London In Fiction
Peter Ackroyd , English Music (Penguin, UK); Hawksmoor (Penguin, UK); The House of Doctor Dee (Penguin, UK); The Great Fire of London (Penguin, UK); Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (Minerva, UK). Ackroyd's novels are all based on arcane aspects of London, wrapped into thriller-like narratives, and conjuring up kaleidoscopic visions of various ages of English culture. Hawskmoor, about the great church architect, is the most popular and enjoyable. Martin Amis , London Fields (Vintage/Random House). "Ferociously witty, scabrously scatological and balefully satirical", it says on the back cover, though many regard Amis Jnr's observation of lowlife London as pretentious drivel, written by a man who lives in comfortable Notting Hill. Anthony Burgess , A Dead Man in Deptford (Vintage, UK). Playwright Christopher Marlowe's unexplained murder in a tavern in Deptford provides the background for this historical novel, which brims over with Elizabethan life. Angela Carter , The Magic Toyshop (Virago, UK). Carter's most celebrated novel, about a provincial woman moving to London. G.K. Chesterton , The Napoleon of Notting Hill (Wordsworth). Written in 1904 but set eighty years in the future, in a London divided into squabbling independent boroughs - something prophetic there - and ruled by royalty selected on a rotational basis. Liza Cody , Bucket Nut; Monkey Wrench; Musclebound (all Bloomsbury, UK). Feisty, would-be female wrestler of uncertain sexuality, with a big mouth, in thrillers set in lowlife London. Joseph Conrad , The Secret Agent (Penguin). Conrad's wonderful spy story based on the botched anarchist bombing of Greenwich Observatory in 1894, exposing the hypocrisies of both the police and the anarchists. Charles Dickens , Bleak House; A Christmas Tale; Little Dorritt; Oliver Twist (all Penguin). The descriptions in Dickens' London-based novels have become the cliches of the Victorian city: the fog, the slums and the stinking river. Little Dorritt is set mostly in the Borough and contains some of his most trenchant pieces of social analysis; much of Bleak House is set around the Inns of Court that Dickens knew so well. Arthur Conan Doyle , The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Penguin). Deer-stalkered sleuth Sherlock Holmes and dependable sidekick Dr Watson penetrate all levels of Victorian London, from Limehouse opium dens to millionaires' pads. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four are set entirely in the capital. Graham Greene , The Human Factor; It's a Battlefield; The Ministry of Fear; The End of the Affair (all Penguin). Greene's London novels are all fairly bleak, ranging from The Human Factor, which probes the underworld of the city's spies, to The Ministry of Fear, which is set during the Blitz. Nick Hornby , High Fidelity (Indigo/Riverhead). Hornby's extraordinarily successful second book focuses on the loves and life of a thirty-something bloke who lives near the Arsenal ? rather like Hornby himself. Hanif Kureishi , The Buddha of Suburbia; The Black Album; Love in a Blue Time (all Faber & Faber). The Buddha of Suburbia is a raunchy account of life as an Anglo-Asian in late 1960s suburbia, and the art scene of the 70s. The Black Album is a thriller set in London in 1989, while Love in a Blue Time is a set of short stories set in 1990s London. Jack London , The People of the Abyss (Pluto Press). London's classic London novel. Timothy Mo , Sour Sweet (Vintage). Very funny and very sad story of a newly arrived Chinese family struggling to understand the English way of life in the Sixties, written with great insight by Mo, who is himself of mixed parentage. Iris Murdoch , Under the Net; The Black Prince; An Accidental Man; Bruno's Dream; The Green Knight (all Penguin). Under the Net was Murdoch's first, funniest, and arguably her best novel, centred on a hack writer living in London. Many of her subsequent novels are set in various parts of middle-class London and span several decades of the second half of the twentieth century. The Green Knight, her last novel, is a strange fable mixing medieval and modern London, with lashings of the Bible and attempted fratricide. George Orwell , Keep the Aspidistra Flying (Penguin). Orwell's 1930s critique of Mammon is equally critical of its chief protagonist, whose attempt to rebel against the system only condemns him to poverty, working in a London bookshop and freezing his evenings away in a miserable rented room. Edward Rutherford , London (Arrow/Fawcett). A big, big novel which stretches from Roman times to the present and deals with the most dramatic moments of London's history. Masses of historical detail woven in with the story of several families. Iain Sinclair , White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (Granta, UK); Downriver (Vintage, UK); Radon Daughters (Granta, UK). Sinclair's idiosyncratic and richly textured novels are a strange mix of Hogarthian caricature, New Age mysticism and conspiracy-theory rant. Deeply offensive and highly recommended. P.G. Wodehouse , Jeeves Omnibus (Hutchinson, UK). Bertie Wooster and his stalwart butler, Jeeves, were based in Mayfair, and many of their exploits take place with London showgirls, and in the Drones gentlemen's club. Virginia Woolf , Mrs Dalloway (Penguin). Woolf's novel relates the thoughts of a London society hostess and a shell-shocked war veteran, with her "stream of consciousness" style in full flow.
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