Book Review: Mother London

A Book You Can Buy From Me

Book Title: Mother London

Author: Michael Moorcock

Author's web page: http://www.multiverse.org/

Date: 1989

Publisher: Crown

Length: 496 pages

ISBN: 0684861410

Quote: "[H]e admits the pills still help. He is a stickler for taking them, refusing to run the risks...of deliberately releasing himself from the course..."

I don't have the patience to read most novels written for adults, so when one of them becomes A Book You Can Buy From Me, it has to be good. And Mother London demands a lot of patience. So what's in it that justifies the expenditure of so much attention? Basically, this novel seems to be written to accomplish four distinct things:

1. To celebrate the Greatest Generation--the generation born between 1920 and 1945.

2. To celebrate the history of London, and present a case for preserving more of it rather than flattening it all out with planned "standardisation."

3. To protest the overprescription of psychiatric medication for people who are eccentric, but not dangerous, without it. (Most of the main characters in Mother London are, in the reality of the novel, involuntary psychic receivers who feel stressed by constantly picking up other people's thoughts.)

4. To spin a passionate romance in which a fifty-something man and a seventy-something man, who are friends, compete for the love of a sixty-something woman. Don't believe it could happen? Try living in a de facto "adult community" like the small town where I'm writing this. It can, and does.

In addition to succeeding in all of these achievements, Mother London will also shock the average American reader. Most of us rather like the glamour of a monarchy, as long as we don't have to pay for it, and since most of the British people we know don't burden us with their political disputes, most of us have never heard the kind of opinions some characters express about the royal family and even Churchill.

Anyway, since abusive diagnoses and prescriptions are a theme here, I read Mother London. During the first half of it I had a sinking feeling that I wasn't going to be able to recommend it; the effects of misprescription would probably, in real life, have done more damage sooner. Still, I found myself getting sucked into the story, particularly enjoying the long dream sequence where the narcoleptic character keeps up on pop culture, and weaves celebrities into her adventures, because the nurses who sit with her watch movies and TV. And the medical chickens come home to roost at the end; in order to preserve suspense I won't say what effects inappropriate medications have on which characters.

But is the publisher--or reprinter, since what I have is the Harper paperback reprint--justified in calling this a comic novel? It's so ambitious, and so sprawling, that it does contain jokes. (The dream sequence is the funniest.) It contains brawls, and sex (with the now obligatory female-voiced vulgarities), and a couple of coyly vulgar early-nineteenth-century-type pub songs that deserve inclusion in the next anthology of the very worst poetry in English. It contains a lot of things, but most of the time Mother London is not especially funny. It's comedy in the sense that, for most of the sympathetic characters, it's not tragedy...but then for at least one character I liked it is tragedy.

If you enjoy fiction, you'll probably enjoy Mother London. It contains a little bit of everything people who love fiction seem to want in novels. Even if you've known someone who, as a result of the harmful medications that were prescribed in the 1950s, thinks s/he is psychically picking up other people's thoughts, and know that in real life this condition is never as helpful as it is to some of these characters and usually creates more problems than it creates for any of the characters, the story is lively enough that you can suspend disbelief and enjoy the fantasy of a telepathic community.

Once again, you can get lower prices from other sources on Amazon, but if you send $5 for a clean copy and $5 for shipping to salolianigodagewi@yahoo.com, Moorcock (or his favorite charity) will receive $1; I'm not aware of any other book resellers who can make that claim.