This Is London
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
CAPITAL
By John Lanchester
527 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
John Lanchester
In “Capital,” a modern offshoot of juicy social satires like Trollope’s
novel “The Way We Live Now,” John Lanchester puts two of his characters in a
compartment of the London Eye, the Ferris wheel that went up on the south bank
of the Thames to celebrate the millennium. It’s the spring of 2008, a sunny day
for once, and a Polish builder named Zbigniew and a Hungarian nanny named Matya
are on a date. Though Britain is reeling from the double whammy of global
economic woes and terrorism jitters, Zbigniew and Matya take in their
bird’s-eye view with no special feeling of unease, apart from a twinge of
motion sickness. On terra firma, both work for wealthy homeowners on a
gentrified street called Pepys Road in the up-and-coming South London
neighborhood of Clapham. At the beginning of the 21st century, before the
bursting of the real estate bubble, property values on Pepys Road had soared —
even for the modest end house, owned by a Muslim family, that holds a corner
shop, and even for the crumbling terraced house owned by an elderly
grandmother, which hasn’t had a change of linoleum, wallpaper or electrical
wiring in 50 years. Owning property there, Lanchester writes, “was like being
in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner.” Lately, though, all
is not well on Pepys Road. The high rollers’ holiday bonuses aren’t secure,
cash in hand is getting scarce, and ominous postcards have been arriving in
every mail slot, reading: “We Want What You Have.” If that weren’t alarming
enough, a young man in a hoodie has been seen lurking in the dawn hours. We all
know what that means.
Lanchester, a brainy, pleasure-loving polymath, is a novelist, memoirist
and journalist who writes sagely and elegantly about food, family, culture,
technology and money. He’s still best known for his delectably wicked first
novel, “The Debt to Pleasure,” which blends murder with gourmandise. But he has
also written a well-reasoned nonfiction book entitled “I.O.U.: Why Everyone
Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay,” which closely analyzes the current financial
collapse. Now, with “Capital,” he readjusts his sights and zooms out, framing a
larger, more inclusive picture that shows how the easy-money era affected not
just greedy speculators but the society that fattened around them.
Lanchester’s assured, detailed overview of today’s Britain recalls
another London eye — not the Ferris wheel but Private Eye, the satirical
publication that has taken the pulse of the country’s body politic for half a
century. If the task of a well-meaning newspaper (as it’s often said) is to
comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, then the mission of Private
Eye is broader: to afflict anyone, famous or obscure, who seems to deserve
scrutiny, censure or mockery. Journalists and politicos can’t help reading the
magazine, even when they themselves are skewered in its pages. Its regular
features carve British behavior into attackable, overlapping compartments: real
estate (Nooks & Corners), banking (In the City), politics (HP Sauce and
Rotten Boroughs), journalism (Street of Shame) and so on. Lanchester’s novel
integrates all these spheres and more. Reading “Capital” is like getting a
crash course in the transformation of British mores and class distinctions,
which otherwise might require a decade of remedial Private Eye-reading to
decode.
The regulars on Pepys Road include the Younts (a rich banker and his
spoiled wife); the Kamals (the Muslim shopkeepers); Freddy and Patrick Kamo (a
teenage soccer star and his protective father, scooped out of Senegal and
deposited in a luxurious house for Premier League players); Petunia Howe (a
little old lady of the Ealing Studios variety, whose grandson, Smitty, is an
underground art provocateur); and a Zimbabwean traffic warden, Quentina Mkfesi,
“the most unpopular woman in Pepys Road,” who seeks out expensive cars to
ticket in order to win bets with her colleagues at Control Services (the
flashiest one nabbed wins a pint or a £5 note). How can such disparate
characters possibly be connected? Like it or not, they all share in the aura
and onus of the real estate that surrounds them in a neighborhood where,
Lanchester writes, “the houses were now like people, and rich people at that,
imperious, with needs of their own that they were not shy about having
serviced.” All the characters have something to lose; many also have something
to hide.
At 40, Roger Yount, a financier in the City, is just old enough to be
mystified by the number-crunching tricks the younger staffers at Pinker Lloyd
perform with ease. His ignorance and bluff good nature can’t shield him from
risk. Roger’s venal wife, Arabella, spews a litany of complaints that evoke the
Private Eye column “Polly Filler,” in which a fatuous twit moans about her
useless husband and her lazy au pairs. In a similar vein, Arabella derides
Roger as a “clueless husband who had no idea what she did.” Nevertheless,
Lanchester makes it clear that in a London that lacks self-indulgent people
like the Younts, struggling people like Zbigniew and Matya would be jobless.
Arabella, he allows, was “in her way resilient. She had the toughness of
her obliviousness.” He has more sympathy for Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal, humble,
hard-working immigrants whose tender regard for their children, kindness to
their customers and struggles with Ahmed’s hotheaded relatives give the novel
its greatest tension and heart. When Ahmed’s younger brother goes into a devout
phase (faked, in Ahmed’s opinion), hiding the alcohol in the family shop
because “Muslims were not supposed to blah blah,” Ahmed fumes: “As if everybody
in the family were not well aware of these facts and also well aware of the
economic necessities at work.” Patrick and Freddy Kamo respond differently to
London’s economic ambience. The father loathes its strident materialism and
yearns to return to Africa, but Freddy finds it “delightful” that the shop
windows teem with covetable objects, “bought, and placed, and groomed, and
shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale”
— including the citizens themselves, who dress at all times as if they are in
costume, “even the beggars.”
Freddy is on to something. Pepys Road’s oldest inhabitant, Petunia Howe,
dons her granny get-up daily without a notion that anyone would think of it as
a costume, but her grandson, a Banksy imitator, wears a suit and tie as a
disguise so he can infiltrate art parties unrecognized. Even for an aesthetic
mischief maker like himself, he reflects, “art was a business,” so “it was good
to sniff around, to look at the players.” At least Quentina, the traffic
warden, can’t be accused of sartorial artifice; her job demands that she wear a
uniform.
In the eventful year the novel spans, the residents of Pepys Road
stagger from one trial to another and the postcard onslaught increases in
frequency and nastiness, bringing with it fears that the campaign might sink
everyone’s property values . . . and might have a link to Islamoterrorism. Even
as the homeowners find it increasingly ludicrous that anyone would covet their
precarious security, a mood of suspicion mounts. Early on, Petunia Howe had
joked to Ahmed Kamal, who walked her home after she fainted in his shop, “When
you’re my age, nobody wants what you have.” Ahmed had laughed, but her question
lingers throughout the pages of this nuanced portrait of a country in flux.
What does anyone on Pepys Road possess that can be defended? And what can
anyone, anywhere, be sure of in an age when “safe as houses” has lost all its
meaning?
Liesl
Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
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