Mother London [Paperback]

I bought this in paperback in England. The store had a pile of them so I assume it's in print there. I read it on the plane home. What a perfect book for a nervous traveler -- for the first time in my life I forgot to give my whole attention to keeping the plane airborne! All the way to New York, all the way home, with the warmest, happiest chapters at the end to finish off with when you get back into your own familiar territory. But now London is familiar territory, too. Read this and know a city as one who loves it and grew up there. The Blitz scenes are worth the money alone! Funny, moving, profound,unsentimental, humane. This is a big novel, with a big generous heart. I would not be the first to compare it to Dickens. Peter Ackroyd, Dickens's and London's biographer, has compared Moorcock to Dickens and has given lavish praise to MOTHER LONDON, as have many London literary critics. Another London novel KING OF THE CITY is also a great read, though very, very different. Read MOTHER LONDON and see the city at her best, dauntless under the Nazi bombing raids, her ordinary citizens not only surviving and making the best of things, but making the quality of their lives better through sheer old-fashioned grit and determination. A lesson for all of us who never experienced our home under constant daily attack, but a heartening message with an old-fashioned up-beat celebration of ordinary human beings. Wonderful!

Why this masterpiece is not in print in America while so much lightweight BritLit fills the stacks, I cannot explain. The London online Guardian has just done a discussion group on this book and it is fascinating to see how the writer, in the Q&A, describes his intentions -- working inwards and outwards from the key Blitz scenes which are at once the most terrifying and uplifting of the whole novel. This novel doesn't let you in easily but once you are there, you have to let it seize you and carry you along. When you do, you find that you are experiencing something both warm, magical, humane, profoundly funny and with a respect for the under-dog we have not seen in this country since Steinbeck's generation. Maybe an English Don DeLillo ? Really, there's no comparison. Moorcock is as modern as today's Middle East and as compassionate as Mother Therese. You won't regret taking the trouble to read this once. And you will find yourself reading it again and again for the rest of your life!! Ask those of us who have been rereading this since it came out! A genuine modern classic.

As much as I love the concept of Moorcock's Multiverse novels, I have to admit that it takes a lot of searching to find the gems amidst all the rest, since many of them were written when he was a lot younger (and often very quickly) and have a bit of a slapdash quality to them, so that the concept is clearly there but it's also all over the place. His best books are the ones where the vision is clear from the onset and he manages to sustain across the entire work, like the Jerry Cornelius novels. And this one. This is probably his most famous work to non-SF readers, I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it's "mainstream" because even though there aren't people with giant black swords cutting everyone to pieces and invoking ancient gods, it's still very clearly a Moorcock book. This is probably the best novel to recommend to people who want to get into him but are scared off by his other novels because it's self contained and more or less "normal". Basically it's his love letter to the city of London, through the eyes of three characters, Mary Gasalee, David Mummery, and Josef Kiss, all of whom were involved in avoiding getting bombs dropped on them during the Blitz and who we follow as the story reels back and forth in time, as the characters wander all over the neighborhoods of London, running into the people there and commenting on the changing times. Moorcock evokes the spirit of London through the characters, both literally and figuritively (Mummery is compiling notes about the city, Gasalee and Kiss are both mildly psychic I think), in the same way that Ulysses gives you a tour of Dublin and Lanark represents Glasgow (on that note, has there even been a definitive novel of NYC . . . Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer?) in a way that lets an outsider like myself get a feel for the city and it's movements but at the same time I think you'd have to truly be a Londoner to understand it all . . . by making the foundation of the novel rooted in the Blitz and having everything either proceed from or regress to there he centers it on what is probably the most defining event for most of London, and contrasts both the great uncertainty and fear of those days with London's nonchalance and ability to survive . . . the shockwaves of it continue to resonate throughout the book, like echoes that haven't reached their targets yet. And due to the characters being psychic, interspersed throughout the narrative are the jumbled thoughts of the people of London, giving voice to the millions that live there, adding a different texture to the proceedings. Moorcock throws everything he can into the novel, giving us a city and a people that are comic and tragic, mundane and grand, all at the same time, creating a story that could only happen in one place, hinting that the only way to really survive is to create your own myths, and run with them. What you get there isn't so much a tightly plotted story but a series of images cascading one after the other, putting together a picture of a place that you'd never understand completely unless you lived there, but since most of us don't, this is the closest we'll ever come. I don't know if it was ever published in the US, but it's certainly out of print here now, though I'm sure used bookstores and UK-related websites have it, since it's definitely still available there I'd recommend snagging it. It shouldn't be the only Moorcock book you ever read, but if you have to start somewhere or if you really only want to read one, this would be it.