Book review: Capital by John Lanchester

I'm glad I finally finished John Lanchester's Capital, a 'Top Ten Bestseller' says its cover. I was initially attracted to the book because I felt it would indulge my fascination with bewitching, multicoloured London. I suspected it would delight me with the cobwebbed lives of a cluster of people, from all walks of life, who in all reality could actually coexist on any one street almost anywhere in the city. I expected the book to be a swift, entertaining and an engrossing read. My verdict? Capital is entertaining in parts. Engrossing, not so much. A swift read it certainly isn't.

Capital centres on Pepys Road around the time of the 2008 financial crisis. (An obligatory Google search shows that there does exist a Pepys Road in London although, funnily enough, the real street is in trending Peckham in the South East rather than the book's nouveau posh South West setting in the vicinity of Clapham Common and Balham.)

The road could very well substitute any other residential street in any other London neighbourhood that has seen its fortunes turned around in the last 50 years. We are told that the colours of Pepys Road have changed from being lower middle class before the war with a good stock of late 19^th century terraces; to being partially bombed during the war leading to a minor influx of Caribbean migrants to inhabit the “gap”; then back to being a dowdy slab of suburbia after the war; and then a veritable gold mine since the 20^th century ended. People have come and gone, but the street remains an emblem of contrasting fortunes. We know that money talks here. It's all about capital you see.

Among the cast of characters whose lives and minds Lanchester delves into, Petunia Howe is a dying octogenarian and widow, who lived 60 years on the street, and whose untouched 1950s kitchen sits within the walls of a Victorian terrace house worth over £1.5 million circa 2008. Unbeknownst to her, of course. There is her grandson Graham, also not known as “Smitty”, a Banksy-type “anonymous” Shoreditch-based street artist-cum-provocateur ironically making it big in the gallery scene. Roger Yount is a self-important but slothful City banker and his wife, Arabella, is a full-time shopaholic who wouldn't be caught dead minding her own two young children for more than 20 minutes at a time. They are your typical picture of an obnoxious couple living in a flush three-storied Victorian citadel converted a multiple of times. Roger laments that he and Arabella have only had sex about 60 times in 5 years despite their master bedroom being “the brightest in the house” next to which sits Arabella's dressing room “with her little built-in writing table and the fitted cupboards”. Mercifully Roger has his sexy Hungarian nanny, Matya, to fulfil his primal needs, even if it's just in his mind (something to keep him going while at work). This tells you all you need to know about the Younts' love of things rather than people. Then there is Roger's young, rueful and ambitious sociopathic assistant Mark – originally from Essex. He “does all the work” but is happy to if it means he is closer to getting Roger the sack and the top job for himself.

On the other end of the spectrum exists Zbigniew (otherwise known as “Bogdan” to Arabella), the hardworking Polish builder who appears cold and detached because his heart is really in Poland but London is where the money is. Unlike the heavily indebted Younts, Zbigniew keeps a close eye on his “stock portfolio”, spends little but may have a sex addiction. Also honest and hardworking, Ahmed Kamal and his wife, the beautiful but caged-up Rohinka, live above their family-owned newsagents. His brothers are Shahid, the lazy but brilliant “physics major” drop out-turned-devout Muslim; and Usman, the good-for-nothing layabout and general disappointment of the fierce family matriarch “Mamaji” Kamal. The incessant family politicking in the Kamal household is literally thrown into disarray when one of the family members is arrested for an alleged terrorist link.

Another foreign immigrant to the street (and country) is Patrick Kamo, a cautious and sullen ex-police officer who relentlessly gives up his life for that of his son Freddy, a 16-year-old football prodigy who was spotted in Senegal by an important football manager. And finally, Quentina, from Zimbabwe, is the poster child of an asylum seeker who has assumed a new identity as a tough traffic warden whose 'beat' includes ticketing all those offending Land Rovers on Pepys Road. The street itself is also a character, most notably in the guise of a protracted creepy and anonymous stunt. Closeup images of each house and building on Pepys Road are delivered regularly to the respective properties as postcards stamped with the words “We Want What You Have”. The postcards are soon joined by silent DVD recordings of the houses taken at every possible angle.

It quickly becomes apparent that Lanchester's cross-section of London life is an exposition of stereotypes that lays bare the exuberance and grievances that have made the headlines for as long as anyone can remember. The minted boast their bets on the bewildering property boom, mindlessly consuming pleasures and envies, while the poor hardworking immigrants suck-it-up, do their job but lay low in the promised land.

Lanchester's way of writing serves to galvanise the reader into taking a moral stance on this social divide. He treats the Kamos, Kamals and Quentina especially sensitively – for they ought to deserve the readers' sympathy – while Roger and Arabella, with all their sense of entitlement and loss of perspective at such rarified heights, are sneered upon with a curmudgeon's abandon. When the bubble bursts around the Younts, as it inevitably does, readers via Lanchester cannot but feel smug with a measure of schadenfreude. Perhaps Capital is Lanchester's version of the Occupy movement.

At nearly 600 pages, the novel's ambition is unmistakeable. Yet I found it overall to be a flat and underwhelming read. This may be a result of what I suspect is the author's confusion as to what kind of novel he wanted to write. As it stands, Capital is part chronicle on social injustice and part mystery novel. But the combination founders.

From the beginning pages, I am led to believe that the ominous stalker campaign on Pepys Road is the thread that sows the plot together. The way it was introduced built expectations in my mind that a mystery, foremost, needed to be solved. The lives themselves, although by no means incidental to the story, would steadily but very surely offer up clues as to the motivation behind “the campaign”. It would be a tantalising page turner, in other words. That sought-after momentum, however, quickly evaporates when Lanchester belabours his characters, engrossed in their minds while doing little to furnish them with new and interesting dimensions. The Younts, Smitty and sociopathic Mark are all extremely cartoonish – and maybe that's the author's point. You then get this weird contrast where stories like Quentina's, which ought to evoke some pathos in the reader, end up being wrung dry bits of social commentary written for readers of the New Statesman. Audiences who enjoy a bit of wry gossip via the lives of the Younts aren't necessarily going to want a pedantic report on the asylum seeker's pitiful lot slotted in. Or vice versa. For a novel in which one is saved the fuss of reading between the lines, Lanchester's earnest social narrative is plain incongruent.

For all the intelligence in Lanchester's writing, one hankers for a bit of subversiveness in his characters' development. Instead, we get to read about the kind of people that the media and popular culture have already fetishised through and through. Shahid is a misunderstood, sensitive fellow, who, despite his flirtation with Islam, really actually wants to have a girlfriend and frequent sex. Smitty is a yawn-inducing byword for irony. Parker, Smitty's ex-assistant, lives in Hackney with his lawyer girlfriend (the one who actually makes money) and is aggrieved that all he has to show for his art degree from Goldsmiths is a stint fetching coffee for a Shoreditch Twat. Needless to say, Lanchester is most successful when his characters do not adhere to such cardboard cutouts. His portrayal of Mary, the daughter of Petunia, is the most convincing of the lot as we follow her quiet travails with the many shades of grief when her mother dies and she decides to sell the house on Pepys Road. She is believable and thus worth sympathising with.

For these reasons and more, I found Capital a slog of a read. Cutting it down by half may have helped it be more digestible. If I am to recommend it to anyone, I would do so only to those for whom London remains the Big Ben and the Royal Family. It will certainly provide a peephole into the city's underbelly. If nothing else, it beats reading the Sun.