Michael Moorcock's novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since - by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment - the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him. It was, presumably, some kind of survivor's trophy. Only tourists are frightened by these urban mad; respectable citizens good-naturedly ignore them as being of no more account than pigeons and as inscrutable as gang graffiti. In New York and Los Angeles (where they parody the consumer-mad host society by heaping their possessions in supermarket trollies), they are called the 'homeless'. There is, as far as I know, no generic English name. Moorcock calls them 'ordinary Londoners'.

LRB 1 September 1988 | PDF Download