A surfeit of pleasures.

A modern Dickens, which it doesn't try to hide, it even makes a direct reference to [b: Bleak House |31242|Bleak House|Charles Dickens|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1280113147s/31242.jpg|2960365]. Wonderful descriptive writing, 5 or 6 big vivid set pieces that you'll never forget. The characters are hyper-real, like real people but just a bit more interesting than any real person has a right to be ;) .
The narrator has his own unique voice, with his own slang etc. this can be a little disconcerting at the start but you soon get used to it.

In similar fashion to [b: Mother London|60160|Mother London|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347548766s/60160.jpg|1145243] we start off in present day (circa 1997) then jump back in time and get a biography of events until we catch up with ourselves again in the last chapter. Unlike Mother London, there is only one point-of-view character and the time jumps are kept to a minimum, so in that regard its far easier to follow.

Nevertheless, i still got a little confused at times as to the year or mixed up among some of the side characters. It doesn't help that some of the cast have nicknames or are sometimes referred to by their first or last names.
Its a very England and London specific book so there were a lot of references i didn't get. Some of the political and social elements went over my head too. But none of that mattered in the end.

Like most Dickens novels there is a plot but nobody pays much attention to it. You could say its a commentary on the rise of consumer culture and the 1% but its really about the development of the various characters. And as for those characters, this time around (see below) our incestuous triumvirate are three cousins, our POV character who is an ex-Rock n'Roll star turned photojournalist, a hyper-intelligent Angelina Jolie-esque aid organizer and a man i can best describe as a combination of Gordon Gekko and Charles Foster-Kane.

It wasn't always perfect, there where peaks and troughs but overall a very easy 5 stars to give. An incredibly dense feeling book, 110% of story.

******************************
Ok this is so weird, Moorcock has now written the same story at least 3 times! First there was [b: Elric of Melniboné |30036|Elric of Melniboné (Elric, #1)|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388345555s/30036.jpg|388812], then [b: Jerry Cornelius|2715615|The Final Programme|Michael Moorcock|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1367455525s/2715615.jpg|1978586] and now this. That's not to say the stories are similar, they're all incredibly different but its the difference between '10 things i hate about you' and the 'Taming of the Shrew', or perhaps a little further apart, like 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'Hamlet'.
With 'Jerry Cornelius' i dismissed the similarities as Moorcock just being short of an idea but by now it feels more deliberate. As if the author is working on some sort of Meta level, creating his own myth-cycle or something.
Anyway none of that actually matters, this is an entirely self-suffient book so i've reviewed it entirely on its own merits. ( )

King of the City is at once splenetic and hilarious, tearing into people and institutions who deserve it, yet affectionate about the many different, vital worlds of London and its denizens