Bleeding London
Geoff Nicholson
Gollancz pbk, £9.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)
London. On the cusp of a new millennium, and the international taste-makers are calling it a cool city. Certainly enough writers are looking Londonwards, be it the Premier Division (Sinclair, Self, Amis) or just the First (John L Williams, Ackroyd). And although we fall back on the comfy cushion of cliché to say it, London really is the central character of Geoff Nicholson’s much awaited follow-up to his fabulous fetish fable, Footsucker.
'And I thought that London is mythical too, created in the image of each of its inhabitants, newly imagined with each new citizen, with each new attempt to describe it.'
In Bleeding London, Sheffield hard-man Mick Walton heads for the Smoke to dispute with the well-to-dos who gang-raped his stripper girlfriend, Gabby. In a shop called the London Particular, he falls in with the half-Japanese Judy Tanaka. She used to conduct walking tours for a company owned by the unfortunately named Stuart London. Meantime, Stuart, bored with life in general and business in particular, has decided to walk every street in the city.
'When a man is tired of London he’s ready for a bullet.'
Initially disparate, even crass, this book resolves itself as something rather special. Nicholson is fascinated by the city: by it’s Sinclairian secrets, yes, its Ackroydian histories, certainly, but equally by its myriad of maps. Mick is gifted a jigsaw of the city. Stuart blackens out streets in his A-Z as he goes. Judy keeps plastic overlays to her own map, conscripting her lovers to mark the sites where they have had sex. Her self-declared ambition is to be fucked in every postal district.
'Maps are euphemisms, clean, clear, self-explanatory substitutes for all the mess and mayhem...'
This is a comic novel (albeit a black, vicious, occasionally pornographic one), concerned with looking down on London from above. Nicholson’s theme is the city as body. In Judy’s own words:
'My veins throb as though with the passage of underground trains. My digestive tract is sometimes clogged. There are security alerts. There’s congestion, bottlenecks... Greater London, c’est moi.'
The book is about the interaction of its characters with the metropolis, the ways they look at it, love it, hate it. Fuck it. Bleeding London.
This is the novel as urban sprawl, erecting sites of particular interest within its boundaries, visiting and revisiting sex (Nicholson does good sex) and violence as easily as it does profundity and enlightenment. Imagine Sinclair’s Lights Out For The Territory remixed as fiction. It’s more substantial than the deliberately slight Footsucker, but performed with equal élan and good humour. Eccentric, erotic, spellbinding and not a little warped.