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Capital
Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (author of The Debt to Pleasure) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time.
It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want?
Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want?
Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
528 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2012
About the author
John Lanchester
29 books560 followersJohn Lanchester is the author of four novels and three books of non-fiction. He was born in Germany and moved to Hong Kong. He studied in UK. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and was awarded the 2008 E.M. Forster Award. He lives in London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,531 reviews
September 19, 2013
I’ve formed the habit of checking on the one-star Amazon reviews (there are always some) of each book I read, to decide if I share their view. At time of writing, this book has 452 reviews and averages 4 stars, so what did the 25 odd-readers-out take exception to? Well, in summary they say (a) the characters are stereotypes, (b) it doesn’t have much story, and (c) it is padded with too many words. Do I agree? (a) No, this criticism in my view entirely misses the point. The cast is indeed chosen to represent various stereotypes of people we can glimpse every day in a South London suburb, but they are drawn with considerable skill, love and insight to reveal them as individuals. I particularly loved the Polish builder, the Zimbabwean traffic warden and the investment banker and his ghastly wife. (b) There is not much story in the dramatic sense, but this is not a book about heroes and villains; it’s a tapestry. Each character’s life had enough development to hold my interest, amuse or involve me, while adding to the multi-faceted picture of London life in 2008 that is the point of the book. (c) The style is quite baggy and prolix; some of the (admirably short) chapters are a little static and repetitious; some of the prose could be punchier. That said however, it reads easily, and has plenty of pithy moments, e.g. “... at the weekend quite a few other bankers [and their wives] could be seen [on the Common], their pushchairs so big and unwieldy they were like infant SUVs.” I enjoyed it :)
September 29, 2021
This book was not as engaging as it could have been. I really like that it was about different inhabitants of one street and their individual stories. However I don’t think the execution was there. Despite this, it was intriguing enough to keep me reading until the end.
November 17, 2018
I can't say this ever engaged me much. In many ways Lanchester tries to do for London what Tom Wolfe did for New York in The Bonfire of Vanities but less successfully. Especially because there's more dramatic tension in Wolfe's book, his characters are much richer and more complex and he's a better prose writer than Lanchester who favours a functional rather prosaic writing style. Capital is a long novel with a lot of characters, none of whom I found particularly interesting and a couple of whom I found hollow pastiches - the banker's wife, Arabella especially. A grave fault because she was representing the dubious ethics of the higher echelon of London's social ladder. But because she never came across as anything but caricature the novel's moral infrastructure never convinced for me. And it's quite a judgemental novel at heart with hard lines. We're called upon to boo the banker and cheer the immigrant which isn't the most demanding of challenges unless you're a racist bigot. Another problem I had is there are so many characters that Lanchester spends a lot of time reminding us who they are. There's a constant sense of denouements being set up but being endlessly delayed. Entire chapters are often recaps of what we already know.
The central character is contemporary London and most of the best passages were observations about the city itself. That said, I can't say I'd recommend this as a trenchant insight into the backstage life of the city of my birth. It often felt simplistic and glib. The moral dilemmas forced and predictable. In fact, half way through, I realised I'd already read this novel years ago and completely forgotten about it.
The central character is contemporary London and most of the best passages were observations about the city itself. That said, I can't say I'd recommend this as a trenchant insight into the backstage life of the city of my birth. It often felt simplistic and glib. The moral dilemmas forced and predictable. In fact, half way through, I realised I'd already read this novel years ago and completely forgotten about it.
March 11, 2012
John Lanchester had me hooked from page one of this 500-page novel. My expectation was that he was going to show us how the financial meltdown of 2008 effected the lives of the people on one London street. He does that to some extent, but what he really delivers is an intimate look at life right before the crash happened.
The people of Pepys Road are mostly upper and upper middle class folks and Lanchester takes us in and out of their houses in smoothly written prose that is just the right mix of intimacy and distance. In addition to the homeowners on the street, he delves into the lives of the handymen, meter maids and nannies on the block as well as their relatives and friends. He creates a kaleidoscope view of the block that bridges class, race and religion. This seeming homogenous steet is shown to be much more diverse than we would realize at first glance.
Money is the obvious thread running through the novel, but equally important are questions of identity. One character is an artist who does his work anonymously, another is a refugee working under an assumed name, the housewife getting repairs doesn't call the Polish contractor by his name and a banker steals passwords to conduct trades. The main thing that binds the characters is that everyone on the block has been getting postcards that say "We Want What You Have." The postcards are pictures of their front doors and it starts as an oddity and ends up feeling menacing. Afterall, once we know what the people have, dysfunctional marriages, terminal diseases and homesickness for Africa, the question is why would anybody want it.
Peel away the posh houses and the expensive cars and even before the crash there was a lot of misery. Although, no one has it as bad as the meter maid (a refugee from Africa desperately seeking asylum in a society that doesn't really care).
I'm a bit heartbroken that I've finished the book. So sad to leave all these amazing characters and their stories. The mystery behind "We Want What You Have," may be over, but their lives go on and I can't help but wonder what happened in 2009.
The people of Pepys Road are mostly upper and upper middle class folks and Lanchester takes us in and out of their houses in smoothly written prose that is just the right mix of intimacy and distance. In addition to the homeowners on the street, he delves into the lives of the handymen, meter maids and nannies on the block as well as their relatives and friends. He creates a kaleidoscope view of the block that bridges class, race and religion. This seeming homogenous steet is shown to be much more diverse than we would realize at first glance.
Money is the obvious thread running through the novel, but equally important are questions of identity. One character is an artist who does his work anonymously, another is a refugee working under an assumed name, the housewife getting repairs doesn't call the Polish contractor by his name and a banker steals passwords to conduct trades. The main thing that binds the characters is that everyone on the block has been getting postcards that say "We Want What You Have." The postcards are pictures of their front doors and it starts as an oddity and ends up feeling menacing. Afterall, once we know what the people have, dysfunctional marriages, terminal diseases and homesickness for Africa, the question is why would anybody want it.
Peel away the posh houses and the expensive cars and even before the crash there was a lot of misery. Although, no one has it as bad as the meter maid (a refugee from Africa desperately seeking asylum in a society that doesn't really care).
I'm a bit heartbroken that I've finished the book. So sad to leave all these amazing characters and their stories. The mystery behind "We Want What You Have," may be over, but their lives go on and I can't help but wonder what happened in 2009.
May 6, 2020
Posh Eastenders: that’s basically what John Lanchester’s Capital is. Instead of the east end working class whose lives revolve around Albert Square, here you’ve got the middle/upper-middle class denizens of Pepys Road. A banker, a footballer, an artist, and the less wealthy who’re connected to them in other capacities: a builder, a nanny, a traffic warden, a granny, a spoilt wife, a wannabe jihadi, and the family that run the nearby newsagent.
Is it any good? You don’t finish a nearly 600-page novel if you’re not enjoying it on some level but I also wouldn’t say that it’s particularly brilliant either. For a book of this size and ambition, it’s surprisingly light and unsubstantive.
I notice that the blurb mentions the 2008 crash quite prominently but that’s misleading - there’s some mention of the financial crisis towards the end of the book but it’s never really about that and it doesn’t affect any of the characters.
If there’s a plot, it’s that there’s a mysterious campaign against the inhabitants of Pepys Road where they’re sent postcards, DVDs, and, later, dead birds, in the post informing them that “We Want What You Have” - who is “we”, why are they doing it, and to what end? It’s intriguing but it’s also a barely developed storyline - that’s not what the book’s about either and the reveal of who it was and the motives behind it are both unremarkable and underwhelming.
The book is really just a slice-of-life narrative about the various characters’ lives and your enjoyment of the novel will depend on how interested you are in them. I liked the rather stupid banker’s story - getting a look into the reckless, bubble-like world of the wealthy and the banking industry was engaging to me. Shahid Kamal’s storyline too was engrossing, if only for where it went - showing us what it’s like to be considered a terrorist - rather than anything up to that point.
The other storylines are occasionally amusing but are largely unmemorable. The Polish builder Zbigniew’s storyline went somewhere unexpected and almost approached exciting drama, as did Roger the banker’s second-in-command Mark’s storyline. But Lanchester’s storytelling is almost always unhurried, making it easy to put down and, at times, frustratingly dull.
The problem with Lanchester’s Dickensian cast of characters is that too many of them felt irrelevant and yet he spends chapter after chapter on them. I mean, what was the point of Petunia’s storyline? She’s an old lady who pottered about her house until she got a brain tumour and died. Roger’s wife Arabella pampers herself with outrageously expensive things - so what? Freddy Kamo, the teenage football star from Senegal, Quentina the traffic warden asylum seeker, Smitty the Banksy-esque artist, Matya the nanny - what did dwelling on any of them for pages and pages do for the overall narrative? Not much in my view.
Which is the problem with this novel: as critically acclaimed as it was, as seriously as it takes itself and (briefly) mentions important issues - banking practices, terrorism, immigration, racism - it’s not really about, or says anything at all remarkable on, those things. It’s just snapshots of various people’s lives, presented without commentary that leaves very little impression.
That’s not to say it’s an unenjoyable read or that Lanchester was wrong to have focused so much on so many characters because every character had something about them that was mildly compelling to read about at some point. And Lanchester’s prose is largely accessible and easy to read. But Capital is also an overlong, rambling and unfocused non-story that’s little more than a literary soap opera.
Is it any good? You don’t finish a nearly 600-page novel if you’re not enjoying it on some level but I also wouldn’t say that it’s particularly brilliant either. For a book of this size and ambition, it’s surprisingly light and unsubstantive.
I notice that the blurb mentions the 2008 crash quite prominently but that’s misleading - there’s some mention of the financial crisis towards the end of the book but it’s never really about that and it doesn’t affect any of the characters.
If there’s a plot, it’s that there’s a mysterious campaign against the inhabitants of Pepys Road where they’re sent postcards, DVDs, and, later, dead birds, in the post informing them that “We Want What You Have” - who is “we”, why are they doing it, and to what end? It’s intriguing but it’s also a barely developed storyline - that’s not what the book’s about either and the reveal of who it was and the motives behind it are both unremarkable and underwhelming.
The book is really just a slice-of-life narrative about the various characters’ lives and your enjoyment of the novel will depend on how interested you are in them. I liked the rather stupid banker’s story - getting a look into the reckless, bubble-like world of the wealthy and the banking industry was engaging to me. Shahid Kamal’s storyline too was engrossing, if only for where it went - showing us what it’s like to be considered a terrorist - rather than anything up to that point.
The other storylines are occasionally amusing but are largely unmemorable. The Polish builder Zbigniew’s storyline went somewhere unexpected and almost approached exciting drama, as did Roger the banker’s second-in-command Mark’s storyline. But Lanchester’s storytelling is almost always unhurried, making it easy to put down and, at times, frustratingly dull.
The problem with Lanchester’s Dickensian cast of characters is that too many of them felt irrelevant and yet he spends chapter after chapter on them. I mean, what was the point of Petunia’s storyline? She’s an old lady who pottered about her house until she got a brain tumour and died. Roger’s wife Arabella pampers herself with outrageously expensive things - so what? Freddy Kamo, the teenage football star from Senegal, Quentina the traffic warden asylum seeker, Smitty the Banksy-esque artist, Matya the nanny - what did dwelling on any of them for pages and pages do for the overall narrative? Not much in my view.
Which is the problem with this novel: as critically acclaimed as it was, as seriously as it takes itself and (briefly) mentions important issues - banking practices, terrorism, immigration, racism - it’s not really about, or says anything at all remarkable on, those things. It’s just snapshots of various people’s lives, presented without commentary that leaves very little impression.
That’s not to say it’s an unenjoyable read or that Lanchester was wrong to have focused so much on so many characters because every character had something about them that was mildly compelling to read about at some point. And Lanchester’s prose is largely accessible and easy to read. But Capital is also an overlong, rambling and unfocused non-story that’s little more than a literary soap opera.
October 3, 2012
This book started of very promising. Set against the backdrop of a very wealthy London neighborhood just before (and during the beginning of) the financial crisis, the book explored the lives of several very different people. A banker, his selfish wife, a refugee, a soccer phenom imported from an African village, a dying woman, her daughter, a polish laborer, a family of Muslim immigrants, and a couple others.
I have to say, the first third of the book I was very into it. Plots were developing, characters were painted (I'm not going to say developed since most were pretty one-dimensional), and I was fascinated to see how he was going to tie it all together. As a reader, you *know* that the financial crisis is going to happen, and *know* that it's going to affect all these people. So there's tension.
The thing is...nothing really happens. The stories all wind themselves out. There is almost no interleaving between the characters or plotlines. And the financial crisis hardly changes anything. For such a long book, it was very, very frustrating to get to the end and feel, "Wait, is that it??"
Clearly I'm not a fan.
I have to say, the first third of the book I was very into it. Plots were developing, characters were painted (I'm not going to say developed since most were pretty one-dimensional), and I was fascinated to see how he was going to tie it all together. As a reader, you *know* that the financial crisis is going to happen, and *know* that it's going to affect all these people. So there's tension.
The thing is...nothing really happens. The stories all wind themselves out. There is almost no interleaving between the characters or plotlines. And the financial crisis hardly changes anything. For such a long book, it was very, very frustrating to get to the end and feel, "Wait, is that it??"
Clearly I'm not a fan.
July 12, 2013
By Peter Thal Larsen
Banking is fiction’s hidden profession. Despite decades of financial expansion, novelists and playwrights have struggled to imagine a contemporary Shylock or Augustus Melmotte, the shadowy star of Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. A quarter of a century has passed since Tom Wolfe dreamt up Sherman McCoy, the bond trader who personified the arrogance and greed of an earlier boom in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. With the crisis wreckage still smouldering, the characters in most contemporary novels are more likely to be found robbing a bank than working for one.
Roger Yount, the anti-hero of John Lanchester’s “Capital”, is therefore a rare breed. As head of the currency trading department at a mid-sized City of London investment bank in late 2007, he is well-placed to anticipate the imminent market storm. Except that Yount, who has a tenuous grasp of the complex strategies used by his traders, doesn’t see it coming. Instead, he sits at his desk trying to calculate the size of his bonus. Then he lists the expenditure – mortgages, private schools, nannies, second homes, skiing holidays, taxis – that will consume his cash. Sherman McCoy complained he was “going broke on a million dollars a year”. Yount’s lifestyle requires the same figure - in sterling.
Lanchester, whose previous book, “Whoops!”, was an entertaining explanation of the crisis, does a good job of capturing the atmosphere inside a modern investment bank with its multinational collection of (mostly) men, engaged in the meritocratic pursuit of wealth. Privately educated, well-mannered, and British, Yount epitomises the entitled, Land Rover-driving breed that colonised London’s more desirable residential areas in the last decade, making them all but unaffordable for everyone else.
Lanchester shares the modern Londoner’s obsession with property values. The book opens with a detailed description of the homes in Pepys Road, the “ordinary street in the capital” where Yount lives with his wife, Arabella, and two young children. Built by the Victorians for the lower middle classes, the terraced houses have been so pumped up by cheap credit that they are now worth millions: “Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner”.
Yet in its attempt to look behind all the doors of Pepys Road, the novel loses its way. Lanchester introduces us to a bewildering cross-section of characters: the Pakistani family who run the local newsagent’s, the Polish builder, the African Premier League footballer, the illegal immigrant working as a traffic warden, the old woman dying of a brain tumour, and the Banksy-style artist whose main selling point is his anonymity.
It’s a valiant attempt to capture the diversity of life in the capital. However, Lanchester struggles to manage the different story lines. His solution is to carve up the book into many small sections - its 600 pages are divided into 106 chapters - and jump between characters. Unfortunately, these snapshots reduce most of the players to two-dimensional stereotypes. Moreover, despite their physical proximity, they barely interact. This, presumably, is Lanchester’s point, but it hardly makes for a coherent narrative.
In the confusion, Yount gets less attention than he deserves. Though he ambles through situations rich with potential for exploring the anthropology of London investment bankers - a shooting weekend in Norfolk, a team-building poker night, a charity dinner - the scenes feel half-finished, as if Lanchester is too impatient to move on to the next section. Even Yount’s downfall, when it inevitably arrives, proves something of an anticlimax.
Parts of “Capital” will resonate with anyone who has lived or worked in London over the past decade. Whether it will appeal to readers without direct, recent experience of the city - and the City - is less clear. Either way, Roger Yount is unlikely to join the thinly-populated pantheon of famous fictional financiers. Perhaps that will only be expanded when the rubble of the crisis has finally been cleared.
Banking is fiction’s hidden profession. Despite decades of financial expansion, novelists and playwrights have struggled to imagine a contemporary Shylock or Augustus Melmotte, the shadowy star of Anthony Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now”. A quarter of a century has passed since Tom Wolfe dreamt up Sherman McCoy, the bond trader who personified the arrogance and greed of an earlier boom in “The Bonfire of the Vanities”. With the crisis wreckage still smouldering, the characters in most contemporary novels are more likely to be found robbing a bank than working for one.
Roger Yount, the anti-hero of John Lanchester’s “Capital”, is therefore a rare breed. As head of the currency trading department at a mid-sized City of London investment bank in late 2007, he is well-placed to anticipate the imminent market storm. Except that Yount, who has a tenuous grasp of the complex strategies used by his traders, doesn’t see it coming. Instead, he sits at his desk trying to calculate the size of his bonus. Then he lists the expenditure – mortgages, private schools, nannies, second homes, skiing holidays, taxis – that will consume his cash. Sherman McCoy complained he was “going broke on a million dollars a year”. Yount’s lifestyle requires the same figure - in sterling.
Lanchester, whose previous book, “Whoops!”, was an entertaining explanation of the crisis, does a good job of capturing the atmosphere inside a modern investment bank with its multinational collection of (mostly) men, engaged in the meritocratic pursuit of wealth. Privately educated, well-mannered, and British, Yount epitomises the entitled, Land Rover-driving breed that colonised London’s more desirable residential areas in the last decade, making them all but unaffordable for everyone else.
Lanchester shares the modern Londoner’s obsession with property values. The book opens with a detailed description of the homes in Pepys Road, the “ordinary street in the capital” where Yount lives with his wife, Arabella, and two young children. Built by the Victorians for the lower middle classes, the terraced houses have been so pumped up by cheap credit that they are now worth millions: “Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner”.
Yet in its attempt to look behind all the doors of Pepys Road, the novel loses its way. Lanchester introduces us to a bewildering cross-section of characters: the Pakistani family who run the local newsagent’s, the Polish builder, the African Premier League footballer, the illegal immigrant working as a traffic warden, the old woman dying of a brain tumour, and the Banksy-style artist whose main selling point is his anonymity.
It’s a valiant attempt to capture the diversity of life in the capital. However, Lanchester struggles to manage the different story lines. His solution is to carve up the book into many small sections - its 600 pages are divided into 106 chapters - and jump between characters. Unfortunately, these snapshots reduce most of the players to two-dimensional stereotypes. Moreover, despite their physical proximity, they barely interact. This, presumably, is Lanchester’s point, but it hardly makes for a coherent narrative.
In the confusion, Yount gets less attention than he deserves. Though he ambles through situations rich with potential for exploring the anthropology of London investment bankers - a shooting weekend in Norfolk, a team-building poker night, a charity dinner - the scenes feel half-finished, as if Lanchester is too impatient to move on to the next section. Even Yount’s downfall, when it inevitably arrives, proves something of an anticlimax.
Parts of “Capital” will resonate with anyone who has lived or worked in London over the past decade. Whether it will appeal to readers without direct, recent experience of the city - and the City - is less clear. Either way, Roger Yount is unlikely to join the thinly-populated pantheon of famous fictional financiers. Perhaps that will only be expanded when the rubble of the crisis has finally been cleared.
March 21, 2013
3.5 rating is about what I'd give "Capital".
This is one of those EXPANSIVE NOVELS ---
...Four Parts
...varied characters
...small mystery
...Pepys Road, (the community), on the brink of financial crisis in London, 2008
If you think you'd enjoy to read about the homes, streets, shops, historic city of London....
With Family Drama---
You like long GRAND EXPANSIVE NOVELS ---- Then you'll enjoy this book!
If in a hurry--- you might get bored --
Me: I'm in the 'middle'. I did enjoy this book, yet ---I think it would still have been good if it were about 200 pages less.
This is one of those EXPANSIVE NOVELS ---
...Four Parts
...varied characters
...small mystery
...Pepys Road, (the community), on the brink of financial crisis in London, 2008
If you think you'd enjoy to read about the homes, streets, shops, historic city of London....
With Family Drama---
You like long GRAND EXPANSIVE NOVELS ---- Then you'll enjoy this book!
If in a hurry--- you might get bored --
Me: I'm in the 'middle'. I did enjoy this book, yet ---I think it would still have been good if it were about 200 pages less.
February 5, 2013
Although it's early in the year, this novel is a finalist in my "favorite book of the year" contest. I hadn't read anything by John Lanchester before so I was unprepared for the elegance, humor and irony in the language. The book takes place in London, just before the economic collapse. We meet a wide range of characters centering around a street called Pepys Street that has recently become gentrified. The homes are bought by the up and coming who then pour lavish amounts of money to make the homes into their own personal palace to include digging basements, raising roofs, expensive sound systems, the latest in kitchens (although they often don't cook) and luxurious baths. We also meet the immigrants - some legal, others not. Winding it's way through the book is a common thread. Every resident is getting weird postcards that say "We Want What You've Got." Then a DVD arrives showing front doors, bay windows, Christmas decorations and more. This was so well written, that I traded in my book credits for bookmooch.com and paperbackswap.com in order to pick up a few of his older books. I'm not sure when I'll get to them. Right now my library pile is two books deep. Then there are all the books I've swapped and bought over the years...... "So many books. So little time." However, I think I'll DEFINITELY make reading at least ONE of them a priority - and soon!
November 13, 2015
The first two definitions for ‘capital’ in the Oxford English Dictionary run thus:
Capital ˃ noun
1. The city or town that functions as the seat of government and administrative capital of the country or region: Warsaw is the capital of Poland.
* (with modifier) a place associated more than any other with a specified activity or product: the fashion capital of the world.
2. (mass noun) wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organisation or available for a purpose such as starting a company or investing: rules of return on invested capital were high.
* the excess of company’s assets over its liabilities
* people who possess wealth and use it to control a society’s economic activity, considered collectively: a conflict of interest between capital and labour.
* (with modifier) figurative a valuable resource of a particular kind: there is insufficient investment in human capital.
We could of course go further and look at the word’s prominent role in capital letters, or indeed at its more blood thirsty interest in capital punishment, but John Lancaster’s novel is very much an exploration of the first two definitions. Here we have the modern state of the nation epic novel. The kind of thing Charles Dickens earned a crust by, or Anthony Trollope pulled off in ‘The Way We Live Now’. Indeed Trollope’s book is a fine comparison, examining as it does similar concerns about money and its effect on London.
Yes, London is the capital in which the action takes place, but more specifically Pepys Road in the affluent South West of the city. (It’s fitting that the street in a book about the comings and goings of London life, should be named after the finest diarist of the comings and goings of London life). Here we follow various characters, either living or visiting: the high flying banker, the corner-shop owner, the widow who’s been in the street her whole life, the Polish builder, the Hungarian nanny, and a contemporary Banksy-style artist. The narrative follows their lives and their fortunes through the 2007 and 2008 financial crash, putting human faces to the stark black and white headlines.
However despite some fine passages and some excellent stretches, it seems that the state of the play novel is harder to pull off than it used to be.
Firstly a Dickens or a Trollope (or a Gissing, for that matter) had far greater success in making their characters interact. True, in the realistic modern London novel that’s harder to do. There is no forum in which everybody in a community would come together and chat and get to know each other. No local factory where everybody works. No regularly thrown street parties. No local pub which everybody goes to. (Pay attention, ‘EastEnders’. You are portraying an absolute fiction). As such some outside element has to be introduced. This Lancaster does by having a series of mysterious photographs, each showing a photo of a character’s own front door, sent to residents under the banner of ‘We Want What You Have’. It’s a creepy touch that serves as the initial motor of the story, (although it’s one that will be a tad familiar to anyone who has seen Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’), but it’s also one largely perfunctory and is parked in the sidings for long stretches of the novel. (As a whodunit as well it’s not overly successful, there’s a character so ridiculously tangential to proceedings that he’s fairly easily picked out as the logical suspect). It works to give a connection to the characters, the same concern they all have in the back of their minds and for one chapter does serve to bring everybody together in a big community meeting. However it’s a scene I felt was oddly botched. It should have been a cornerstone of the book, with the invisible lines between these characters breaking apart momentarily – perhaps fleeting friendships would flare up, perhaps even some innocent flirting. There might even have been a connection made which lasted beyond the meeting, a chance for two characters, who hitherto barely knew each other, to stand chatting on the street. Instead the friendly policeman (not a Pepys Road resident) doing most of the talking.
So okay, the interaction between characters is not overly satisfying, but then the more of the book I read (and it is a long book) I wondered about the reality of the characters chosen. Were they characters, or were they merely symbols? I liked the set of chapters detailing the Younts, the most upwardly mobile figures in the book, but they are clearly characters who must obey Chekhov’s rule. Can a banker introduced in act one, not have suffered a humiliating fall by act three? Similarly the Muslim family in the corner-shop. Can a young Muslim man be introduced in a twenty first century novel and not be arrested on terrorism offences by act three? These are interesting characters, I liked them, but clearly they have their own dramatic rules to follow and so lose their free wills – becoming obvious symbols in a greater thematic plan.
Other strands are less successful. Following a Zimbabwean traffic warden trudge around the streets just feels a bit of a, well, trudge. While the Banksy-esque just feels as if Lancaster wanted to have a pop at the absurdities of modern art, but knew he didn’t have enough material for a whole book, and so littered it through this one. See also the Premiership footballer, who barely makes it above the level of a cypher.
As you may have guessed, this is a very cosmopolitan novel. It’s a novel which embraces the cosmopolitan, where all the characters are comfortable with it. So it’s noticeable that one strata of society not represented is the indigenous working class. Yes, it’s a street which has now become wealthy, but inclusion is made of visiting Polish builders and Hungarian nannies. Why isn’t there anyone British? Why isn’t there someone who can give the ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ point of view? This is a very liberal novel (a view and standpoint I share), and it’s a book where everyone readily accepts this new way of things. In a Britain where the right wing press will regularly hark on about illegal immigrants and British jobs for British people (both things which I know are touched upon in the sections concerning the Zimbabwean traffic warden), it does feel odd that no one makes any overt comments. They would not be views I share, but they are views which clearly exist and if one is writing an epic state of the nation London novel, it seems odd not to acknowledge them. If a writer is going to capture a panorama, to portray life as it happens, life in the raw, then that voice – no matter how unpalatable you may find it – also needs to be heard.
A lot of ‘Capital’ is successfully pulled off – with lonely widows, Polish builders and city bankers captured with real skill and empathy. Some parts are better than others, but there’s a lot more good here than bad. And while it’s unfair to judge it solely on how well it stands up against masters like Dickens, Gissing or Trollope, it can hold itself high as something of a success in portraying modern London.
London living is essentially village life. Your area of the city is your village and so you know that part of London and really have little clue about other areas – those are other people’s villages. For example, I have lived in the South East of the city for fourteen years, and so somewhere like Kilburn (in the North West) might as well be on Mars. I’m shortly to move to the suburbs to embark on a quest to become Leonard Bast, but I will always have an affection for London writing. This book doesn’t capture my village, but it does clearly capture a village in London and at its best, creates a vivid and human portrait.
Capital ˃ noun
1. The city or town that functions as the seat of government and administrative capital of the country or region: Warsaw is the capital of Poland.
* (with modifier) a place associated more than any other with a specified activity or product: the fashion capital of the world.
2. (mass noun) wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organisation or available for a purpose such as starting a company or investing: rules of return on invested capital were high.
* the excess of company’s assets over its liabilities
* people who possess wealth and use it to control a society’s economic activity, considered collectively: a conflict of interest between capital and labour.
* (with modifier) figurative a valuable resource of a particular kind: there is insufficient investment in human capital.
We could of course go further and look at the word’s prominent role in capital letters, or indeed at its more blood thirsty interest in capital punishment, but John Lancaster’s novel is very much an exploration of the first two definitions. Here we have the modern state of the nation epic novel. The kind of thing Charles Dickens earned a crust by, or Anthony Trollope pulled off in ‘The Way We Live Now’. Indeed Trollope’s book is a fine comparison, examining as it does similar concerns about money and its effect on London.
Yes, London is the capital in which the action takes place, but more specifically Pepys Road in the affluent South West of the city. (It’s fitting that the street in a book about the comings and goings of London life, should be named after the finest diarist of the comings and goings of London life). Here we follow various characters, either living or visiting: the high flying banker, the corner-shop owner, the widow who’s been in the street her whole life, the Polish builder, the Hungarian nanny, and a contemporary Banksy-style artist. The narrative follows their lives and their fortunes through the 2007 and 2008 financial crash, putting human faces to the stark black and white headlines.
However despite some fine passages and some excellent stretches, it seems that the state of the play novel is harder to pull off than it used to be.
Firstly a Dickens or a Trollope (or a Gissing, for that matter) had far greater success in making their characters interact. True, in the realistic modern London novel that’s harder to do. There is no forum in which everybody in a community would come together and chat and get to know each other. No local factory where everybody works. No regularly thrown street parties. No local pub which everybody goes to. (Pay attention, ‘EastEnders’. You are portraying an absolute fiction). As such some outside element has to be introduced. This Lancaster does by having a series of mysterious photographs, each showing a photo of a character’s own front door, sent to residents under the banner of ‘We Want What You Have’. It’s a creepy touch that serves as the initial motor of the story, (although it’s one that will be a tad familiar to anyone who has seen Michael Haneke’s ‘Hidden’), but it’s also one largely perfunctory and is parked in the sidings for long stretches of the novel. (As a whodunit as well it’s not overly successful, there’s a character so ridiculously tangential to proceedings that he’s fairly easily picked out as the logical suspect). It works to give a connection to the characters, the same concern they all have in the back of their minds and for one chapter does serve to bring everybody together in a big community meeting. However it’s a scene I felt was oddly botched. It should have been a cornerstone of the book, with the invisible lines between these characters breaking apart momentarily – perhaps fleeting friendships would flare up, perhaps even some innocent flirting. There might even have been a connection made which lasted beyond the meeting, a chance for two characters, who hitherto barely knew each other, to stand chatting on the street. Instead the friendly policeman (not a Pepys Road resident) doing most of the talking.
So okay, the interaction between characters is not overly satisfying, but then the more of the book I read (and it is a long book) I wondered about the reality of the characters chosen. Were they characters, or were they merely symbols? I liked the set of chapters detailing the Younts, the most upwardly mobile figures in the book, but they are clearly characters who must obey Chekhov’s rule. Can a banker introduced in act one, not have suffered a humiliating fall by act three? Similarly the Muslim family in the corner-shop. Can a young Muslim man be introduced in a twenty first century novel and not be arrested on terrorism offences by act three? These are interesting characters, I liked them, but clearly they have their own dramatic rules to follow and so lose their free wills – becoming obvious symbols in a greater thematic plan.
Other strands are less successful. Following a Zimbabwean traffic warden trudge around the streets just feels a bit of a, well, trudge. While the Banksy-esque just feels as if Lancaster wanted to have a pop at the absurdities of modern art, but knew he didn’t have enough material for a whole book, and so littered it through this one. See also the Premiership footballer, who barely makes it above the level of a cypher.
As you may have guessed, this is a very cosmopolitan novel. It’s a novel which embraces the cosmopolitan, where all the characters are comfortable with it. So it’s noticeable that one strata of society not represented is the indigenous working class. Yes, it’s a street which has now become wealthy, but inclusion is made of visiting Polish builders and Hungarian nannies. Why isn’t there anyone British? Why isn’t there someone who can give the ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ point of view? This is a very liberal novel (a view and standpoint I share), and it’s a book where everyone readily accepts this new way of things. In a Britain where the right wing press will regularly hark on about illegal immigrants and British jobs for British people (both things which I know are touched upon in the sections concerning the Zimbabwean traffic warden), it does feel odd that no one makes any overt comments. They would not be views I share, but they are views which clearly exist and if one is writing an epic state of the nation London novel, it seems odd not to acknowledge them. If a writer is going to capture a panorama, to portray life as it happens, life in the raw, then that voice – no matter how unpalatable you may find it – also needs to be heard.
A lot of ‘Capital’ is successfully pulled off – with lonely widows, Polish builders and city bankers captured with real skill and empathy. Some parts are better than others, but there’s a lot more good here than bad. And while it’s unfair to judge it solely on how well it stands up against masters like Dickens, Gissing or Trollope, it can hold itself high as something of a success in portraying modern London.
London living is essentially village life. Your area of the city is your village and so you know that part of London and really have little clue about other areas – those are other people’s villages. For example, I have lived in the South East of the city for fourteen years, and so somewhere like Kilburn (in the North West) might as well be on Mars. I’m shortly to move to the suburbs to embark on a quest to become Leonard Bast, but I will always have an affection for London writing. This book doesn’t capture my village, but it does clearly capture a village in London and at its best, creates a vivid and human portrait.
September 8, 2017
What a cool book! It follows the lives of the residents of a posh street in London around the time of the financial crisis. Although there is a bit of mystery at the heart of the novel, I was just fascinated by the peek inside the lives of the well-to-do--and the people who worked for them. I picked it up right before I went on vacation and it was the perfect airplane novel.
July 25, 2012
I enjoy titles which have layers of meaning. I enjoy the cleverness and I appreciate the sign-posting they provide so I can make sure that I don't miss a thread woven into the story. As layered titles go, John Lanchester's Capital isn't particularly difficult to penetrate: there is Capital as Money, and there is Capital as London and the fact that, to Lanchester, the first defines the second adds an admirable tidiness to the layers. All in all, it's a good title. The only problem is that it's been given to the wrong book, for Lanchester's novel betrays both readings.
Capital is an infuriating book, superficial, glib and shallow. It mirrors prevailing opinions and prejudices, but not prevailing spirit. It is filled with stereotypes but few characters and no people. It doesn't even scratch the surface of what makes London the city it is; it records a pulse but no heartbeat.
The depiction of Finance, from Roger Yount's dashed bonus hopes to the collapse of Pinker Lloyd, is at best simplistic, at worst childish and unrealistic. The connection back to London is through a single front door - No 51 Pepys Road - behind which lives a family carefully constructed to conform with our most obvious preconceptions.
Yet, Lanchester's prologue astutely observes that there is a wider connection, a shift in the community's perceptions and values tied to the infectious heart of greed and aspiration. Sadly, the Prologue remains the best part of the book.
The microcosm device - a single street in London, Pepys Road - falls far short of its intent. Lanchester attempts to overcome the weaknesses of such an unrepresentative device by including a selection of peripheral characters who have a recurring relationship with the street: the builder, the traffic warden, the nanny and an assortment of relatives. But the links are too tenuous, too fragile. Often the link is made simply through an event rather than through the complex social connections that knit a city together. We are given the strands of wool but never the pattern.
The drama of community lies not in its connections, but in its dependencies and the conflict between what is valued and what is believed to be valuable.
It would take far more time than I wish to spend to write in detail of all the things that frustrated and irritated me about this book: from the weak plot resolution; its disjointed, episodic structure that reads like a series of newspaper observations; the deliberate pandering to topical public opinion in place of deeper analysis; the technical flaws and the improbable and implausible plot developments.
Capital is a book that touches on many issues but fails to go to the added trouble of exploring any of them. It doesn't do London justice nor does it do justice to the profound impact that the banshees of Finance and Fear have had on us all.
Capital is an infuriating book, superficial, glib and shallow. It mirrors prevailing opinions and prejudices, but not prevailing spirit. It is filled with stereotypes but few characters and no people. It doesn't even scratch the surface of what makes London the city it is; it records a pulse but no heartbeat.
The depiction of Finance, from Roger Yount's dashed bonus hopes to the collapse of Pinker Lloyd, is at best simplistic, at worst childish and unrealistic. The connection back to London is through a single front door - No 51 Pepys Road - behind which lives a family carefully constructed to conform with our most obvious preconceptions.
Yet, Lanchester's prologue astutely observes that there is a wider connection, a shift in the community's perceptions and values tied to the infectious heart of greed and aspiration. Sadly, the Prologue remains the best part of the book.
The microcosm device - a single street in London, Pepys Road - falls far short of its intent. Lanchester attempts to overcome the weaknesses of such an unrepresentative device by including a selection of peripheral characters who have a recurring relationship with the street: the builder, the traffic warden, the nanny and an assortment of relatives. But the links are too tenuous, too fragile. Often the link is made simply through an event rather than through the complex social connections that knit a city together. We are given the strands of wool but never the pattern.
The drama of community lies not in its connections, but in its dependencies and the conflict between what is valued and what is believed to be valuable.
It would take far more time than I wish to spend to write in detail of all the things that frustrated and irritated me about this book: from the weak plot resolution; its disjointed, episodic structure that reads like a series of newspaper observations; the deliberate pandering to topical public opinion in place of deeper analysis; the technical flaws and the improbable and implausible plot developments.
Capital is a book that touches on many issues but fails to go to the added trouble of exploring any of them. It doesn't do London justice nor does it do justice to the profound impact that the banshees of Finance and Fear have had on us all.
November 3, 2021
CRITIQUE:
Big Fat London Novel
Once white male American postmodernists started writing "big fat Boston/Brooklyn novels" (like Joseph McElroy's 1,200 page "Women and Men")(1), it was perhaps inevitable that someone would want to write a "big fat London novel", no matter how Dickensian it might turn out to be.
I wouldn't say that John Lanchester was the most obvious choice of author to realise this vision. His three earlier novels were imaginative, but not necessarily post-modernist.
Even the work that emerged ("Capital") has more in common with Martin Amis, Karl Marx, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard and David Mitchell. It relies on perspicacious realism rather than self-conscious experimentalism. It has a lightness of touch and a subtle (quasi-satirical) sense of humour, without succumbing to the affectations of post-modernism.
Hip Disorders (Hips Don't Lie Meets Sheela-Na-Gig)
Nevertheless, a novel of 577 pages necessarily calls on the author to make serious stylistic and structural decisions.
At the most superficial level, there are 107 chapters, which means that there is an average of 5.4 pages per chapter. This allows Lanchester to address his subject matter in detail without being long-winded or oppressive. Readers get a sense of achievement as we reach each successive goal of a chapter ending, where we can take a breather.
Structurally, Lanchester's characters mostly live or work in the South London street of Pepys Road, Lambeth SE14. They form part of a neighbourhood, though not necessarily a community. Thus, Lanchester is able to use the residents of the street as a representative cross-section of the population of London, if only the more gentrified element living and working close to the City.
Systematic Social Observation
Although there are probably over 170 separate households in the actual street, Lanchester only refers to nine addresses, and focuses his story on only four, those belonging to or occupied by Petunia Howe (#42), Roger and Arabella Yount (#51), Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal (#68), and Mickey Lipton-Miller (#27), whose house is leased to a 17 year old Senegalese professional footballer, Freddy Kamo, and his father, Patrick .
In effect, these residents are a cross-section of a cross-section.
There are almost a dozen other characters who have some material involvement with the activities in the street: Petunia's daughter, Mary Leatherby, Mary's son, Smitty (a street artist possibly modelled on Banksy), Smitty's assistant, Parker French, Mark (Roger's second in command), Quentina Mkfesi (a Zimbabwean traffic warden), Zbigniew (a Polish builder, contracted by most of the residents), Davina (Zbigniew's English girlfriend), Matya (the Younts' Hungarian nanny), Ahmed's younger brothers, Shahid and Usman, Iqbal Rashid (a potential jihadist Belgian acquaintance of Shahid from their time in Chechnya), and Detective Inspector Mill.
"We Want What You Have"
These numerous characters, both major and minor, are portrayed in detail. In fact, description forms the largest part of the novel. The challenge seems to have been how to sustain interest in the novel with the barest sliver of a plot. The plot can be summarised, more or less, in a dozen sentences (it's almost as if one or two things happens to each character, and these things somehow coalesce into a coherent narrative):
* Somebody starts sending postcards declaring "We Want What You Have" to the residents of Pepys Road;
* Mrs Howe dies of a brain tumour;
* Mary gets Zbigniew to renovate her house in Pepys Road in preparation for sale;
* Iqbal moves out of the Kamal residence when the Pakistani matriarch visits the family;
* Roger anticipates receiving a Christmas bonus of £1M (on top of his £150K salary), without which he would go broke;
* Instead, Roger gets sacked for not adequately supervising Mark, his second in command;
* Shahid is wrongly accused of committing crimes against the residents of Pepys Road;
* the real culprit of these crimes is not who we'd suspect it is;
* Zbigniew breaks up with Davina;
* Zbigniew falls in love with Matya;
* Smitty sacks his offsider, Parker French;
* Parker reveals Smitty's true identity to the media;
* two homes in Pepys Road are sold, at least one of them to a banker.
Ultimately, just these fragments of plot together satiate an appetite for narrative motion.
The Postmaterialist Shift
The greatest influence on the plot is actually mentioned so little that it's almost invisible. It's both an elephant in the room and a noisy steamroller coming down the road at great speed.
The wealth and status of the residents of Pepys Road depend on the value of their properties. However, the novel extends from December, 2007 to November, 2008, more or less the duration of the Global Financial Crisis, when values would diminish enormously.
Roger loses his job as a banker during this period, and must sell his home. It also forces him to reassess his lifestyle, and in particular the lifestyle of his spendthrift wife, Arabella, that his base salary and bonuses had historically funded:
While he recognises his own need to change (and promises to do so), nowhere does he admit his own primary responsibility for what has happened. Surely, it's sanctimonious to suggest that Arabella was solely responsible for their collective materialism. After all, at the beginning of the novel, it was Roger who longed impatiently for a bonus of £1M. Arabella might have bought the sofas, but Roger bought the houses. He was as attached to the teat of the City milk cow as anybody in the novel. I suspected that Roger would be back working in the banking sector within three to five years. His embrace of postmaterialism just wasn't truly convincing.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Most of the novel ("Women and Men") was actually set in an apartment block in Murray Hill, thus making it a vertical neighbourhood (in contrast to the horizontal neighbourhood of Pepys Road).
SOUNDTRACK:
Big Fat London Novel
Once white male American postmodernists started writing "big fat Boston/Brooklyn novels" (like Joseph McElroy's 1,200 page "Women and Men")(1), it was perhaps inevitable that someone would want to write a "big fat London novel", no matter how Dickensian it might turn out to be.
I wouldn't say that John Lanchester was the most obvious choice of author to realise this vision. His three earlier novels were imaginative, but not necessarily post-modernist.
Even the work that emerged ("Capital") has more in common with Martin Amis, Karl Marx, Michael Moorcock, JG Ballard and David Mitchell. It relies on perspicacious realism rather than self-conscious experimentalism. It has a lightness of touch and a subtle (quasi-satirical) sense of humour, without succumbing to the affectations of post-modernism.
Hip Disorders (Hips Don't Lie Meets Sheela-Na-Gig)
Nevertheless, a novel of 577 pages necessarily calls on the author to make serious stylistic and structural decisions.
At the most superficial level, there are 107 chapters, which means that there is an average of 5.4 pages per chapter. This allows Lanchester to address his subject matter in detail without being long-winded or oppressive. Readers get a sense of achievement as we reach each successive goal of a chapter ending, where we can take a breather.
Structurally, Lanchester's characters mostly live or work in the South London street of Pepys Road, Lambeth SE14. They form part of a neighbourhood, though not necessarily a community. Thus, Lanchester is able to use the residents of the street as a representative cross-section of the population of London, if only the more gentrified element living and working close to the City.
Systematic Social Observation
Although there are probably over 170 separate households in the actual street, Lanchester only refers to nine addresses, and focuses his story on only four, those belonging to or occupied by Petunia Howe (#42), Roger and Arabella Yount (#51), Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal (#68), and Mickey Lipton-Miller (#27), whose house is leased to a 17 year old Senegalese professional footballer, Freddy Kamo, and his father, Patrick .
In effect, these residents are a cross-section of a cross-section.
There are almost a dozen other characters who have some material involvement with the activities in the street: Petunia's daughter, Mary Leatherby, Mary's son, Smitty (a street artist possibly modelled on Banksy), Smitty's assistant, Parker French, Mark (Roger's second in command), Quentina Mkfesi (a Zimbabwean traffic warden), Zbigniew (a Polish builder, contracted by most of the residents), Davina (Zbigniew's English girlfriend), Matya (the Younts' Hungarian nanny), Ahmed's younger brothers, Shahid and Usman, Iqbal Rashid (a potential jihadist Belgian acquaintance of Shahid from their time in Chechnya), and Detective Inspector Mill.
"We Want What You Have"
These numerous characters, both major and minor, are portrayed in detail. In fact, description forms the largest part of the novel. The challenge seems to have been how to sustain interest in the novel with the barest sliver of a plot. The plot can be summarised, more or less, in a dozen sentences (it's almost as if one or two things happens to each character, and these things somehow coalesce into a coherent narrative):
* Somebody starts sending postcards declaring "We Want What You Have" to the residents of Pepys Road;
* Mrs Howe dies of a brain tumour;
* Mary gets Zbigniew to renovate her house in Pepys Road in preparation for sale;
* Iqbal moves out of the Kamal residence when the Pakistani matriarch visits the family;
* Roger anticipates receiving a Christmas bonus of £1M (on top of his £150K salary), without which he would go broke;
* Instead, Roger gets sacked for not adequately supervising Mark, his second in command;
* Shahid is wrongly accused of committing crimes against the residents of Pepys Road;
* the real culprit of these crimes is not who we'd suspect it is;
* Zbigniew breaks up with Davina;
* Zbigniew falls in love with Matya;
* Smitty sacks his offsider, Parker French;
* Parker reveals Smitty's true identity to the media;
* two homes in Pepys Road are sold, at least one of them to a banker.
Ultimately, just these fragments of plot together satiate an appetite for narrative motion.
The Postmaterialist Shift
The greatest influence on the plot is actually mentioned so little that it's almost invisible. It's both an elephant in the room and a noisy steamroller coming down the road at great speed.
The wealth and status of the residents of Pepys Road depend on the value of their properties. However, the novel extends from December, 2007 to November, 2008, more or less the duration of the Global Financial Crisis, when values would diminish enormously.
Roger loses his job as a banker during this period, and must sell his home. It also forces him to reassess his lifestyle, and in particular the lifestyle of his spendthrift wife, Arabella, that his base salary and bonuses had historically funded:
"Whatever the reason for the shift, it was real, and he now, and increasingly, found her crushingly shallow and wearingly, suffocatingly materialistic. He had worked in the City, among the biggest breadheads on planet Earth - and he was married to a bigger breadhead than any of them."
While he recognises his own need to change (and promises to do so), nowhere does he admit his own primary responsibility for what has happened. Surely, it's sanctimonious to suggest that Arabella was solely responsible for their collective materialism. After all, at the beginning of the novel, it was Roger who longed impatiently for a bonus of £1M. Arabella might have bought the sofas, but Roger bought the houses. He was as attached to the teat of the City milk cow as anybody in the novel. I suspected that Roger would be back working in the banking sector within three to five years. His embrace of postmaterialism just wasn't truly convincing.
FOOTNOTES:
(1) Most of the novel ("Women and Men") was actually set in an apartment block in Murray Hill, thus making it a vertical neighbourhood (in contrast to the horizontal neighbourhood of Pepys Road).
SOUNDTRACK:
July 9, 2017
Another masterful novel by Lanchester
I'm now officially a member of the John Lanchester fan club. I've read three of his novels: Mr. Phillips, The Debt to Pleasure and now Capital. What strikes me as remarkable about Lanchester's novels is that they are all so utterly different in topic and in tone, and I'd happily reread each one multiple times to relive the reading experience of being absorbed in the novel and in awe of his writing.
Capital is one of those luxuriously long, let-yourself-get-lost in the neighborhood of Pepys Road, a street transformed from middle-class to affluent over a few decades. Lanchester uses those economic striations to follow the long-time residents, newer arrivals, and those who work for the newly rich. Set around the time of the 2008 crash, everything either directly or indirectly relates to capital.
Chapters alternate among the characters in the novel. Lanchester skewers the upwardly mobile showing them obsessed with vapid consumerism. At certain points of the novel, characters like Arabella and Roger seemed almost too oblivious to be believable. Lanchester portrays the working-class characters with rounder brush strokes. It's a slice of London life as detailed and as obliquely observant as some of my favorite 19th century novelists have provided.
I'm now officially a member of the John Lanchester fan club. I've read three of his novels: Mr. Phillips, The Debt to Pleasure and now Capital. What strikes me as remarkable about Lanchester's novels is that they are all so utterly different in topic and in tone, and I'd happily reread each one multiple times to relive the reading experience of being absorbed in the novel and in awe of his writing.
Capital is one of those luxuriously long, let-yourself-get-lost in the neighborhood of Pepys Road, a street transformed from middle-class to affluent over a few decades. Lanchester uses those economic striations to follow the long-time residents, newer arrivals, and those who work for the newly rich. Set around the time of the 2008 crash, everything either directly or indirectly relates to capital.
Chapters alternate among the characters in the novel. Lanchester skewers the upwardly mobile showing them obsessed with vapid consumerism. At certain points of the novel, characters like Arabella and Roger seemed almost too oblivious to be believable. Lanchester portrays the working-class characters with rounder brush strokes. It's a slice of London life as detailed and as obliquely observant as some of my favorite 19th century novelists have provided.
April 27, 2017
This book is a funny, warm and incisive dissection of London society at the time of the financial crisis of 2008. It is a loosely interlinked set of stories, and covers a wide range of characters. It is especially strong on the experiences of various have-not immigrants, and the amorality of the richer residents. Highly recommended.
May 10, 2019
While this book was quite enjoyable to read in a not very emotionally or intellectually challenging way, it throws many rather promising balls up in the air, only to land them rather anti-climatically. Based on the title and the moment in time (2008), I thought it was going to be about the onset of the financial crisis and its impact on this street of characters who are all have a lot of capital tied up in their houses. So I imagined a book about financial anxiety, and shifting realities and class alignments.
That is a (weak) thread in this book, but it's both more sprawling and more gentle then that. And there's not much anxiety (not how I remember those days of 2008!), a nanny loses her job, and finds another one. A day trading immigrant remembers to liquidate his portfolio before catastrophe sets in. It's all quite benign. Even the "mystery" of who is menacing the street's inhabitants is not very tense or very menacing. Everything is rather muffled and unfocused, and the effect is rather unsatisfying.
Few of the characters rise above stereotype (there are perhaps a few more of them than most authors can handle well). As a result, the sense upon meeting the Pakistani newsagent with a domineering mother in law and one religious brother, the Banksy stand-in, the shopaholic yummy mummy, the sociopathic trader, the stoic Polish builder, the hot Hungarian nanny, is one of familiarity and, ultimately, something approaching boredom. A couple of the African characters seem a bit more interesting but because of the book's structure, we don't see as much of them as we might like.
All in all, it's a bit like one of those desserts that looks so much better than it tastes! Oh well.
That is a (weak) thread in this book, but it's both more sprawling and more gentle then that. And there's not much anxiety (not how I remember those days of 2008!), a nanny loses her job, and finds another one. A day trading immigrant remembers to liquidate his portfolio before catastrophe sets in. It's all quite benign. Even the "mystery" of who is menacing the street's inhabitants is not very tense or very menacing. Everything is rather muffled and unfocused, and the effect is rather unsatisfying.
Few of the characters rise above stereotype (there are perhaps a few more of them than most authors can handle well). As a result, the sense upon meeting the Pakistani newsagent with a domineering mother in law and one religious brother, the Banksy stand-in, the shopaholic yummy mummy, the sociopathic trader, the stoic Polish builder, the hot Hungarian nanny, is one of familiarity and, ultimately, something approaching boredom. A couple of the African characters seem a bit more interesting but because of the book's structure, we don't see as much of them as we might like.
All in all, it's a bit like one of those desserts that looks so much better than it tastes! Oh well.
July 21, 2012
A great multi-character look at London in 2008. Lanchester is a master at delving into the stories of individual families living on a single street in the City. Recommended for readers who enjoyed "The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst; "Crossing California" by Adam Langer; and the novels of Zadie Smith. Another case where I would have given 4.5 stars if it were possible on GoodReads....ahem!
April 22, 2019
I would be lying if l said this wasn't a classic. It's more of a pastiche of London life. The different kinds of characters you can meet not just in South London but in London in general. There is a plot going on in the background but not much of one. It's also funny in places
January 9, 2012
This book details the events and past history of several families in Pepys Road, Lambeth from late 2007 to late 2008. I liked most of the characters, my favourite probably being Ahmed and Roger. There's a woman nursing a dying relative, a lost fortune found, the ubiquitious Eastern European builders and nannies, the crash of the banking system, Muslim terrorism, the lazy spoilt wife of a banker and the Asian family working all the hours that Allah sends in their newsagent/mini-mart shop plus a local prankster irritating the whole street which rapidly gets out of hand, necessitating the local police being called in to investigate. I loved it and read the bulk of it in one night - I couldn't put it down until I really needed to sleep, in my anxiety to see what happened next. I especially enjoyed seeing the various strands tied up, with a lot of satisfaction at the lesser pleasing characters receiving what could childishly be called 'just desserts'. If you love family sagas, a lot of strands in your story and a fast-moving story then do beg, borrow or steal a copy when it comes out.
March 11, 2013
In the late 1980s I went to an exhibition of the work of three of the great British architects of the twentieth century--Richard Rogers, Norman Foster and James Stirling. I think it was Rogers who was quoted as saying that cities exist for one reason only--as a place for people to meet. I've never forgotten that.
Capital is a book not so much about a city as about its people. Its epicentre is a south London street, Pepys Road--Everystreet, in all but name. Its dramatis personae are the street's residents: the banker and his wife and children, the Pakistani family who own the corner shop, the widow living out her final years in the house where she was born, the up-and-coming football star, the immigrants both legal and illegal, the tradesmen and traffic wardens, the artists and artisans, the sons and the lovers. Added to this is the slightly menacing presence of the houses of Pepys Road, every one of them a tyrannical god demanding constant tribute, whose market value bestows arbitrary blessings or curses on its owner.
This is a "slice of life" novel portraying the people of Pepys Road through the course of a year, from December 2007 to November 2008--the year that saw the collapse of the merchant banks, the beginning of the credit crunch, against a backdrop of commuter journeys and low-level antisocial behaviour and the constant rumble of the threat of terrorism. All play a role in the drama of the residents of Pepys Road.
The story is told at the personal level, switching from one character to another, showing for the most part lives that intersect by accident rather than a homogeneous community. It is a story of the everyday grind rather than of heroism or achievement: most of the characters are simply getting on with their lives, some more competently or more successfully than others; only one or two of them are drawn with out-and-out contempt.
There is no single narrative thread, no grand conclusion, but by the end of the novel every character has seen some kind of resolution in his or her life. In many ways these are not characters to inspire or enthuse; one is more likely to spot an unflattering or self-destructive character trait, and check in the mirror to see that one has not developed it oneself. This makes it all the more satisfying to encounter the few surprising moments of personal strength and dignity and courage, amid the everyday successes and failures and the lives of quiet desperation.
It's a good read, with some moments of real humour and surprise, and a good many characters whom you wish well at the end. (OK, and one you don't...)
And what of London itself? The capital is a constant presence, perhaps the least palatable character, an unforgiving and all-devouring deity to many of its citizens. To every one of Lanchester's characters the city has held out some lure or other--wealth, fame, security, justice, notoriety, fairness, fulfilment in all its forms. Every one of these promises is tested to the limit in the course of the book; nearly all are found wanting.
Not quite all, though. But it is telling that the characters who emerge stronger at the end, more fulfilled and better equipped to cope, are those who do not bow down and worship the golden calves of the Capital, but treat it in Lord Rogers' words as a place for people to meet; those who turn their backs on London's gaudy promises, and find what they need inside themselves and their fellow man.
Capital is a book not so much about a city as about its people. Its epicentre is a south London street, Pepys Road--Everystreet, in all but name. Its dramatis personae are the street's residents: the banker and his wife and children, the Pakistani family who own the corner shop, the widow living out her final years in the house where she was born, the up-and-coming football star, the immigrants both legal and illegal, the tradesmen and traffic wardens, the artists and artisans, the sons and the lovers. Added to this is the slightly menacing presence of the houses of Pepys Road, every one of them a tyrannical god demanding constant tribute, whose market value bestows arbitrary blessings or curses on its owner.
This is a "slice of life" novel portraying the people of Pepys Road through the course of a year, from December 2007 to November 2008--the year that saw the collapse of the merchant banks, the beginning of the credit crunch, against a backdrop of commuter journeys and low-level antisocial behaviour and the constant rumble of the threat of terrorism. All play a role in the drama of the residents of Pepys Road.
The story is told at the personal level, switching from one character to another, showing for the most part lives that intersect by accident rather than a homogeneous community. It is a story of the everyday grind rather than of heroism or achievement: most of the characters are simply getting on with their lives, some more competently or more successfully than others; only one or two of them are drawn with out-and-out contempt.
There is no single narrative thread, no grand conclusion, but by the end of the novel every character has seen some kind of resolution in his or her life. In many ways these are not characters to inspire or enthuse; one is more likely to spot an unflattering or self-destructive character trait, and check in the mirror to see that one has not developed it oneself. This makes it all the more satisfying to encounter the few surprising moments of personal strength and dignity and courage, amid the everyday successes and failures and the lives of quiet desperation.
It's a good read, with some moments of real humour and surprise, and a good many characters whom you wish well at the end. (OK, and one you don't...)
And what of London itself? The capital is a constant presence, perhaps the least palatable character, an unforgiving and all-devouring deity to many of its citizens. To every one of Lanchester's characters the city has held out some lure or other--wealth, fame, security, justice, notoriety, fairness, fulfilment in all its forms. Every one of these promises is tested to the limit in the course of the book; nearly all are found wanting.
Not quite all, though. But it is telling that the characters who emerge stronger at the end, more fulfilled and better equipped to cope, are those who do not bow down and worship the golden calves of the Capital, but treat it in Lord Rogers' words as a place for people to meet; those who turn their backs on London's gaudy promises, and find what they need inside themselves and their fellow man.
June 22, 2012
Take Sebastian Faulks’ A Week in December, add in healthy dollops of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Hector Tobar’s The Barbarian Nurseries and you’ll have some idea what to expect from John Lanchester’s CAPITAL.
Like these other books, CAPITAL presents a panoramic view: in this case, of London at the cusp of a new and turbulent economic age. He focuses on a cross-section of residents and workers on a fictional and prestigious London treat including a well-heeled banker and his shopaholic wife and Hungarian nanny, an elderly widow dying of a brain tumor and her middle-aged daughter and alternative-arts grandson, a talented Senegalese young soccer player on the cusp of stardom, three Pakistani brothers with varying degrees of political involvement, a Polish builder, and a political refugee from Zimbabwe who is supporting herself on forged work permit.
Each has his or her own ambivalent relationship with money. One reflects, “It was brash and horrible and vulgar, but also exciting and energetic and shameless and new…If the city was one huge shop window, she was on the outside on the pavement, looking in.” Indeed, “having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be rich.” The haves and have-nots are clearly delineated and to muddy the waters, someone is sending creepy postcards to all of them, stating, “We want what you have.”
Those of foreign origin – the Polish builder, the Zimbabwe refugee, the Hungarian nanny, the Pakistanis – appear to have a stronger moral compass than those for whom wealth is a given. They are the fiber of the story, a direct contrast to those who enjoy ease and comfort. This is, perhaps, my biggest gripe: the all-too-often stereotypical portrayals of the characters. Arabella, the shopaholic wife, has virtually no redeeming characteristics, for example. The Pakistanis – well, we know what’s going to happen to at least one of them because it is highly telegraphed.
That being said, this is a good London saga, with interwoven characters who hold your attention. It may not be the quintessential London novel – as is being touted – but it’s intriguing nonetheless.
Like these other books, CAPITAL presents a panoramic view: in this case, of London at the cusp of a new and turbulent economic age. He focuses on a cross-section of residents and workers on a fictional and prestigious London treat including a well-heeled banker and his shopaholic wife and Hungarian nanny, an elderly widow dying of a brain tumor and her middle-aged daughter and alternative-arts grandson, a talented Senegalese young soccer player on the cusp of stardom, three Pakistani brothers with varying degrees of political involvement, a Polish builder, and a political refugee from Zimbabwe who is supporting herself on forged work permit.
Each has his or her own ambivalent relationship with money. One reflects, “It was brash and horrible and vulgar, but also exciting and energetic and shameless and new…If the city was one huge shop window, she was on the outside on the pavement, looking in.” Indeed, “having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be rich.” The haves and have-nots are clearly delineated and to muddy the waters, someone is sending creepy postcards to all of them, stating, “We want what you have.”
Those of foreign origin – the Polish builder, the Zimbabwe refugee, the Hungarian nanny, the Pakistanis – appear to have a stronger moral compass than those for whom wealth is a given. They are the fiber of the story, a direct contrast to those who enjoy ease and comfort. This is, perhaps, my biggest gripe: the all-too-often stereotypical portrayals of the characters. Arabella, the shopaholic wife, has virtually no redeeming characteristics, for example. The Pakistanis – well, we know what’s going to happen to at least one of them because it is highly telegraphed.
That being said, this is a good London saga, with interwoven characters who hold your attention. It may not be the quintessential London novel – as is being touted – but it’s intriguing nonetheless.
September 1, 2013
I was eager to read this, as I liked Fragrant Harbor, but Capital was a disappointment. It’s easy to see what it was aiming at: something along the lines of a literary equivalent of Altman’s Short Cuts or Paul Haggis’s Crash, crafting a collective portrait of contemporary London through the intersecting lives of a series of inhabitants of a single street in Clapham. It is set before and after the 2008 financial meltdown—a timeline that allows the novel to tap into a vein of dramatic irony as we watch the ebd of a micro-era of plenty.
One of the most sustained characters, Roger Yount, works in the city, and I found myself wondering whether Lanchester’s original intent was to focus the narrative on him and his family. This might have produced a more successful book; as it is, I wasn’t convinced that the multi-perspectival structure added sufficient richness and depth to the novel to counter the risk of superficiality. A couple of reviews I’ve read here have compared Capital to a soap opera and that doesn’t seem to me entirely unfair, despite the novel’s literary pretensions; certainly, some characters, notably Roger’s spoilt wife Arabella—the name says it all—are pure cliché.
I found technical problems with the novel, as well, in that it combines point of view and omniscient narration, rather clunkily at times. At one point, early in the novel, Arabella glances at her reflection in a shop window while speaking on her mobile and we are informed by the narrator that:
this habit was not vanity but an occasional, sudden, vertiginous loss of self, brought on by the experience of talking to a voice over the airwaves … she needed these occasional reminders that she was still actually there, and it was this unconscious need which underlay this habit of needing to look at her reflection
To which the only response is, "well, that’s her explained ..."
One of the most sustained characters, Roger Yount, works in the city, and I found myself wondering whether Lanchester’s original intent was to focus the narrative on him and his family. This might have produced a more successful book; as it is, I wasn’t convinced that the multi-perspectival structure added sufficient richness and depth to the novel to counter the risk of superficiality. A couple of reviews I’ve read here have compared Capital to a soap opera and that doesn’t seem to me entirely unfair, despite the novel’s literary pretensions; certainly, some characters, notably Roger’s spoilt wife Arabella—the name says it all—are pure cliché.
I found technical problems with the novel, as well, in that it combines point of view and omniscient narration, rather clunkily at times. At one point, early in the novel, Arabella glances at her reflection in a shop window while speaking on her mobile and we are informed by the narrator that:
this habit was not vanity but an occasional, sudden, vertiginous loss of self, brought on by the experience of talking to a voice over the airwaves … she needed these occasional reminders that she was still actually there, and it was this unconscious need which underlay this habit of needing to look at her reflection
To which the only response is, "well, that’s her explained ..."
March 20, 2018
I could write paragraphs about the book in a serious review, but why bother? Essentially, there was too little drama, very small trauma, and no lessons learned that made for dramatic or special satisfaction. Very small potatoes. The best I can do is to describe the story as a literary cozy with very little charm or anything sparkly about it.
November 7, 2012
I read Mr Phillips a long time ago... couldn't remember if I liked it or not. This book was getting good press and ideally suited for my tastes. London. State of the Nation. Comedy.
Lets give it a go.
It's a lengthy book in very short chapters and an incredibly simple premise. The inhabitants of a South London Street are receiving sinister, anonymous "we want what you have messages". Like that film where the owners are left videos of their house on the doorstep. I forget the name.
This allows us to discuss the population of this street. We have the old lady who's house is about to be inherited, the asian shopkeepers, the polish builder (not living there, but working), the banksy style art terrorist, the teenage African footballer and my favourite - The Younts.
Poor old Roger Yount. 40 Year old banker, dreaming of his £1m bonus simply to keep his wife and kids in the two house life they have become accustomed to. The book is nicely building when it reaches its peak at Xmas time.... Roger gets a 30k bonus and gets home to find out his wife has left him for the festive period with one of the greatest letters of all time. Loved the sign off. Bloody Arabella.
Short chapters work well and the book moves forward but it does seem a touch flimsey. There's no key pay off and no apparenet wider picture of London or the UK. I think I got more from watching Julian Temple's Babylon London - where it revealed that 40% of londoners today were not even born in the UK.
That said, there is a range of humour, from gentle, to laugh out loud. Some memorable characters and some reasonable state of the nation commentary.
A pleasure to read.
Lets give it a go.
It's a lengthy book in very short chapters and an incredibly simple premise. The inhabitants of a South London Street are receiving sinister, anonymous "we want what you have messages". Like that film where the owners are left videos of their house on the doorstep. I forget the name.
This allows us to discuss the population of this street. We have the old lady who's house is about to be inherited, the asian shopkeepers, the polish builder (not living there, but working), the banksy style art terrorist, the teenage African footballer and my favourite - The Younts.
Poor old Roger Yount. 40 Year old banker, dreaming of his £1m bonus simply to keep his wife and kids in the two house life they have become accustomed to. The book is nicely building when it reaches its peak at Xmas time.... Roger gets a 30k bonus and gets home to find out his wife has left him for the festive period with one of the greatest letters of all time. Loved the sign off. Bloody Arabella.
Short chapters work well and the book moves forward but it does seem a touch flimsey. There's no key pay off and no apparenet wider picture of London or the UK. I think I got more from watching Julian Temple's Babylon London - where it revealed that 40% of londoners today were not even born in the UK.
That said, there is a range of humour, from gentle, to laugh out loud. Some memorable characters and some reasonable state of the nation commentary.
A pleasure to read.
January 22, 2016
I realise it's maybe a bit unfair to give this book a 1 star review based on what I assumed the book would be like. But I can't hide the fact that I'm disappointed with how the book ended. The synopsis, and not to mention the various We Want What You Have postcards pictured on each side of the book seems to suggest that it is a fairly integral part of the story. So I went in to reading this book, chapter after chapter, character after character, thinking how amazing this book is going to be once all these many characters - somewhere in the high teens - are all pulled together at the end under the umbrella of the WWWYH campaign.
In the end I found that the postcards almost seemed like a side story, it only involved a handful of characters, and only directly affected maybe four at the most.
Given the fact that there were so many characters, it meant that the chapters where very short, and it left no room for any real character developments, so I never made a connection with anyone besides Petunia and Mary - but I suspect that is only due to my mother going through something similar recently with her parents.
I found that many characters stories just fizzled out, leaving me wondering why they were included in the book in the first place. It's a fairly weighty tome, so to have done away with a few characters not only would have shortened the book, but it probably would have made much more sense.
In the end I was left feeling frustrated, the main story arc seemed like an after thought and the characters were a little one dimensional and at times superfluous.
In the end I found that the postcards almost seemed like a side story, it only involved a handful of characters, and only directly affected maybe four at the most.
Given the fact that there were so many characters, it meant that the chapters where very short, and it left no room for any real character developments, so I never made a connection with anyone besides Petunia and Mary - but I suspect that is only due to my mother going through something similar recently with her parents.
I found that many characters stories just fizzled out, leaving me wondering why they were included in the book in the first place. It's a fairly weighty tome, so to have done away with a few characters not only would have shortened the book, but it probably would have made much more sense.
In the end I was left feeling frustrated, the main story arc seemed like an after thought and the characters were a little one dimensional and at times superfluous.
April 6, 2013
This is a bang up-to-date book written in an old fashioned way. Each chapter about half a dozen pages; each focuses on one of a cast of characters living in or linked to a single London street where houses have reached the million pound mark, even more with the extensive renovations done by the more prosperous. So we meet a lawyer, a footballer, a banker, a dying woman, her daughter, an asylum seeker, an immigrant Polish builder, a conceptual artist... As a "state of the nation" novel it sounds and is schematic. We follow the characters through personal crises against the background of the great banking crash. Ideas or meanings are rarely discussed; the focus is squarely on the characters. Yet the structure and texture of the novel lull the reader into something like a slow-moving mosaic of real lives, some familiar, some strange and exotic. I found it strangely gripping, a page turner, stories of now told with honesty, humour and compassion but without melodrama or over-wrought prose. Few lessons are drawn or even suggested; ideas are left unexplored; character is all. Here they are, says Lanchester almost dispassionately, make of them what you will; maybe a hint of, aren't they (we) strange? But they're also very human, and Lanchester makes us care about them for a year or so in their lives and times.
July 2, 2012
It's not the definitive London novel, however hard it tries to be. I did enjoy reading it, but I think its pretty much a copy of the idea of Sebastian Faulks' A week in December, which does this same story better. A cross section across London society, cleverly encapsulated in the idea of people living in the same road and how their fortunes and misfortunes intertwine: the rich family in which the father works in the city, the poor pensioner who has lived in her house through the years to see it become worth over a million, the Muslim idealist, the African footballer, the illegal immigrant escaping an oppressive regime... it gives a great perspective into the diversity of people living in London. I enjoyed the viewpoint of the horrendous moneyed and spoilt Arabella, but some of the characters remained little more than sketches. Living in South London myself, I also enjoyed the descriptions of areas I know well. I also expected more of an analysis of the money problems in the city, given Lanchester's experience in writing about this, and again I think Faulks' provided more insights into this topic. However, its hard to put down, and I did want to carry on reading about the people even after 500 pages of this weighty tome!
July 28, 2019
Multi-narrator story, which means that the book (although much longer than Mr. Phillips or The Debt to Pleasure) does not seem too long, and in fact draws the reader in. The book tells the story of the various inhabitants of a South London street (and those who interact with them) of now desirable expensive homes, during four separate months over 2008.
Enjoyable although lacking real depth or a particularly strong ending.
Enjoyable although lacking real depth or a particularly strong ending.
November 23, 2013
“Capital,” John Lanchester’s too-big-to-fail novel about the financial crisis, sounds like an opportunity any sharp reader should invest in. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, of course, but this 50-year-old writer has been an illuminating chronicler of capitalism’s seizures.
In the London Review of Books, among other venues, he has written on everything from the global expansion of Kraft Foods to the future of newspapers (please, God). His greatest asset may be that he has no formal economic training. Dedicated to writing for people “who don’t speak finance,” he never assumes we know how a reciprocal currency arrangement should work. Two years ago, he published “I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay,” which provided a global tour of rapacity and stupidity. Blending brilliant financial reporting with irresistible British wit, it was a profitable merger of Michael Lewis, James Surowiecki and Kingsley Amis. Collateralized debt obligations were never so much fun.
But Lanchester is also an accomplished and daring novelist (his first, “The Debt to Pleasure,” won a Whitbread Book Award), and now he has combined his fiction-writing artistry with a reporter’s expertise to capture the financial biodiversity of London in 2008.
From that prospectus, “Capital” seems to be positioning itself as a competitor to Tom Wolfe, even Charles Dickens. The opening chapters rotate through a fantastic variety of characters who live on the same street. The plain houses along Pepys Road were constructed during the late 19th century for middle-class residents, but the 21st-century property boom has raised prices to hysterical levels. “It was like Texas during the oil rush,” Lanchester writes, “except that instead of sticking a hole in the ground to make fossil fuel shoot up from it, all people had to do was sit there and imagine the cash value of their homes rattling upwards so fast that they couldn’t see the figures go round.” As the still-stunned buyer of a tiny house in Bethesda, I was all over this satire like green on cash.
In vivid, short chapters, we meet London residents who have no idea that by the end of the year, a bank in New York will collapse and throw the economy into chaos: They’re young and old, whites and blacks, Englishmen and immigrants (legal and illegal). Clusters of characters cohere around each house on the street, from No. 42, owned by an 82-year-old widow getting knocked through modern medical care, to No. 68, where a Pakistani family runs a small shop and tries to avoid association with radical Muslims. There are African meter maids and Polish handymen, beautiful nannies and jealous assistants, lazy relatives and gifted soccer players — the whole vast complex of people rubbing against one another in a big city, and Lanchester seems to know the colorful minutiae of everybody’s business. He swings from deep sympathy for a Zimbabwean refugee waiting for asylum to tart satire of a financier anticipating his bonus. The effect is like one of those cut-away illustrations that show the interior of every room in an apartment complex.
But forget the bedrooms. In a market saturated with 50 shades of concupiscence, what additional sexual detail could modern fiction possibly reveal? Lanchester knows that what really piques our curiosity is other people’s money, and in one cascading paragraph after another, he unrolls the grand ledger of our desires. That breathless accounting reaches its climax in his portrayal of the Yount family at 51 Pepys Rd. Richard Yount, a handsome investment banker, thinks nothing of spending 30,000 pounds on a hunting rifle for a weekend outing. He’s still capable of feeling a twinge at the “slightly revolting sign of excess,” but he and his wife, Arabella, can barely keep hold of the fire hose of money spraying from their wallets on country homes, designer clothing and exotic vacations. (What most people pay for a car, Arabella spends to redo the lighting in her dressing room.) It’s all itemized here to the nearest 10,000 pounds, along with the network of personal staff meant to keep Richard and Arabella from ever enduring a moment’s interaction with their young children. Written in a voice that captures the Younts’ blithe egotism, this section is the most delightful response I’ve ever read to those execrable stories about how difficult it is to get by on “just” $250,000 a year.
As you can probably tell, there’s a strong populist theme running through Lanchester’s survey of London, a sense that inane distortions at the top of the economic register are ruining life for everyone who actually works for a living by doing something of value. But that lovely liberal ideal crimps the novel’s moral imagination: Its rich people are foolish and extravagant; its poor people are hardworking and ethical. Such a rule does not produce much surprise. Despite his command with the excesses of the period, Lanchester seems unwilling to make us gasp, to confront us with the truly creepy things people will do when cursed by extreme poverty or absurd wealth. The result is a novel that, for all its variety, works from a fairly predictable palette.
That’s disappointing because the early sections of the story are so full of spectacular comedy — and menace. Throughout the novel, all the residents of Pepys Road receive increasingly unnerving postcards that say, “We Want What You Have.” Like the anonymous phone calls in Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” these cards accumulate threatening power. Over many chapters, this element of intrigue seems to be laying the basis for some complex and ominous exploration of class envy, but that mystery just peters out. The various story lines become hard to service, and the book’s initial comedy starts to look like your bank’s teaser rate. The bubble of enthusiasm doesn’t so much pop as leak, and by the end, this long story is something of a labor.
For an alternative reading investment, buy Adam Haslett’s “Union Atlantic” (2010). It’s still the best novel about the recent financial collapse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
In the London Review of Books, among other venues, he has written on everything from the global expansion of Kraft Foods to the future of newspapers (please, God). His greatest asset may be that he has no formal economic training. Dedicated to writing for people “who don’t speak finance,” he never assumes we know how a reciprocal currency arrangement should work. Two years ago, he published “I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay,” which provided a global tour of rapacity and stupidity. Blending brilliant financial reporting with irresistible British wit, it was a profitable merger of Michael Lewis, James Surowiecki and Kingsley Amis. Collateralized debt obligations were never so much fun.
But Lanchester is also an accomplished and daring novelist (his first, “The Debt to Pleasure,” won a Whitbread Book Award), and now he has combined his fiction-writing artistry with a reporter’s expertise to capture the financial biodiversity of London in 2008.
From that prospectus, “Capital” seems to be positioning itself as a competitor to Tom Wolfe, even Charles Dickens. The opening chapters rotate through a fantastic variety of characters who live on the same street. The plain houses along Pepys Road were constructed during the late 19th century for middle-class residents, but the 21st-century property boom has raised prices to hysterical levels. “It was like Texas during the oil rush,” Lanchester writes, “except that instead of sticking a hole in the ground to make fossil fuel shoot up from it, all people had to do was sit there and imagine the cash value of their homes rattling upwards so fast that they couldn’t see the figures go round.” As the still-stunned buyer of a tiny house in Bethesda, I was all over this satire like green on cash.
In vivid, short chapters, we meet London residents who have no idea that by the end of the year, a bank in New York will collapse and throw the economy into chaos: They’re young and old, whites and blacks, Englishmen and immigrants (legal and illegal). Clusters of characters cohere around each house on the street, from No. 42, owned by an 82-year-old widow getting knocked through modern medical care, to No. 68, where a Pakistani family runs a small shop and tries to avoid association with radical Muslims. There are African meter maids and Polish handymen, beautiful nannies and jealous assistants, lazy relatives and gifted soccer players — the whole vast complex of people rubbing against one another in a big city, and Lanchester seems to know the colorful minutiae of everybody’s business. He swings from deep sympathy for a Zimbabwean refugee waiting for asylum to tart satire of a financier anticipating his bonus. The effect is like one of those cut-away illustrations that show the interior of every room in an apartment complex.
But forget the bedrooms. In a market saturated with 50 shades of concupiscence, what additional sexual detail could modern fiction possibly reveal? Lanchester knows that what really piques our curiosity is other people’s money, and in one cascading paragraph after another, he unrolls the grand ledger of our desires. That breathless accounting reaches its climax in his portrayal of the Yount family at 51 Pepys Rd. Richard Yount, a handsome investment banker, thinks nothing of spending 30,000 pounds on a hunting rifle for a weekend outing. He’s still capable of feeling a twinge at the “slightly revolting sign of excess,” but he and his wife, Arabella, can barely keep hold of the fire hose of money spraying from their wallets on country homes, designer clothing and exotic vacations. (What most people pay for a car, Arabella spends to redo the lighting in her dressing room.) It’s all itemized here to the nearest 10,000 pounds, along with the network of personal staff meant to keep Richard and Arabella from ever enduring a moment’s interaction with their young children. Written in a voice that captures the Younts’ blithe egotism, this section is the most delightful response I’ve ever read to those execrable stories about how difficult it is to get by on “just” $250,000 a year.
As you can probably tell, there’s a strong populist theme running through Lanchester’s survey of London, a sense that inane distortions at the top of the economic register are ruining life for everyone who actually works for a living by doing something of value. But that lovely liberal ideal crimps the novel’s moral imagination: Its rich people are foolish and extravagant; its poor people are hardworking and ethical. Such a rule does not produce much surprise. Despite his command with the excesses of the period, Lanchester seems unwilling to make us gasp, to confront us with the truly creepy things people will do when cursed by extreme poverty or absurd wealth. The result is a novel that, for all its variety, works from a fairly predictable palette.
That’s disappointing because the early sections of the story are so full of spectacular comedy — and menace. Throughout the novel, all the residents of Pepys Road receive increasingly unnerving postcards that say, “We Want What You Have.” Like the anonymous phone calls in Muriel Spark’s “Memento Mori,” these cards accumulate threatening power. Over many chapters, this element of intrigue seems to be laying the basis for some complex and ominous exploration of class envy, but that mystery just peters out. The various story lines become hard to service, and the book’s initial comedy starts to look like your bank’s teaser rate. The bubble of enthusiasm doesn’t so much pop as leak, and by the end, this long story is something of a labor.
For an alternative reading investment, buy Adam Haslett’s “Union Atlantic” (2010). It’s still the best novel about the recent financial collapse.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/enterta...
July 22, 2018
è possibilissimo che anche stavolta abbia agito il mio notorio pregiudizio positivo verso tutto quanto parla di Londra, in questo caso esaltato dall'avere letto il libro proprio in loco, durante la vacanzina londinese che mi concedo ogni due o tre anni.
Come che sia, questo Lanchester (di cui avevo letto secoli fa Gola, di cui non ricordo niente se non che mi aveva divertita) mi sembra l'ennesimo inglese che scrive benissimo. A Pepys Road si incrociano (ma neanche tanto, ognuno vive la propria vita) residenti storici, arrivati nella strada prima che ci arrivassero il boom immobiliare e i soldi della finanza allegra; residenti arrivati con il boom; immigrati arrivati da lontano cercando quello che cercano tutti gli immigrati, una vita decente. Intorno a loro si muovono le loro madri, i loro figli, i loro colleghi, i loro fratelli. Chi è pronto a mandare in rovina altre persone e chi non cede alla tentazione, chi finisce in prigione ingiustamente e chi ci finirà per colpe di cui non aveva valutato la portata, chi rimane stritolato nella macchina che seleziona gli eletti (e per sentirsi eletti basta avere il permesso di soggiorno nel Regno Unito).
Non ho contato quanti siano i personaggi di questo libro: ma Lanchester è riuscito a renderli tutti interessanti ed umani (si arriva a provare simpatia per uno squalo della finanza, e ho detto tutto), e Pepys Road è una godibilissima lettura.
Come che sia, questo Lanchester (di cui avevo letto secoli fa Gola, di cui non ricordo niente se non che mi aveva divertita) mi sembra l'ennesimo inglese che scrive benissimo. A Pepys Road si incrociano (ma neanche tanto, ognuno vive la propria vita) residenti storici, arrivati nella strada prima che ci arrivassero il boom immobiliare e i soldi della finanza allegra; residenti arrivati con il boom; immigrati arrivati da lontano cercando quello che cercano tutti gli immigrati, una vita decente. Intorno a loro si muovono le loro madri, i loro figli, i loro colleghi, i loro fratelli. Chi è pronto a mandare in rovina altre persone e chi non cede alla tentazione, chi finisce in prigione ingiustamente e chi ci finirà per colpe di cui non aveva valutato la portata, chi rimane stritolato nella macchina che seleziona gli eletti (e per sentirsi eletti basta avere il permesso di soggiorno nel Regno Unito).
Non ho contato quanti siano i personaggi di questo libro: ma Lanchester è riuscito a renderli tutti interessanti ed umani (si arriva a provare simpatia per uno squalo della finanza, e ho detto tutto), e Pepys Road è una godibilissima lettura.
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