Book title: Capital
Author: John Lanchester
Publisher: Faber
Pages: 592
Price: £10.07
John Lanchester’s latest novel, the hefty but easily digestible Capital, will be read in the future much as we read Dickens today, for its exquisitely drawn portraits of a cross-section of Noughties London society. Using the population of one London street, the recently ‘gentrified’ Pepys Road, as a microcosm of the capital’s inhabitants just before the financial crash, Lanchester gives us an instantly recognizable view of the diversity of the capital city; disparate characters, in this case drawn together both by their shared street address and by an odd prank: postcards and DVDs with a photograph of every house to which they are addressed, bearing the message, ‘We want what you have.’
The cards fall through the letterbox belonging to the old-style, old school, City banker, Roger Yount, presently anticipating a large yearly bonus and unaware, or at least unafraid of, the activities of his more numerate and less gentlemanly underlings just as the City is riding towards a catastrophe. His wife, Arabella, Botoxed and beautified and living way beyond reality, is the least nice of Lanchester’s crop of characters, if ultimately rather pathetic when the chips are down. Their neighbours in Pepys Road include Petunia Howse, widow, the oldest resident, living in an unmodernized house without the loft conversion and/or dug-out basement kitchen of wealthier, newer residents, bemused by the postcards arriving through her door. Petunia’s grandson, Smitty — real name Graham, a newly successful Banksy-style hit-and-run anonymous graffiti artist, considering a project to be called ‘Bloody Great Hole’ — is fascinated.
John Lanchester does not moralize, but Capital may one day be viewed as a picture of morals or lack of them in a society teetering on the brink of drastic change. His characters are barely caricatured, with the exception perhaps of Arabella Yount and Smitty’s resentful assistant, Parker French. Rather, they appear all too terribly familiar to those of us who have lived in London during recent years. Zbigniew I know well; Quentina, I naturally detest and curse for the obviously unfair parking tickets. The City was indeed full of Rogers, now retired or diversified, and we have all shopped in the Kamals’ emporium or that of their relations, come from South Asia via East Africa to struggle with daily papers and corner-shop supplies in grey, early London mornings, bedrooms over the shop the breeding ground for new generations of highly educated and successful scientists and entrepreneurs.
Capital beautifully creates a picture of London at a particular time. For that, it can be valued now and will continue to be so in the future. The first meetings with the inhabitants of Pepys Road and their various colleagues, employees and acquaintances are a pleasure; they deserve to be introduced, their immediate idiosyncrasies to be enjoyed. Getting to know them better is also a pleasure if, as with so many people, a diminishing one. The sense of impending doom in their individual surroundings is palpable and all too familiar as it mirrors the shadow hanging over a city built of paper where the ceiling is about to fall in. The plot they all inhabit is of only passing interest like the first postings of ‘We want what you have’ through their front doors.
REVIEWER: ANABEL LOYD
Published on April 13, 2012
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1120413/jsp/northeast/story_15357127.jsp#.T4y-2YG-bCM
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