Nothing can match Our Mutual Friend

Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer. America is currently searching for a novel to "represent" each of its great cities in the BookExpo festival. Each city is reading and championing its choice. Already Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Milwaukee and Cleveland have made their selections. Most have grabbed desperately at the same politically correct title, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, despite it being set in the Deep South. Sales have soared most satisfactorily.

New York has proved more cussed. There the knives are out. A local panel is said to have come up with Native Speaker by a Korean writer, Chang-rae Lee. The hope was that this would offend nobody. It has duly offended everybody, including those offended by the mere thought of any one book representing New York. Good for New York.

The scene now moves to London. What novel could possibly represent London? The city is even more " bookedout" than New York. It has been biographed by a hundred Boswells, from Stow and Pepys to Amis and Ackroyd. Its citizens daily record their doings, whether gay or grim. We may have league tables for schools, hospitals, social-work departments and West End plays. We may nominate the greatest movies, the greatest hits, the greatest opening batsmen. But spare us, surely, the greatest London novel.

Yet New York's attempt at literary self-analysis has been intriguing. Any collective decision on such a matter is bound to end in tears or politics, probably both. The New York panel found itself rejecting its greatest son, Henry James, as too WASP and its greatest daughter, Edith Wharton, for much the same reason. Truman Capote's settings were too rich. James McBride's Colour of Water upset blacks and Hassidics by writing about both. My favourite Big Apple novel, The Education of Hyman Kaplan, was presumably too Jewish, as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was presumably too close to the bone.

According to The Guardian, the impeccably hip Jay McInerney rubbished the idea unless the panel chose his own Bright Lights, Big City. The book by Chang-rae Lee seems to have enjoyed the great virtue of being unread, even unknown, by most of the panel. When it was read, someone pointed out that it was not by a woman and might also upset Asian-Americans. It is, therefore, back in the melting pot.

Thank goodness that the greatest London novel is beyond debate. It is Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. It stands alone as a portrait of the city and its people, a portrait for its own age and for London as long as it lives, moves and has being. Dickens alone could peel back the city's fa?ade, knowing every crevice and revealing the compass of human emotions within.

Our Mutual Friend is his last and definitive masterpiece. Part thriller, part topographical tour de force, the book moves from the murky waters of Wapping to the stuccoed palaces of the West End. It drifts to the suburbs and up the canals. It has poverty-stricken teachers, starving immigrants, grasping wives and sainted daughters. It has the dead, the alive, the lucky, the desperate. And over it all towers the mysterious Golden Dustman. You may put forward Copperfield or Pickwick or Great Expectations. None is a match for Our Mutual Friend in its depth of metropolitan understanding.

There will be challenges, from Fielding, Trollope, Thackeray, Collins, Gissing, Grossmith, Wells, Woolf, Waugh, Powell, Murdoch. There will be private passions, such as mine for the Londons of Conan Doyle and Doris Lessing. There will be other less fashionable viewpoints, as of Rose Macaulay and Elizabeth Bowen. All have their Londons. None is a Dickens.

Such a choice would enrage New Yorkers. The " representative" novel, they would say, should be a living thing, reflecting the mood of the moment. London too is now the dynamic immigrant city. Demographers claim that it has overtaken New York in the number of first-generation ethnic communities of more than 10,000 souls. Just as Dickens recorded the "comers and goers" of the Victorian city, so surely there are writers today who are stirring the melting pot of ethnic, sexual and occupational diversity.

The surprise is that there are few good new London novels. We have Martin Amis, Iain Sinclair, Muriel Spark, AS Byatt, Fay Weldon, Peter Ackroyd and Zadie Smith. But a more fruitful game is to find not the new London novel but the novelistof London's neighbourhoods, the village voice, the Chestertonian Napoleon of Notting Hill. Thus Trollope's The Way We Live Now would stand for the City. Westminster can fight between Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Snow's The Corridors of Power. Holborn must have Bleak House. Soho has Colin MacInnes's Absolute Beginners. Notting Hill can take Amis's London Fields and Islington, The Diary of a Nobody. Mayfair can choose between Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Trollope's Phineas Finn. Lambeth should be proud of Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying.

The suburbs are trickier. Twickenham might settle for Walpole's Castle of Otranto. Hampstead is du Maurier's Trilby. Brent is Smith's White Teeth. Points east are best served by Iain Sinclair's Downriver, if not Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet. But with the possible exception of early Amis, London does not have a McInerney or a Wolfe.

The reason is that London is no longer a Great Wen. It is relaxed and unself-conscious as a city, a backdrop rather than a foreground. It is Eliot's " attendant lord, one that will swell a progress, start a scene or two". It is not a Prince Hamlet of fiction. It is never the hero of a novel.

Except once, except in Our Mutual Friend. I need only open my eyes in any London street and the whole Dickensian cast is still there, walking up and down. The master created them, not for his own time but for all time. Londoners will always be our mutual friends. Let Dickens be our ambassador.