Mother London

"In a sense, Mother London connects with what I’ve just been talking about. Michael Moorcock is probably best known generally for a series of sword and sorcery novels, but he’s also very much in the tradition of the earlier writing I mentioned: Victorian-Edwardian ideas of fiction, of the man of letters, the guy who turns his hand to any form of writing and is very much a person of London. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Mike grew up in South London and began writing around the age of 15. But this particular book is really the testament of his whole experience and career, which also back-references entire forms of popular London generic writing for generations and generations. It shows the Blitz [when Nazi Germany bombarded London in World War Two ] as another moment of great psychological trauma and describes how the city deals with it. The characters are, in a sense, damaged sleepwalkers, but they’re also taken up with a kind of visionary reality. There’s a woman who walks through the flames of the Blitz and survives. The others are trying to come to terms with the contemporary city that’s emerging, the one we’ve been talking about, which hasn’t actually arrived yet (this is still the Thatcher period). In a sense, Moorcock is a perfect pivotal figure for me: he anticipates the mood of what’s coming through new, neoconservative policies, but also reaches back to acknowledge and deal with the forms of a larger, more generous kind of Dickensian fiction, which he has lurking in his background. Yes. It’s a blow against cultural amnesia. There seems to be a belief now, with the world of cyberspace, that people don’t need to make the old archaeological journeys into the literature of the past – that they can download or access elements or fragments and that it will give them enough to know where they are. So there’s a cut-off from a long tradition, which has gone on through various forms of education for several hundred years, whereby you were grounded deeply in the literature of the past (either the classic past or your own, recent past) that really doesn’t exist anymore. When I see new pieces of work about the city, they’re always grounded in the contemporary landscape and topography – they deal with what happens on the streets, in the clubs, et cetera. The writers don’t seem to feel obliged – or they don’t have the urge – to understand what was there before, or other versions of what people have done with the same stuff. Moorcock’s the last of the great memory men."