ARTICLES AND ESSAYS Unreal City: Reflections on London and the Novel in the Twentieth Century

London has been peopled as much in the mind as in its streets. No city has been written about more. Nowhere else have novelists more frequently chosen to plot narratives, set characters and explore circumstances. The very idea of London in the twentieth century, how it has been thought about and imagined, has been constructed as much through fiction, mainly the novel but to a lesser extent film and television, as through any medium that seeks to rely on ‘fact’. Perhaps, indeed, London and Londoners can be most truly realized in fiction. It is the novelists who, in Ford Madox Ford’s phrase, are able to reveal to us the ‘Soul of London’. This ‘unreal city’, truly unknowable, its life-force beating to a superhuman pulse, seems to become most penetrable when following the lives of its inhabitants as worked out in the novelist’s imagination. There could be many ways to celebrate this novelist’s construction of London and the Londoner in the twentieth century. Geography, perhaps, where London fiction got under the skin of the changing preoccupations of fashion in almost every town, village, hamlet in the capital. A long study, for instance, could be made of the meaning of Notting Hill, between Richard Curtis’s eponymous movie of 1999 and G. K. Chesterton’s fantasia of local attachments, The Napoleon of Notting Hill of 1904. It would take in James Curtis’s low-life novels of the 1930s, would include a talented cluster from the late 1950s and early ’60s (Colin MacInnes’s Absolut