"The soul of Old England was left behind in Trafalgar Square; the bus rolled on through one of the corridors of the new England. Up Charing Cross Road past a cinema house announcing "The Grim Avenger: a thrilling romance of Three Continents"… past a music hall, flaunting across its front the pirouetting of a Russian toe-dancer on a coloured screen, while underneath, flashing for the world to see, letters of bright light proclaiming other attractions; a Cockney Comedian, a Spanish Tango Turn, a Swedish Acrobatic Troupe, American Clog Dancers, an Argentine Stunt Artist, Naughty Fifi the French Comic Chanteuse and Mimi her Eccentric Accompanist, and so on, and so on.
How amazingly international! mused Gombarov, and laughs to himself, as the afterthought struck him: ‘And here I am, a Russo-American Jew, looking on!’
Was this chaos or unity? It was chaos, and it had a unity after a fashion. It was the unity of a many-tuned medley, each tune of which maintained its entity, losing it only at the moment of embracing another tune; at best it was a unity of ultra-modern music, shaped out of discords, beaten but not molten into a harmony."
From The Independent on Sunday’s excellent Talk Of The Town supplement, this is a fabulous quote – a description of London from the novel Babel by John Cournos, published in 1922. Reminds me why I called this blog what I called this blog.
I enjoyed your post today about the novel but the trouble is it makes me want to read it and, given the previous discussions about the amount of time we’ve got and the amount of books we’ve got to read, I can’t!
very best, Ian
For some reason, talk of London and its musical signature always makes me think of sitting by the window in Foyle’s Jazz cafe: high enough to be above the traffic but low enough to still have the sounds saturating you.
I apologise for the slight plug, but there’s a SF novel just out about urban cultures and music. It’s called ‘This Town Will Never Let Us Go’ by Lawrence Miles, and is set in an unnamed town (and the reason it’s a bit of a shameless plug is that he’s a friend).