King of the City

Rating:
Summary: A great modern novel
Review: I read this at the same time as I read Don DeLillo's wonderful Cosmopolis which is the 'cool' approach to the same material.
This is an angry, eloquent, all-encompassing book dealing with modern greed and lack of spirituality, our obsession with vulgar fame and money. DeLillo's book concentrates on a relatively small canvas -- one day in New York in the year 2000.
Moorcock starts in London and goes to Paris, New York, Rwanda,
Bosnia and back again. These two books are two different 'takes' on the same modern problems. They are both hugely entertaining, beautifully written, with a keen ear for modern speech. Read them together as I did. You won't regret it!

Rating:
Summary: Timely
Review: In the light of recent horrifying events in New York and Washington, Moorcock's new novel, which is about corporate
greed, terrorism and the means of overcoming both, is very timely. This novel
is worth it for its affirmative ending alone. Admittedly I read it at a very emotional time, but as in much of Moorcock's work, the note of affirmation and optimism on which it ends somehow offers a beacon of hope and humanity. As an answer to 'Why ?', this book has some profound and, for me, useful suggestions. As usual with Moorcock, his characters are wonderful, alive, engaging, warm and memorable, affirming life as hard as they can!

Rating:
Summary: Not really a novel
Review: Leonard, you'll love this, you said. And you were right. But how did you know ? Thanks, Amazon! This is a great, great novel about pretty much everything that affects modern urban society, mostly about the rapacious destruction of their own heritage by Londoners destroying the best in order to make an even greater profit, but also about international terrorism, the New World Order and all the causes of our present terrible situation. But it's better than that. This isn't a doom-saying book. I's a heartening book which celebrates the spirit of ordinary people. This is a book which accepts the present terrible state of the world and suggests -- believe it or not -- a viable solution.
Clear-eyed, ranting angry and positive, even optimistic. A great book for our age.

Rating:
Summary: Outstanding and very relevant to our times
Review: One of Moorcock's finest realistic novels. This book has a strange structure, which gradually reveals why the central character, Danny Dover, is in the situation he's in,
then takes him to embattled Europe (Kosovo specifically) and the book's conclusion, which might or might not be a happy ending.
On the way you learn about his life as a rock and roll guitarist, a photo-journalist and, finally, a cynical paparazzo. He loves the go-getting Rose and has a rival in the equally ambitious Johnny 'Barbican' Begg.
This threesome offers typical Moorcock dynamic. But there are dozens of other great characters. I particularly liked the chain-smoking French giant journo Fromental, who goes with him to Rwanda. The set pieces are great, as you would expect from the Moorcock of Mother London, Byzantium Endures and, of course, The Condition of Muzak.

As a character Danny is most like a 'realistic' Jerry Cornelius (though the book's described significantly as 'a fable') and the concerns are closer to the JC stories, with direct confrontations with modern social problems and politics. Moorcock's understanding of modern politicians, like Clinton or Blair, is wonderful, as is his writing. This is some of the most powerful writing he's ever done -- an incredibly sustained roll of words and ideas, like a great, prolonged rock performance. His descriptions of the rock and roll life have the feel of autobiography, as does much of the Notting Hill material. Where he dealt with real places in Mother London, he here invents or resurrects London backgrounds, such as the Mill at Tufnell Park,
the thieve's sanctuary in Seven Dials and a whole London district, Brookgate, sandwiched between Holborn and Clerkenwell.
Dickensian? Yes. Sentimental? No. The resolution offers a happy ending much in the manner of Condition of Muzak -- ironic, sardonic, hopeful. Moorcock likes his fellow human beings, even some of the worst of them, though he rarely sees them as anything but what they are. The scenes in Rwanda -- angry, accurate, urgent -- are as good as anything Moorcock has done. I loved this book which, like Mother London, rewards several readings. It seems almost a different book every time you come back to it. A classic from one of our finest modern novelists. Totally recommended!

Rating:
Summary: Eloquent, funny, savage
Review: 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 'totalitarian
capitalism' -- 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 and
wrestling 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 his
holocaust 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!

Rating:
Summary: Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll -- A Moral Tale!
Review: 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 of
Books 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.