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Originally Posted by NWRA
I'd like to see a good (and ambitous) author try to capture the 'spirit' of present-day London (in the same way that authors try to with New York), without resorting to chocolate-box stereotypes or just concentrating on the Asian communities, etc; that is unless it's already been done and I've missed it.
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Yes, Amis (London Fields) and Zadie Smith (White Teeth) have both tried to nail modern London in their fiction, but I don't think either have come close. Theirs is too much a broadsheet-friendly vision of the city, with no real eye for its more subtle aspects (and, because of Britain's strange political and social structuring - a sort of welfare capitalism, of sorts - London is a
very subtle, and finely balanced city, I think.)