Unfortunately, Mother London was swamped by the extra-literary controversies surrounding The Satanic Verses. It could have used some of the fortuitous timing that allows a book to mop up well-deserved honours and achieve a word-of-mouth readership that keeps it running for years. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as "the long-awaited sequel to a Whitbread Prize shortlisted book Mother London". Actually, this fly-pitched outlaw, spotted on the side of a telephone junction box outside Toynbee Hall, on Commercial Street in Whitechapel, had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. The candidate, a Father Christmas in civvies, knows that better than anyone, knows he's on a loser, but it hasn't dowsed his fire. No Londoner, according to the spin-doctors, is ever going to vote for a beard. The tilted look was watchful, eyes narrowed against bright light: a non-combatant shocked to find himself exposed on the hustings. There was nothing peevish or pop-eyed about this citizen. Around the time of the London mayoral election, that stupendous non-event in the calendar of civic discourse, posters appeared out of nowhere with the head of a man who wasn't quite Frank Dobson.
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