Posh Eastenders: that’s basically what John Lanchester’s Capital is. Instead of the east end working class whose lives revolve around Albert Square, here you’ve got the middle/upper-middle class denizens of Pepys Road. A banker, a footballer, an artist, and the less wealthy who’re connected to them in other capacities: a builder, a nanny, a traffic warden, a granny, a spoilt wife, a wannabe jihadi, and the family that run the nearby newsagent.
Is it any good? You don’t finish a nearly 600-page novel if you’re not enjoying it on some level but I also wouldn’t say that it’s particularly brilliant either. For a book of this size and ambition, it’s surprisingly light and unsubstantive.
I notice that the blurb mentions the 2008 crash quite prominently but that’s misleading - there’s some mention of the financial crisis towards the end of the book but it’s never really about that and it doesn’t affect any of the characters.
If there’s a plot, it’s that there’s a mysterious campaign against the inhabitants of Pepys Road where they’re sent postcards, DVDs, and, later, dead birds, in the post informing them that “We Want What You Have” - who is “we”, why are they doing it, and to what end? It’s intriguing but it’s also a barely developed storyline - that’s not what the book’s about either and the reveal of who it was and the motives behind it are both unremarkable and underwhelming.
The book is really just a slice-of-life narrative about the various characters’ lives and your enjoyment of the novel will depend on how interested you are in them. I liked the rather stupid banker’s story - getting a look into the reckless, bubble-like world of the wealthy and the banking industry was engaging to me. Shahid Kamal’s storyline too was engrossing, if only for where it went - showing us what it’s like to be considered a terrorist - rather than anything up to that point.
The other storylines are occasionally amusing but are largely unmemorable. The Polish builder Zbigniew’s storyline went somewhere unexpected and almost approached exciting drama, as did Roger the banker’s second-in-command Mark’s storyline. But Lanchester’s storytelling is almost always unhurried, making it easy to put down and, at times, frustratingly dull.
The problem with Lanchester’s Dickensian cast of characters is that too many of them felt irrelevant and yet he spends chapter after chapter on them. I mean, what was the point of Petunia’s storyline? She’s an old lady who pottered about her house until she got a brain tumour and died. Roger’s wife Arabella pampers herself with outrageously expensive things - so what? Freddy Kamo, the teenage football star from Senegal, Quentina the traffic warden asylum seeker, Smitty the Banksy-esque artist, Matya the nanny - what did dwelling on any of them for pages and pages do for the overall narrative? Not much in my view.
Which is the problem with this novel: as critically acclaimed as it was, as seriously as it takes itself and (briefly) mentions important issues - banking practices, terrorism, immigration, racism - it’s not really about, or says anything at all remarkable on, those things. It’s just snapshots of various people’s lives, presented without commentary that leaves very little impression.
That’s not to say it’s an unenjoyable read or that Lanchester was wrong to have focused so much on so many characters because every character had something about them that was mildly compelling to read about at some point. And Lanchester’s prose is largely accessible and easy to read. But Capital is also an overlong, rambling and unfocused non-story that’s little more than a literary soap opera.
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