From Publishers Weekly
Like Gargantua or Tristram Shandy, Dennis "Denny" Dover is born with all the portents of some future myth. "I was born in Mustard Street. In the top back room of the Hare and Hounds. On 21 December 1952. My dad... was the last real Londoner to be hanged for murder." We first meet Denny, the narrator of Moorcock's scurrilously exuberant London novel, on a downer. He has scored a coup, photographing a supposedly dead English billionaire, Johnny Barbican Begg, enjoying illicit, copulatory bliss with an English countess on a Bahamian island. Denny's scoop is outscooped, however, by Princess Di's car wreck, which not only chases everything else off the headlines, but puts paparazzi in bad odor with the public, forcing Denny to hide out in an English resort town, Skerring. In the long flashback taking up most of the book, we go from the early '70s remnants of a swinging London, with Denny a cult rock and roll guitarist, to his news photography in Rwanda and then his paparazzo days. At the heart of Denny's story is his love for his cousin Rosie Beck, and for working-class London. Rosie metamorphoses from a radical to Barbican Begg's wife and, perhaps, the plotter of his downfall. Moorcock includes real people, like Johnny Lydon, and a host of fictional characters, like the Quentin Crisp-like actor, Norrie Stripling, as though the book were Moorcock's version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover: private favorites and public enemies. Fans of Moorcock's science fiction might find the references hard going, but readers of his Booker Prize-nominated Mother London will enjoy the novel's angry rant against the vices of the age. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
King of the City FROM THE PUBLISHER
Michael Moorcock, "one of the most exciting discoveries in the contemporary English novel [in] forty or so years" (Washington Post), returns with the story of the times and trials of Dennis Dover, former rock guitarist, photojournalist, paparazzo, and loyal denizen of Mother London, and his brilliant, beautiful, and socially conscious cousin, Rosie Beck. Since childhood they have been inseparable, delighting in the daily discoveries of a life with no limits. But now a powerful, unstoppable force that consumes the past indiscriminately, leaving nothing of substance in its wake, threatens the metropolis that nurtured them. The terminator is named John Barbican Begg. A hanger-on from Denny and Rosie's youth, he has become the morally corrupt center of their London, and the richest, most rapacious creature in the Western Hemisphere, with but one goal: to devour the entire world. And their only choices left are to join in, drop out ... or plot to destroy him.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Like Gargantua or Tristram Shandy, Dennis "Denny" Dover is born with all the portents of some future myth. "I was born in Mustard Street. In the top back room of the Hare and Hounds. On 21 December 1952. My dad... was the last real Londoner to be hanged for murder." We first meet Denny, the narrator of Moorcock's scurrilously exuberant London novel, on a downer. He has scored a coup, photographing a supposedly dead English billionaire, Johnny Barbican Begg, enjoying illicit, copulatory bliss with an English countess on a Bahamian island. Denny's scoop is outscooped, however, by Princess Di's car wreck, which not only chases everything else off the headlines, but puts paparazzi in bad odor with the public, forcing Denny to hide out in an English resort town, Skerring. In the long flashback taking up most of the book, we go from the early '70s remnants of a swinging London, with Denny a cult rock and roll guitarist, to his news photography in Rwanda and then his paparazzo days. At the heart of Denny's story is his love for his cousin Rosie Beck, and for working-class London. Rosie metamorphoses from a radical to Barbican Begg's wife and, perhaps, the plotter of his downfall. Moorcock includes real people, like Johnny Lydon, and a host of fictional characters, like the Quentin Crisp-like actor, Norrie Stripling, as though the book were Moorcock's version of the Sgt. Pepper album cover: private favorites and public enemies. Fans of Moorcock's science fiction might find the references hard going, but readers of his Booker Prize-nominated Mother London will enjoy the novel's angry rant against the vices of the age. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Shortlisted for the Whitbread, nominated for the Booker: another fabulous ride through London's recent history-here, the last four decades-that manages to be as sprawling as a Victorian social novel and as vigorous as an 18th-century picaresque. Author of more than 70 novels (including the SF trilogy begun with "Blood", 1995), Moorcock here picks up where he left off-artistically, not literally-with "Mother London "(1989). The story concerns three lives. Narrator Dennis Dover, son of the last Londoner hanged for murder, started out as a documentary photographer and ended up a sleazy paparazzo-and now, in newly sensitive, post-Di England-is unemployed. From this miserable perch, he takes a long, bitter, nostalgic, backwards look. Then there's Rosie, Dennis's cousin, whom Dennis dearly loves and who also, like Dennis, managed to pull herself out of working-class Brookgate. But most importantly, there's John Barbican Begg, who has evolved, through genius and ruthless avarice, into a media magnate, one of the world's wealthiest men. As these three move through the pop-riddled '60s, through the years of drugs, assassinations, and social upheavals and on to Thatcherite England and the present day, Moorcock fills the tale with real characters and situations, made-up characters and situations, and those somewhere in between. Americans at times may feel they could use a concordance-presumably the Brits could figure it out for themselves when it was published in England last year-but you soon give up caring. Moorcock's storytelling is just too powerful in a novel more than likely to invite comparisons to Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities". Certainly Moorcock strikes his big themes:sojourns to Africa and the Balkans echo with imperialism (both cultural and corporate) while contemporary London loses its soul to American-style consumerism. Yet at the same time "King of the City "is far more idiosyncratic than Wolfe's book-and more successful because of it-with a strongly autobiographic feel. Dennis, Rosie, and John Begg never illustrate the fable, as Moorcock calls it, but it emerges completely through them. One of our topmost novelists writing at the peak of his powers.
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