Book Review: Capital By John Lanchester

I’ve been searching in the past few years for the best book to explain the 2008 Crisis, but I have yet to find it.

John Lanchester’s novel Capital presents the 2007 and 2008 pre-conditions for the crisis in London – soaring real estate values, extraordinary inequality, random good and bad fortune, injustice, and fundamental cultural misunderstandings.

Lanchester’s diverse London characters occupy the same space – a single, gentrifying block in London – but arrive from entirely different worlds. 

We meet the stand-in for pre-crisis London, the successful but clueless and doomed banker Roger, who finds his lifestyle nearly unaffordable at 1 million pounds per year. 

A Banksy-style performance artist, his mother, and his dying grandmother show a temporal cross-section of England, unable to communicate across generations.

Lanchester has a gift for cultural nuance in portraying four distinct immigrant stories: The Zimbabwean meter maid working and living illegally, the Polish contractor riding the home renovations wave to save money before returning home, the Pakistani shopkeeper and his extended family, and the gifted 17 year-old footballer from Senegal signed to an extraordinary professional contract.

With few exceptions [1] Lanchester has empathy for all of his characters as they each suffer an existential crisis concurrent with the financial crisis.

Lanchester employs a unifying plot hook – a semi-mysterious harassment campaign affecting all of the homeowners of the single London block – that doesn’t quite matter to the novel.  Neither the vague sense of dread the campaign engenders – nor the resolution of the harassment campaign – justify its prominence in most chapters.  Nevermind, though, because the novel does not need it. 

His sympathetic characters and gentle satire show us the way we live now, together in time and space but apart in everything else.