capital (john lanchester)

The prologue of Lanchester’s novel promises much. The premise is set out: a street where every home is worth is a million pounds. The great London victors of the property wars, those blessed to have been in possession of a house in a desirable barrio of London in the late years of the twentieth century, early twenty first. Who, as the writer explains, just by sitting still in their homes day after day were racking up capital, getting rich. The street is called Pepys Road and would appear to be on one of the more salubrious streets of Clapham. The absurdity of the London housing boom is a subject that begs to be interrogated and there’s no better place for investigating it than in a novel.

However, the novel never really seems to follow through on this premise. It’s another in the current vogue of novels told from multiple perspectives (see Coe’s Middle England and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other), a format that by and large feels more effective in theory than execution. In theory the potential for crossover, for one household to effect another, with great dramatic possibilities, is strong, but this never really happens in Capital. In addition, in the end at least half of the book’s key characters don’t actually live on the street. And if they do, the impact of their undeserved wealth on their psyche is never examined. Whist being an entertaining enough read, it feels as though Lanchester never nails any of his targets. Rather the novel drifts along towards what feels like a sort-of happy ending, except for the fact that one of the protagonists has ended up in a detention centre, under threat of being sent back to her native Zimbabwe and facing whatever kind of horrors she might have to face there. Whilst it is in some ways admirable to compose an overarching novel about London, its winners and losers, there’s always a danger that the presentation of the losers ends up seeming trite. 

Capital could have been a correlative to Who We Was, Krauze’s take on the criminal underclass. It could have shown the complex underside of the other world, that of the unwitting millionaires. There is a  hint of a darker storyline where the residents of the streets are sent the same menacing postcard, but this is never thread which feels undercooked. The man behind this menacing campaign, an angry frustrated artist, is at one point described as going through his Dostoyevski stage. And naming Dostoyevski makes one wonder what the Russian would have made of this story, as well as realise how much modern London needs and lacks its own Dostoyevski.