Conundrums and Intrigue in London Settings.

Loitering with Intent short novel by Muriel Spark was a lot of fun to read.  It is slow to build as it tracks the progress of Fleur Talbot who takes a job 'on the grubby edge of the literary world' as a secretary to the pompous and tetchy Sir Quentin Oliver, director of the Autobiographical Association - a group of eccentric egomaniacs working on their memoirs in advance.   At the same time Fleur is working on her own piece of fiction Warrender Chase.  "How wonderful to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot marvels. Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with intent to gather material for her writing, Fleur works at her job.  But when Sir Quentin, steals the manuscript of Fleur's new novel, fiction begins to appropriate life. The Association's members begin to act out scenes exactly as Fleur herself has already written them in her missing manuscript. And as they meet darkly funny, pre-visioned fates, where does art start or reality end? It is a delicious conundrum,"
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Capital by John Lanchester is also set in London and  poses another conundrum. Who is sending the postcards "We Want What You Have" to the residents of Pepys Road?  The author is a British free-lance journalist as well as novelist.   By way of a cast of characters depicting some sterotypes of our times Lanchester charts a time of tension and financial crisis in the city and the domestic dramas which are played out behind certain of the closed doors in Pepys Street.  It is a potted state-of-the-nation novel set on a single street in South London. In this 'big, fat London novel' Lanchester is writing a report on London in 2008, peopling it with fictional but precisely observed Londoners – a touch of Mayhew as well as Dickens, so writes Claire Tomalin in her review for The Guardian.