This is a sort of biography of multiple characters as their lives in london interact. On a minor note all of the characters suffer from mental issues due to being psychic. I say this is a minor note as being a bit psychic certainly hasn't done any of them any good and doesn't play a very large role in the story.
Its very well written with very well rounded characters. I will say i did occasionally get confused amongst some of the minor characters, the story jumps back and forth through time a lot and you could say there are a lot of moving parts.
I'm sure some familiarity with london and its history would be beneficial but i still liked it despite my lack of background knowledge.
Its also quite long and might reward multiple reads as there is a lot to dig through. ( )

I gave this over 50 pages, and can only cringe at the thought of reading the next 400 some odd pages. ( )

PEARLY KING OF PIMLICO. PEARLY QUEEN OF DALSTON. Their proud, knowing, friendly faces look no different from the gypsies, the travellers, the first settlers who returned to London after the desolation, drifting in from all the compass points, bringing their carts to market, some to settle, some to stay on the outskirts and grow lavender; some to put down roots in Kent and plant orchard; horse people from India to found the New Troy, powerful kings and queens, arrogant creators of cities and dynasties wherever they paused; always travelling on again, perhaps to the other planets, to the stars; unremarked carriers of civilisation, showing few signs of it in themselves, but spreading it like a virus across the universe.

When we first meet David Mummery, Mary Gasalee and Josef Kiss, they are all out-patients attending the same group therapy session. All three have the gift or curse of being able to hear other people's thoughts, which has led them to a life in and out of mental hospitals and on constant medication to suppress the voices in their heads. The only one ever to have used his talent is Mr Kiss, who made a living in the pre-war music halls with a mind-reading act that was rather too successful for his own good, and had a knack for locating people buried alive under collapsed buildings as an ARP warden during the Blitz.

The story goes backwards and forwards in time between the Blitz and the late 1980s, giving the reader a window in to the lives of the three main characters and their friends and acquaintances, and so we can feel their regret at the way the city they love has changed through the years. ( )

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.) ( )

Novel