It’s not a bad time to be a journalist, not wholly bad. Sure, the industry is in apparently irrevocable decline and it is being flagellated before Lord Justice Leveson. But, for the first time in years, there is a species more hated than the Hack. The vitriol against bankers is unrelenting — each week brings fresh acrimony and recrimination. The Guardian is running a TV advert that has reworked the nursery rhyme, Three Little Pigs. The pigs commit insurance fraud by framing the wolf for the destruction of their houses after having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. The banks, reads one fictional headline, are to blame for the tragedy.
John Lanchester’s latest novel, Capital, is a testament against a culture built on acquisitive greed. Rapacious banks are to blame, but so are the three little pigs for living beyond their means. Lanchester charts the transformation virtue of aspiration into the vice of consumption.
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