King of the City

A surfeit of pleasures.

A modern Dickens, which it doesn't try to hide, it even makes a direct reference to [b: Bleak House |31242|Bleak House|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1280113147s/31242.jpg|2960365]. Wonderful descriptive writing, 5 or 6 big vivid set pieces that you'll never forget. The characters are hyper-real, like real people but just a bit more interesting than any real person has a right to be ;) .
The narrator has his own unique voice, with his own slang etc. this can be a little disconcerting at the start but you soon get used to it.

In similar fashion to [b: Mother London|60160|Mother London|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347548766s/60160.jpg|1145243] we start off in present day show more (circa 1997) then jump back in time and get a biography of events until we catch up with ourselves again in the last chapter. Unlike Mother London, there is only one point-of-view character and the time jumps are kept to a minimum, so in that regard its far easier to follow.

Nevertheless, i still got a little confused at times as to the year or mixed up among some of the side characters. It doesn't help that some of the cast have nicknames or are sometimes referred to by their first or last names.
Its a very England and London specific book so there were a lot of references i didn't get. Some of the political and social elements went over my head too. But none of that mattered in the end.

Like most Dickens novels there is a plot but nobody pays much attention to it. You could say its a commentary on the rise of consumer culture and the 1% but its really about the development of the various characters. And as for those characters, this time around (see below) our incestuous triumvirate are three cousins, our POV character who is an ex-Rock n'Roll star turned photojournalist, a hyper-intelligent Angelina Jolie-esque aid organizer and a man i can best describe as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Charles Foster-Kane.

It wasn't always perfect, there where peaks and troughs but overall a very easy 5 stars to give. An incredibly dense feeling book, 110% of story.

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Ok this is so weird, Moorcock has now written the same story at least 3 times! First there was [b: Elric of Melniboné |30036|Elric of Melniboné (Elric, #1)|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388345555s/30036.jpg|388812], then [b: Jerry Cornelius|2715615|The Final Programme|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367455525s/2715615.jpg|1978586] and now this. That's not to say the stories are similar, they're all incredibly different but its the difference between '10 things i hate about you' and the 'Taming of the Shrew', or perhaps a little further apart, like 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'Hamlet'.
With 'Jerry Cornelius' i dismissed the similarities as Moorcock just being short of an idea but by now it feels more deliberate. As if the author is working on some sort of Meta level, creating his own myth-cycle or something.
Anyway none of that actually matters, this is an entirely self-suffient book so i've reviewed it entirely on its own merits. show less

More immediately accessible but less humane than Moorcock's masterful Mother London, King of the City is a dense, frustrating, wild, funny, incisive, and wide-ranging romp through the second half of the twentieth century. Seen through the eyes of a single narrator, Denny Dover, a rock star turned photojournalist turned paparazzo, the book covers the slow death of London's micro-neighborhoods and their unique cultures, victims of gentrification and neoliberalism, personified in Denny's cousin John Barbican Begg. Their antagonistic frenemy relationship is complicated by the fact that they are both in love with another cousin, Rosie, a quintessential do-gooder/NGO worker who rises to become one of England's most prominent philanthropists show more and Johnny's widow.

The writing fizzes with wit and spleen, the descriptions are vivid, and many of the satirical elements dealing with fame/celebrity, capitalism/"globalization", gentrification, and the culture of screens/privacy read as if they could have been written today (2025) rather than a quarter-century ago. The portrait of a changing London is incredible and so pointed and filled with rage and sadness. I particularly appreciated how the Ye Olde East End simulacrum Barbican builds after tearing down the real thing starts to disintegrate; the stone and wood veneers mimicking the now-demolished historical architecture peel off after just a few years. It's all very Dismaland avant la lettre. (Maybe Moorcock is Bansky? You heard it first here, folks!)

There is a cast of, if not thousands, at least hundreds, real and imagined. It gets a little confusing, as everyone seems to be related through blood, marriage, or step-sibling-dom, and I couldn't always keep track of these webs. I also had trouble figuring out why some people appear as themselves (Lemmy, David Bowie, Johnny Lydon, Salman Rushdie, many more) while others are given silly aliases (Kingsley and Martin Amis were the only ones I was 100% sure about, but I think Sting, Julian Barnes, and a few others also appear under fake names). Even with the obfuscation it's like a who's-who of the interesting and arty of the mid-70s through late 90s, an insane little puzzle to figure out.

While this book was in many ways a staggering work of art, I had trouble with the pacing at times. Sometimes we speed through decades at a breakneck speed; other times 50 pages are spent in minute detail on rehearsals for a Live-Aid-like concert that takes place in the middle of Tower Bridge. A long set-piece in North Africa felt slow as treacle and tangential to the main event, only to become crucially important to the characters' relationships later in the book. I might read 100 pages in a day, and then struggle to get through 5 the next. The ending was (on the surface) unsatisfactory, though ambiguous enough to provide some food for thought. These issues stopped the book from being a true five-star read, but there is no denying how inventive, strange, hilarious, and angry it is. show less

King of the City is at once splenetic and hilarious, tearing into people and institutions who deserve it, yet affectionate about the many different, vital worlds of London and its denizens