I'm very surprised no-one has reviewed this rather good and quite accessible novel.
Those who can't stomach SF and fantasy but liked, for example Martin Amis' "London Fields" or Peter Ackroyd's non-fiction about London, should have little trouble with this, while Moorcock's genre fans should be interested to read his take on the "literary" novel.
The SF is reduced to one character being telepathic and Moorcock also tones down his postmodernism - there are some "streams of consciousness" but they are quite short and helpfully in italics. The chronology flits about in "cut-up" style but only by whole chapters.
Three friends who met in a lunatic asylum, Mary, Josef and David, (mother, father and adopted "son"! But this isn't Incredibly Portentous and they aren't a bit holy) criss-cross London from the Blitz in 1940 to the arrival of Mrs Thatcher in 1980. They each have chapters from their perspective but for me the most engaging is the larger than life but kindly Josef Kiss. ('Ware very weird surnames all through, as per Dickens.) Using his telepathy in a pre-war mind-reading music-hall act, he is driven insane as, plausibly, he also picks up the thoughts of people with horrific sexual fantasies. Partly rehabilitated by heroically finding people trapped beneath buildings in the Blitz, he and the other two stick up for each other through the next 40 years, in and out of therapy.
Thatcher and Thatcherism get a fair old kicking, at the shambolic but moving funeral of David's Uncle Jim, a civil servant under eight prime ministers and the fiasco of the yuppified restaurant an acquaintance almost persuades the friends to invest in (spoiler here!) but the politics doesn't unbalance the book, unlike the later "King Of The City". (A much more knockabout book in any case and not a sequel.)
The descriptions of various parts of London - the pubs round Ludgate Hill with names of legends as old as the city, the riots at the Notting Hill Carnival in the 70s, the canals particularly spring to mind - are great and detailed.
But there's a huge accretion of detail round the characters too, of all the Hollywood films, cowboy comics and other ephemera they remember. They relate to and get sustenance from their heroes from these to various degrees. In the asylum, one character lives entirely in such fantasy worlds. The more balanced characters draw on them to play jokes or get out of tight spots - and then become mythologised themselves.
And this is really the theme of the novel. "By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them, we should undoubtedly go mad." (And three very different mates sticking by one another through thick and thin doesn't hurt either.) ( )