Capital by John Lancaster

I'm “daft” about English novels. I like it when "nappies", "crisps", "biscuits", "knackered", "cheeky" and "bugger off" pop up in the dialogue. I love it when tea is served with elaborate pastries on fragile china. I like sly spinsters in tidy cottages who solve heinous crimes on their way to jumble sales and drunken old colonels who talk endlessly of their time in India.

The characters in John Lanchester's novel, "Capital", set in modern London, are more of a twenty-first-century breed. They are either scheming careerists and greedy, mindless consumers (the Haves) or the dignified, hard-working, foreign-born residents who serve them. (the Have-nots) The title of the book alludes not only to London, the capital of England, but to financial capital like property and pounds sterling and the characters are defined by whether they have lots of it or little of it.

This have/have-not theme focuses on the bustle and commerce of Pepys Road, a London street of handsome, three-story, brick homes built in the late 19th century. The residents of Pepys Road are introduced just as they are receiving identical postcards in their mailboxes with the menacing message, "We want what you have." As the novel goes on, the harassment escalates and the messages are accompanied by dead crows and human feces.

The main characters include Roger and Arabella Yount; Roger makes heaps of money in a bank and Arabella spends it. Eighty-two-year-old Petunia Howe is the oldest resident and Zbigniew Tomaszewski, a Polish builder, is kept busy with the endless home restorations and renovations on Pepys Road. Matya Balatu is a Hungarian-born nanny who, in a funny account, rescues Roger from his own children during the Christmas holidays and the Kamals are an extended family of Pakistanis who live above their small grocery/convenience store. Many other characters including a meter maid from Zimbabwe and a young Senegalese Soccer phenom and his protective father are woven into the plot of this well-populated book.

The point of view in "Capital" changes with each chapter and sometimes within the chapter so that each character's story is told incrementally. I enjoy reading a novel structured like that because, as a reader, I find the plot more compelling and readable when the scene and mood, and characters keep changing. The only time the narrative stumbles a bit is on the last few pages which seem gratuitous and hastily written. For example, when Roger sums up his wife's attitude to the family's straitened circumstances: "Roger wasn't quite clear whether she had always been the way she is now, or whether what had happened was that he had moved in one direction and she had gone in another. Whatever the reason for the shift, it was real, and he now, and increasingly, found her "crushingly shallow and wearingly, suffocatingly materialistic"; there is no need for this simplistic insight as Lanchester has skillfully portrayed her as exactly that throughout the book.

Finally, I am not going to say that London is like another character in the book not only because it’s a cliche but because I stubbornly hold to the idea that people are people and places are places even in books. But London certainly lingers in some characters' minds, especially those born in other countries who are homesick, alienated, and despise the city's unfriendliness and vulgarity and others who are charmed and dazzled by its variety, polish, and style. Freddie Kamo, the soccer player's father, takes long walks through London and keeps a detailed mental catalog of what he sees as its garish, wasteful excess and cruelty while his son is besotted with its beauty.

This 527-page novel was a well-paced and involving summer read.