John Lanchester

From the best-selling author of The Debt to Pleasure, comes a sweeping social novel set at the height of the financial crisis.

Capital

A very solid novel which is only really ambitious or challenging in terms of the quantity of characters. It’s a book about everyday people that anyone can read and enjoy. Given the variety of people some of the descriptions felt vague but maybe the universality is the the point. The revelation of the central mystery was a little bit of a letdown but the journey more than makes up for it. The lesson is about appreciating what you have and how other people have it worse - but can we ever really escape our own subjectivity? 

Luke Pearce

One of the most talked about books of the year, Capital is a sweeping social novel by the writer hailed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review as “a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath.” Celebrated novelist John Lanchester (author of The Debt to Pleasure) returns with an epic novel that captures the obsessions of our time. It’s 2008 and things are falling apart: Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers are going under, and the residents of Pepys Road, London—a banker and his shopaholic wife, an old woman dying of a brain tumor and her graffiti-artist grandson, Pakistani shop owners and a shadowy refugee who works as the meter maid, the young soccer star from Senegal and his minder—are receiving anonymous postcards reading “We Want What You Have.” Who is behind it? What do they want? Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.

Capital: A Novel

Gavin

Grand account of London’s strange socio-emotional contortion up to 2008. When he listed the banker’s sky-high rationalised outgoings (“nanny: £20,000 plus employment tax nonsense”), I thought Capital was going to be didactic; when its first chapters revealed its prose to be a plain story-book, I thought it was going to be pat and mundane. 

Instead it’s humane, deliberate and clear, implying radical critique while focussing on the inside of the matter, flicking between a dozen vivid characters (who collide neatly in the very way of The C21st Novel) and noting the sharp line between the City people and the immigrants who serve them. 

(There’s a sick sharp bit where a pro bono human rights lawyer wants to be begged for their services.) 

Lanchester uses whodunit tension without detracting from his main achievement, which is engrossing ordinariness (traffic wardens and Polish rewiring, infidelious twinges and infant irrationality).

The residents of Pepys Road, London - a banker and his shopaholic wife, an elderly woman dying of a brain tumour, the Pakistani family who run the local shop, the young football star from Senegal and his minder - all receive anonymous postcards with a simple message: We Want What You Have. Who is behind it? What do they want? As the mystery of the postcards deepens, the world around Pepys Road is turned upside down by the financial crash and all of its residents' lives change beyond recognition over the course of the next year. From the bestselling author of Whoops! and How to Speak Money comes a post-financial crisis, state-of-the-nation novel told with compassion, humour and unflinching truth.

Magdalene Lim

Many pages, with many characters, each talked about in a different chapter. This reminds me of a Game of Thrones book except that the stories couldn't be more different. Despite the many pages, this is a leisurely read that allows one a peek into the lives of middle-class Londoners. The characters are interesting enough for one to be drawn to them, with a "mystery" that sort of binds them all together. While I enjoyed reading each character's story, some more than others, the mystery which was solved at the end, was unravelled at such a quick and disappointing pace. It felt like a rushed ending that matter-of-factly said, "Okay, so it ends like that."

This is a pretty good holiday read — not something that you can take a reading break from for too long lest you forget who each character is.

Capital

Reviews