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"London, Londres, London" (writes Dickens) "is at its worst. Such a shrill black city, combining the qualities of a smoky house and a scolding wife; such a hopeless city, with no rent in the canopy of its sky…" There is passionate love
for the city here! How can that be? But there it is.

As there is in the following, for all the peevish post-colonialist attitudinising of the writer:

"London...revealing its true capricious tormented nature, its anguish of a city that had lost its sense of itself and wallowed accordingly in the impotence of its selfish angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the
insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future"…

Who knows, the future may be bleak and impoverished in the future (though sorry Salman, it's looking pretty good at the moment); but one way or the other it doesn't matter. For Rushdie it has to have a bleak future.

A French observer, Pierre Mailland, said in 1945 (and I presume he himself has succumbed to the perverse enchantment of London but I am not sure) of the lovers of London:

"They become fond of it because its conquest is a love's labour, because its stones, too well 'besmeared with sluttish time", have begun to whisper what sounds to the listener like a personal message or else is never heard."

London is a sad, hard city; it is epically melancholy. It wakes in me huge emotions. When I am away from London it visits me with a intensity that brings tears to my eyes.

I am in Rio; standing there, on the dazzling sands of Copacabana, with the Atlantic surf crashing in, midst lithe brown bodies in the tiniest bikinis in the world; and I am visited by a vision as sallow as it is intense: a street in West
London (corner of North End Rd and Talgarth Road?), on the kerb, in the teeth of the traffic, the 747s stumbling in across a liverish sky; and I ache for London.

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