Vegetarian Books
Bookmark the site !
Select Country
UK Vegetarians
US Vegetarians
DE Vegetarier
FR Végétariens
Books : Mother London
See Larger Image |
Mother London by: Michael Moorcock List Price: £8.99 Vegetarian Books Price: £6.99 You Save: £2.00 (22%)Prices subject to change. |
|
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813 EAN: 9780684861418 ISBN: 0684861410 Label: Scribner Manufacturer: Scribner Number Of Pages: 512 Publication Date: January 05, 2004 Publisher: Scribner Studio: Scribner Sales Rank: 88527 Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Editorial Review: Amazon.co.uk Review: Michael Moorcock's Mother London is perhaps his best known literary work and for good reason. Shortlisted for the Whitbread fiction prize this has the feel of a novel by a writer at the acme of his powers. A large, though never sprawling, novel Mother London follows three mental-hospital outpatients Mary Gasalee, David Mummery and Josef Kiss and their friends, in an episodic, non-linear history of the capital from the Blitz to present day. Most noteworthy is the astounding humanity of the novel (a quality redolent in all his work including its excellent follow up King of the City), with all of London's outcasts and marginals mentioned and defended. This could have reduced the novel to polemic, to parody or to the dreadful, mind-narrowing of political correctness but instead is testimony to the fact that Moorcock has created such a fine array of believable, flawed, kind characters. Throughout the book the voice of ordinary Londoners forces its way into the narratives through snippets of conversations "overheard" by the three main characters who each have, to a greater or lesser extent, the gift of telepathy. This hint of magic is underplayed throughout so that the work never succumbs to the straitjacket of magical realism itself: the conceit is used very successfully to take our characters out of themselves, and to allow London, and the voices that constitute her being, into the novel as a character herself. A vast and superb achievement (London novelists such as Charles Dickens, Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair all come to mind as peers), Mother London is a book to cherish--rarely have the voices of this wonderful city spoken out so clearly through such an expansive story. --Mark Thwaite Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Familiar streets transformedLike Neil Gaiman (Gaimanesque?), the supernatural is everyday in Mother London. And like Anthony Burgess (Burgessian?), the authorial voice here is unlike that of any other Moorcock work, despite thematic (and political) resonances with the histories of the Pyat Quartet. This is London describing itself through the glimmering weirdos that love it. Indeed, the London of Josef Kiss, David Mummery, Mary Gasalee and their lives is at both fantastical and familiar, a new world and a common one revealing some old scars. I cannot think that these streets will look the same again after this fragmented little joy of a book. It misses a little something, but not much. It is worth both your time and your money. Rating: - Flotsam and JetsamI loved the structure of this novel. The chapters in each book ebb and flow through time, mirroring London's great river, revealing the flotsam and jetsam of the book's voices and inhabitants. The magical realism bit of this book tends to idealise London, but only in the most humane of ways. If you want to see the flip side and get deep down and dirty however, I'd recommend anything by Iain Sinclair. Rating: - Wonderful novelThis is a wonderful novel. Rich, complex and genuinely humane. Michael Moorcock's ability to create realistic characters often in the most fantastic situations is here seen at its finest, where he is describing ordinary Londoners in an ordinary city. Only the device of using 'voices' -- a sort of Londoners' chorus -- makes this book in any way fantastic. He takes a triangle of disparate people -- a music hall performer, a reclusive writer and a woman who has awakened from a coma after many years -- and describes them, their relatives and friends during the years from 1942 (the Blitz) to 1988, but it is not the typical 'family saga'. Its picture of an entire city is loving and at the same time profound. It could be read in conjunction ... Read More: Rating: - A joy....I've always had a 'fondness' for Moorcock, and read all, and I mean all, his Eternal Champion series as a teenager, but would find it hard to recommend any to anyone other than teenagers now. This novel, however, is a joy to read, Complex, deep, but always with a wonderful sense of the love of life that clearly infects Mr Moorcock to this day if you read his website. I cannot recommend this book highly enough and the ending is an elegy to better days ahead..... Rating: - Victorian virtues, modern obsessionsThis is probably my favourite novel by a living English author. I recently bought my third copy because I keep lending it and not getting it back. Anyone interested in the history of contemporary London but who wants to read a novel with a cast of characters and variety of scenery as rich and complex as Dickens should get Mother London. My only advice is not to go lending it to anyone. You'll probably find you have to buy another! |
|
