This epic portion from the kitchen of Michael Moorcock’s imagination is a vast, uncorseted, sentimental, comic, elegiac salmagundy of a novel, so deeply within a certain tradition of English writing, indeed, of English popular culture, that it feels foreign, just as Diana Dors, say, scarcely seems to come from the same country as Deborah Kerr.
Mother London contains obvious input from the music hall – Josef Kiss, the central character, himself started out working the halls as a mind-reader. And Moorcock tends to create his characters with a few, swift, sure strokes, brilliant and two-dimensional, just as the characters in music-hall sketches, or, indeed, the personas of the performers themselves are created.
He also does not deny the influence of pulp fiction – a whole generation of English youth nourished its dreams on Western novels – nor of The Magnet, The Gem, nor certain kinds of teddibly, teddibly Bridish popular history. (He quotes copiously from Arthur Mee.) But across the ad hoc structure and the unapologetically visionary quality of it all necessarily falls the incandescent shadow of William Blake, for whom there was no distinction between the real and the imaginary and whose phantom rises again every time we see a way out of that particular trap.
It isn’t really a question of ‘magic realism’, that much-abused term. For Moorcock’s Londoners, nothing could be more magical than the real fabric of the city they love and the stories with which it echoes.
A city is a repository of the past. Therefore Mother London is organised as an anthology of memories – recollections from the pasts of a group of men and women who meet regularly at an NHS clinic (under threat) to collect their tablets and enjoy group therapy.
Not that any of them are deranged, exactly. But they are all sensitives, some of them perhaps too sensitive to the stories of the city and its myriad voices. The grandly eccentric old man, Josef Kiss, can hear what people think. Sometimes it drives him mad.
We can hear the voices, too. The narrative is seamed with them, voices in a multitude of tongues, speaking platitudes, mouthing sexual paranoia, prejudice, gossip, wild talk, abuse . . . the city talking to herself. She is not a loving mother. But we must take her as we find her; she is the only one we have.
During the Blitz, Josef Kiss put his talents as a mind-reader to work, seeking survivors in the burning ruins. He did not find the beautiful Mary Gasalee among the ruins, however. She walked out of the flames by herself, carrying her new-born baby in her arms.
In spite of this authentic miracle, Mary’s daughter grows up to be a best-selling historical novelist, not the new Messiah. Though the novel ends with the joyously consummatory marriage of Josef and Mary, there is no suggestion this event might cue in the arrival of another saviour, even though the city that survived the fire from heaven might now be in need of divine intervention to save it from the effects of late capitalism – the property boom, the demise of history, the exile of the working class from the city they built.
For the London Moorcock celebrates is working-class London, whose history has always survived by word of mouth, in stories and anecdotes. He takes you on a grand tour of the forgotten, neglected parts of London, as far as Mitcham in the South, but always coming back to W 11, where, twenty years ago, you could see the Proverbs of Hell chalked up on the walls.
And if Josef and Mary turn out to be indestructible, as they do, perhaps there is hope in the infinite resilience of narrative itself.
Not for Moorcock the painful, infrequent excretion of dry little novels like so many rabbit pellets; his is the grand, messy flux itself, in all its heroic vulgarity, its unquenchable optimism, its enthusiasm for the inexhaustible variousness of things. Posterity will certainly give him that due place in the English literature of the late twentieth century which his more anaemic contemporaries grudge; indeed, he is so prolific it will probably look as though he has written most of it, anyway.
(1988)