces of Rosie and Dennis's days. For Barbican has but one goal: to devour the entire world. And the only choice left is to join in, drop out ... or plot to destroy. A sprawling work of incomparable invention, King of the City is eccentric and remarkable, a unique urban love story with a pit-bull bite that confirms the unparalleled literary genius of the amazing Michael Moorcock.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0380975890
• ISBN13: 9780380975891
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: William Morrow
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.3" x 6.1"

Customer Reviews

BRILLIANT. TIMELY. A REAL LIFT FROM REAL LIFE!

Whoever thinks this book has no shape just doesn't know what a gem they have in their hands! Like Mother London, you have to let Moorcock lead you through something of a maze. You have to give yourself up to his work, as with the Cornelius books. If you let him lead you -- he'll take you a lot of places you've never been before. The centerpiece of this novel appears to be the big Thanksgiving Party at the Red Mill, when every character in the book dances around the mill, while above them the vanes turn through a third dimension. In Mother London everything radiates from the Blitz scenes. This is a more eccentric shape, but it certainly works for me. It doesn't matter how many times Denny Dover has been married (three, I think) -- just look at the women he's married. Each one a wonderful individual! Rosie, his cousin, is a sort of Diana figure, as beautiful as she is good, and it's at this point, for all Rosie is a living, thinking human being, you realise why this book is called 'A Fable'. It is dealing with the fabulous. It is all invented. Virtually no place in the city, however much you mourn a genuine loss, ever existed. You think the names are familiar, that they are bound to be just around the corner, or on the next tube station, but they never are. This entire London is an invention. But why is it an invention ? I think it is the other side of Mother London, which was all about real places, real London. This is the modern fantasy of London, as unreal and at the same time as real as anything Dickens ever gave us. And, finally, you understand why Peter Ackroyd has called Moorcock the modern Dickens -- for his humanity is as profound as his inventive genius. Moorcock is a true original. If he had not written those rafts of awful sword and sorcery epics and added to the flow of garbage which began with the Attack of the Hobbits, I could forgive him anything. As it is, there is a different kind of engagement here which, if you value original minds, you will want to sample. Moorcock's determination to remain in the popular arena, in spite of every effort (including articles about him in the London Review ofBooks and inclusion in the Oxford Companion to English Literature) to draw him in to his rightful place in English literature sometimes to look like a career death-wish, but you have to admire his engagement with his audience, which is as much part of his ethos (see his website multiverse.org) as never offering us the same book twice. Mother London is a gentler book, but King of the City is a wild hunt of a novel, full of rage and love for the unsung, the under-rated and the disrespected. Moorcock's identification with his readers rather than his reviewers is to be applauded.

Breathtaking!

This is nothing less than modern Dickens. A kind of Great Expectations for our post-modern times. It's amazing. It'sa whole different level of writing. All I can say is -- readit and see what I mean!

Eloquent, funny, savage

The incredible consistency and vitality of the writing would, if Moorcock weren't such a familiar (and frequently unread) name, set the literary world to raving his virtues. This book is not only a sustained attack on what Moorcock calls 'totalitariancapitalism' -- consumerism -- it is a moving love story, an elegy for a past torn down and buried by human rapacity and greed, and it is FUNNY. While it can be compared to Bonfire of the Vanities, there really isn't any serious comparison. Moorcock keeps his passions, his commitments, his loyalties and writes from an angry heart that retains its tolerance and concern for the underdog, for the undervalued -- but never lets the top dog or the overvalued get away with it. Like most of his work, this book is not for the reader who simply wants their cultural values and presumptions reinforced. Moorcock has been questioning andwrestling with the great concerns of our age since he wrote The Final Program and Behold the Man (in the same year) and King of the City reinforces the moral weight and voice of his extraordinary Holocaust series about Colonel Pyat, the jew-hating Jew. Like all his best work, including Mother London, this book is Dickensian in its mixture of humor and tragedy, and I wouldn't consider myself a sophisticated modern reader unless I had read at least Moorcock's London fiction, together with hisholocaust fiction. This would be a fine place to start -- though even the holocaust books can seem mellow in comparison! If you want anger, humanity, comedy, real tragedy and a loving picture of Moorcock's home city, this is the book for you. Its analysis of the world of modern commerce is brilliant. His solutions are knowingly utopian -- but you can never say Moorcock isn't positive. There is a heartening quality about his books, no matter how close they get to the cruel realities of modern life.This isn't 'introduced' by Moorcock, by the way. It could not have been written by any other modern writer. Like John Cowper Powys, Moorcock is an unclassifiable giant, mixing a vivid love of life, a sharp sense of character,with a rich, broad almost transcendental understanding of the world. You won't find better value for your money, that's for sure. Worth any ten of your average limper Brit novels by Amis, Lodge or Byatt, Moorcock is closer to being an English Don DeLillo but could also be said to have inherited the maverick mantle of Anthony Burgess, who was one of his many admirers. Read it for yourself. You won't regret it!

Moorcock at his finest

This is an outstanding novel. There is no better writer than Moorcock at his best. This love story against a background of growing world consumerism is rich with characters, plots and Moorcock's incredibly funny, incredibly wise, observations of our complicated and confusing consumerist society. But it is the characters you remember -- the generosity, the warmth, the anger, the sheer humanity. And the scope. Only Moorcock gives you that scope -- London, New York, Rwanda, Kosovo... Not enough Americans know Michael Moorcock's literary fiction. It is their great loss. He is one of the best we have.