Only UK edition in printCéline’s recently rediscovered novel, London, centres on Ferdinand, the protagonist of War, a shell-shocked French soldier with a severe wound to his ear suffering from vertigo and chronic tinnitus. Having earned a reprieve as well as a medal, Ferdinand has left France to join his prostitute friend Angèle in London. Despite his decoration, he fears being sent back to the front and holes up in an attic room from where his pal, the pimp Cantaloup, runs a flourishing sex-trafficking operation. Populated by unforgettable characters such as the generous Jewish doctor Yugenbitz, the corrupt cop Bijou, an eccentric English aristocrat, a slew of pimps, a rich variety of whores and the revolutionary Borokrom, a former bomb maker, London is a sweeping narrative that deserved to be numbered among Céline’s greatest works, and which is informed, like his masterpiece Journey to the End of the Night, by his own experiences in the British capital and as a young doctor in a working-class suburb of Paris.
