Capital, by John Lanchester. Book review
Faber
and Faber 2013. ISBN 978-0-571-23462-2. 577 pages.
Set
mainly in London in 2007-2008. All the main characters are fictional.
Capital follows a group of people who live
or work in Pepys Road, an unexceptional (fictional) street in south London. The
residents include a City banker and his wife, a Pakistani family who run the
corner shop, a young African football star and his father, and an elderly
widow. Those who work there include a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny and a
Zimbabwean traffic warden. All the residents start receiving mysterious postcards
with a photograph of their house and the words ‘We Want What You Have’ printed
on the back. Who is sending the postcards and what do they mean?
From
the title, I expected this would be a book about the City of London and the
finance world. It turned out to be much more varied and engaging than that,
because although it does feature a City casino bank and some of the traders who
work there, they are only a component of a large and varied cast. Each
character or group of characters has their own plot. Some happen to cross each
other’s paths as they encounter each other in Pepys Road, others never meet at
all. So the book reads rather like a collection of interweaving short stories.
The big plus of this approach is that there are lots of tales and characters to
choose from; if one narrative doesn’t catch a particular reader’s imagination,
another probably will. For me, I found Zbigniew the Polish builder, Matya the Hungarian
nanny, the Kamal family, and Petunia the elderly widow and her daughter Mary
the most appealing characters. Smug, complacent banker Roger and his shallow
acquisitive wife Arabella deserve each other, and the football sub-plot largely
passed me by (although I did sympathise with the homesick father). Other
readers will no doubt have their own favourites.
Capital doesn’t have an overall plot as
such. The ‘We Want What You Have’ postcards form a sort of loose thread on
which to hang the individual plots, but the ‘mystery’ and its eventual
resolution seemed a bit incidental. This didn’t matter for me, because the
individual plots were engaging enough in their own right to keep me turning the
pages to find out what happened next. I did find I tended to skim the chapters
about the characters I found less interesting and to hurry forward until the
book came back to someone I was more interested in, but that always happens in
a book with multiple sub-plots.
The
writing style is warm and humane, easy to read and often wryly funny. The
characters may occupy stereotypical roles – the public-school banker, the
Polish builder, the Asian shopkeepers – but they are all distinct individuals,
with their own relationships, dilemmas and human foibles. Even the ghastly
characters have some good points.
Entertaining,
easy read about a diverse group of people living and working in London just
before and after the 2008 financial crash.
