Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line:
‘You never—’
‘He never—’
‘Batty man—’
And that’s it: six words in 650 pages.
Capital, a metropolitan panorama that takes in the dawn of what we call ‘the current climate’, is wonderful — warm, funny, smart — but you do feel John Lanchester might be afraid to fall flat on his face with a fuddy-duddy faux pas. So no black Britons or (equally weirdly) teenagers of any colour, unless you count a Senegalese football star whose job stops him doing anything teenagey. Yet this risk aversion proves valuable even as it dents the novel’s claim on relevance and verisimilitude.
Chapters that are seldom longer than half a dozen pages take turns to show us an old lady with a brain tumour, a family of Punjabi shopkeepers, a banker struggling to stay solvent after losing out on a million-quid bonus, a nanny from Hungary, a traffic warden who faces being deported to Zimbabwe, a Banksy-like guerrilla art-maker and plenty of others. Writing from the point of view of the migrant characters causes no special hassle, in part, I’d guess, because the Asian material has ready templates; for the rest, Lanchester can wear the research without seeming to trawl.
The narrative orbits a scarcely disguised SW4 street on which the houses fetch megabucks. Residents receive postcards that bear the legend ‘We Want What You Have’, a mystery put to bed five pages from the end. While Capital says less about inequality than this invites us to expect, the novel triumphs precisely because of what it doesn’t do: no overarching plot, no symbolism, no unlikely climax twinning every fate, only a great fat wodge of life and death.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in