King of the City

Michael Moorcock

London has always been a part of Moorcock's fictional landscape, and like Mother London, this novel is a return to that real life city with its powerful fictional resonance. On the surface it is a novel about a war photographer turned paparazzi, a biography of a man whose life has taken many turns.

It opens in the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana, with Denny Dover coming back with the evidence of the faked death of a powerful media magnate. His sleazy photographs do nothing but turn him into a pariah, in the new climate he finds himself in not even the tabloids will touch his pictures. Financially ruined he goes to ground, and from there we are taken into a journey into his past. We see all the colour and energy of the East End of London from the seventies to the nineties. From Dover's early career as a rock musician and the dark brutish word of illegal boxing and dog fights, to the empty world of unbridled consumption.

His entourage, friends gathered from childhood, are ever present in his life. Consisting of his cousin Rosie Beck, his most trusted confidant, the eccentric Tubby, and John Barbican Begg - otherwise known as Barbie, a man who grows into someone so powerful that he becomes almost untouchable.

It isn't just London we see though, through Dover's photographers eyes we see the atrocities in Ruanda and Kosovo, and a tragedy that draws a wedge between him and Rosie that seem almost impossible to reconcile.

The novel has an incredible breadth, as ambitious as any of Moorcock's earlier literary works and quite breathtaking in its sheer energy. Sometimes scathing and satirical, at others warm and intimate. It succeeds in compressing the ups and downs of an entire lifetime filled with experience into a single work of fiction. At times it is almost biographical, more than almost any other previous novel Moorcock has brought himself into the work. It is in every sense a novel that blurs fiction and reality, even down to the dramatic ending.