Mother London pivoted on the Blitz, on psychic damage, small urban miracles worked by human affection, a woman walking out of the fire with a newborn baby in her arms. The book is a great, humane document, written at a time when the old liberties were under threat and therefore more alive than ever. Its status as one of the novels by which a substantial portion of London memory can be recovered is assured. Mother London, a book whose reputation continued to grow as it became harder to find, as paperbacks disappeared and hardbacks drifted into charity shops, has now been reissued.
Rushdie, seduced by the high-definition celebrity culture of New York, new smells, brighter lights, has denounced his old midden for its failure to fire his imagination, but Moorcock, in whatever exile he finds himself, returns obsessively to his dream-source, the city of his birth. One strand in Salman Rushdie's novel, necessarily under-discussed, was Brick Lane-based, a Bollywood derive through the territory where I came across Moorcock's King of the City poster. Unfortunately, Mother London was swamped by the extra-literary controversies surrounding The Satanic Verses. It could have used some of the fortuitous timing that allows a book to mop up well-deserved honours and achieve a word-of-mouth readership that keeps it running for years. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as "the long-awaited sequel to a Whitbread Prize shortlisted book Mother London". Actually, this fly-pitched outlaw, spotted on the side of a telephone junction box outside Toynbee Hall, on Commercial Street in Whitechapel, had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. The candidate, a Father Christmas in civvies, knows that better than anyone, knows he's on a loser, but it hasn't dowsed his fire. No Londoner, according to the spin-doctors, is ever going to vote for a beard. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. Around the time of the London mayoral election, that stupendous non-event in the calendar of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn't quite Frank Dobson.
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