Capital

John Lanchester is a very talented writer, and his prose has the feel of silk and the sound of music. It is simply intoxicating to hear his voice, but no matter how intoxicating all voices become weary after a while, especially when it becomes obvious that the deep sonorous voices are saying nothing at all.

"Capital" is an ambitious novel, attempting to capture the social, cultural, and economic milieu of London just before, during, and after the 2008 global financial crisis. The story is told through the lens of several occupants of expensive houses on Pepys Street, as well as characters who work for the occupants. There is no central storyline, and John Lanchester works tirelessly to capture the cultural hodgepodge that has become modern-day London: the banker and his free-spending wife, the beautiful Hungarian nanny who cares for their children, the Polish contractor who falls in love with the nanny, a Sengalese football star and his retinue, an elderly woman and her family, a Muslim shopkeeper and his family, and a traffic warden from Zimbabwe. The characters themselves are not terribly thought out -- they all seem a bit too two-dimensional and flat, especially the honest and hardworking immigrants. And there's the absence of a plot, or the implosion of too many. Because this novel is called "Capital," there is a financial scandal that engulfs the banker and his family, but there are also many other silly and contrived plots: a character is caught in a terrorism sweep, a mischievous vandal unites the neighborhood into action, the Polish contractor discovers what true love is, etc.

The inanity and banality of the various plots would not have mattered if the characters themselves have emotional resonance and vitality, but unfortunately they do not. Most characters seem like nice and sympathetic souls, but there is a vulgar flatness to each and everyone of them. The most annoying aspect of the novel is how the author attacks freely the rich (who are actually probably more vulgar and disgusting in real life) while assigning a noble dignity to the penniless East European and African immigrants in the book. Thus, you have a penniless but beautiful Hungarian nanny who puts honesty and true love over material gratification and well-being, Sengalese implants disgusted by the commercialism and vulgarity of London, a Polish contractor who thought his heart as hard and as lean as his body but discovers the beauty of his own soul when he falls in love -- and of course the loyalty, nobility, and sincerity of the Muslim people.

"Capital" is a major disappointment. It fails to deliver a plausible interesting storyline, and it's difficult to build any emotional bond with any of the characters.

The first few chapters of the book were really promising and interesting. Then, the author kept on introducing new characters; that's when the book started to descend into a long, winding tale with no obvious points or plots. As I hate to leave a book unfinished - especially after I was already half way through, I managed to reach the final chapter today. Can't say I am surprised that the ending was as flat as I'd expected.

Coincidently, I had just finished reading Middlemarch before I read this. Capital doesn't quite reach that level of accomplishment, but I kept seeing similarities as I read it. Intense social commentary through deep dives into a wide range of members of a small community. It's a fascinating comparison, at least to me.

Nice work.

Enjoyable read, but not at all the exploration of changing lives amid the great economic crisis that I had expected based on some of the reviews. More like a soap opera tail of every day life in a street in London than anything else. Easy head-candy type reading that allow you to while a way a few hours without having to think much!

CAPITAL starts out promisingly, describing the effect of the global financial crisis on the lives of several families in Pepys Road, London. This is a gentrified street where houses typically cost 2.5 million pounds -- money trader territory. Plus one old lady who has lived there long enough to have seen her property appreciate without her understanding what has been going on. And there is a Pakistani family running the convenience store on the corner. That sort of ethnic/social/wealth mix.

It all gets off to a promising start when the money dealer and his grubby merchant bank are brought low by the GFC. But, in the end, not low enough. There are all sort of stories set up -- the money-grubbing shopaholic wife, the Pakistanis caught between cultures, with one family member under suspicion for terrorist connections (he spends time in prison without charge) -- but in the end every story strand just peters out.

The writing is excellent -- as it always is with Lanchester -- but you are left with the feeling that the book was dashed off in a weekend without any clear end in mind for the various characters.

The book is very unsatisfying. While his descriptions of wealthy people trying to keep up with the Jones are wonderful - the book meanders until it seems to randomly stop without any conclusion - as if he suddenly went on vacation and was unable to write the end before his deadline.

I really, really wanted to like this book. I lugged it with me on a recent trip to North Carolina so excited at the prospect of this huge book keeping me enthralled during my two week trip. I love stories with lots of characters and lots of plotlines. This has that, but in the end I just didn't feel like everything tied up quite right. There was so much happening and I expected it to end in more of a dramatic way, and to me it just fell flat. I don't mean that I need things tied into a neat little package - life is messy, I get that - but I guess I expected to feel more complete when it was all over.

Too many characters with their own internal monologues. The read gets confused as to which character he is hearing about...

Also, the impact of the 2008-2009 market crash is minimized in the lives of the characters... So, they have to sell their house and move... more realistically: they would never be able to see, and would be (what Americans would call) "under water."

The author would like to leave use hopeful. Too that that is a coating on the picture he's painted.

The promise of this book was intriguing. Eavesdropping on the lives of families living on a street was a great idea. The story moves along in an interesting fashion and with the wonderfully intimidating anonymous postcards "we want what you have" seemed a perfect setup for an exciting ending. Alas, the author chose to make it more of a prank than a threat and the story ran out of steam. I was disappointed.

Capital, by John Lanchester, is a brilliant down to earth book about ordinary people. It is well written and a great 'page turner'. Both my husband and myself read this book and we were more than happy with the story and how it was written. We will be looking out for more of this Authors books.

Capital by John Lanchester
Brilliant. Captivating read. I couldn’t put the book down. This book is a contemporary picture and analysis of life in the city of London UK (first two decades of the 21st century). Although it focuses on the story of one single street (Pepys Road in South London) it cleverly weaves in an enormous amount of colourful life stories and is full of vivid images about its inhabitants. It is a powerful display of parallel lives that intertwine but never mix.
True to that vast city, the characters come from diverse social and financial backgrounds: the Polish builder, the famous African footballer from a remote village in Africa bought by one of the city’s famous Premier League Club, the Muslim shopkeeper and his extended family originally from Pakistan, the very British banker working in the City, the Hungarian nanny, the white policeman investigating Pepys Road, the traffic warden refugee from Zwimbabwe working illegally, the extravagant and absurdly adulated white artist who hides behind his anonymity and so on. Each one of the characters came to London with dreams and hopes, works hard and fights his own battles. They live side by side and have only one thing in common: their street comes under some strange sort of threat.
The book feels so true to reality. The author has an amazing power of observation and analysis. He is able to get us into the heads of all those diverse characters. It is a feast.
The author doesn’t tie up the loose ends at the end. I wished for more (a good thing) and was left wondering what happened to a lot of the characters I cared for. However this is typical of London. People come and go and no one knows what happens to them.
The threat under which the street was, although intriguing at first, sort of fizzles out but this is unimportant. The book is a page turner and an authentic depiction of life in London. A treat.SWEET SUGAR

While the title of Lanchester's novel is _Capital_, and while the title makes perfect sense, an equally appropriate title might be _London_. At the conclusion when Roger Yount is doing the last walk-through of his empty house at 51 Pepys Road, he thinks that his house was a "stage set, a place where life went on, more than it was thing in itself," and I momentarily considered that perhaps London itself was like a stage set, too. After all, the various characters all have their lives to live, and some of them are not entirely aware of their surroundings. In the end, though, I think Lanchester meant for the city to be a breathing, pulsing thing, something grander and more enduring than are the lives of the people who find themselves living there.

The name of the road which works as the unifying device in the novel is Pepys Road, and that seems deliberate on Lanchester's part as well. Without Samuel Pepys' Diary, kept from 1660 until 1669, our understanding of London's evolution would be so much poorer. As Pepys daily recorded his goings about, what he ate, with whom he visited, his financial rise, his promotions, the mundane and the profound events of his own life, readers learn about how alive London itself was, and how the city’s life affected the lives of its thousands of inhabitants. We also become aware of the profound changes that happen in Pepys’ London after the Plague and Fire, how London becomes a phoenix rising from the ashes.

Lanchester's novel affects me in a similar way to Pepys' Diary. Although the characters and their stories are fiction, the city is not, and repeatedly Lanchester pays close attention to the way his characters react to and interact with this city, not only the native Londoners like Petunia, but also the foreigners—particularly the foreigners—including the Kamal family from Pakistan, Quentina, an illegal from Zimbabwe, Bogdan the Builder, whose Polish name is Zbigniew, and his friend, Piotr, Freddy and Patrick Kamo from Senegal, and finally, Matya, from Hungary. London is huge, it is impersonal, it is unfeeling, the weather is terrible, . . . . but then London is vibrant, full of color, almost technicolor in the springtime, moist, romantic, impenetrable, profound. We see London in all its guises through its characters' emotional and physical states.

I am also reminded of George Eliot's classic novel _Middlemarch_. Others have compared Lanchester's style and scope to Dickens, another Victorian, but Eliot also comes to mind for me because like Eliot, Lanchester tells many different stories and moves expertly between the characters' lives and their connections to one another. The feel is that of a soap opera, but on a grand scale. Sometimes, the connections between characters are based on family ties--Smitty is Petunia's grandson, for example. Sometimes, the connections are more allusive, at least at first, and then the connections become increasingly important to unraveling the many mysteries that make up the various plots. Detective Mill's connection to Quentina, and then to the Kamal's, then to Smitty, and finally to Smitty's fired helper, Parker, help glue plots and characters together. Most characters are ultimately connected in some fashion to Pepys Road itself. Maybe they live there, as do the Kamal's and briefly the Kamo's or the Yount's, or they work there, such as Mickey or Matya.

I highly recommend this novel. Lanchester's writing pulls in his readers, the pace is fast, clipped, and no words wasted; every word is valuable.

Fabulous, wondrous, wacky, fun book! I don't know how anyone could not like this one! Love the author's style of writing, the short chapters, the crazy characters & their situations. I'm not very sure there's an actual plot except for the one thread that runs through the book of the post cards, because I'm not sure I care about plot. But I will tell you, pick up this book, eat your Wheaties, because it's long and heavy, and give it a go, you won't be sorry!

In this novel about greed and other human fallibilities, the houses on Pepys Road in London are characters in their own right. The prologue of CAPITAL describes their genesis in the late 19th century and the social history of their owners, right down to that flashpoint of financial history --- 2007 --- where the main action begins. "History had sprung an astonishing plot twist on the residents of Pepys Road. They were rich simply because...all of the houses in Pepys Road, as if by magic, were now worth millions of pounds."

The main human characters are skillfully introduced in the first 10 short chapters. We meet 40-year-old Roger Yount as he is anticipating a million-pound bonus at his banking firm, and the ways he and his extravagant wife Arabella will spend it. We're introduced to Ahmed Kamal, who owns the shop at the end of Pepys Road, as he begins his day before dawn, dragging the newspapers from the sidewalk into the shop. Petunia Howe, a widow living alone in the house where she raised her children, is dealing with the first hints of her own mortality, which include fainting in Ahmed's shop. Mickey Lipton-Miller, a lawyer and fixer for Premier League football, is checking out his house to be certain it's ready for the next occupant, a 17-year-old African kid who was going to be starting on 20 grand a week. Quentina Mkfesi, an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, is filling her quota for parking violations by ticketing Mickey's Aston-Martin.

Other than living in or working on Pepys Road, these residents seem to have little in common, except for the mysterious postcards they've begun to receive. The postcards feature detailed photos of their homes with a single phrase: We Want What You Have. As a plot device, the mystery of who is doing this and why weaves through the story, linking characters and events, and keeping us guessing. But the writing also more than does its part. John Lanchester is an absolute master at creating and embodying characters. And what illuminates them are their thoughts on what it means to live in their particular place and culture, leavened by the (to me) utterly charming bonus of British slang. As the banking crisis deepens and Roger gets sacked, he finds himself on the Commons on a rare sunny summer day. "The sprawlers looked like yobs and proles, but Roger knew that appearances were deceptive; just because they had their kit off and were getting drunk didn't mean that they weren't web designers, secretaries, nurses, software engineers, chefs. It was a rule of London life that anybody could be anybody."

After thoroughly sucking us in, Lanchester leads us through deaths, betrayals, unjust imprisonment and revenge plots. I was fascinated, entertained, impressed and amused, and my copy of the book is festooned with so many colored stickies it looks like a prayer flag. Here's another one: "The bow window had huge heavy ruched curtains in deep scarlet, but they were only pretend-curtains, which you couldn't actually pull all the way across. That was in keeping with what was wrong with the hotel. It was pretending to be some olde-worlde haven of calm and order and how-life-should-be, while being full of small modern bits of crapness."

Of course, we ultimately find out who was sending the postcards and why. The only thing wrong with CAPITAL is that it's only 527 pages long.

Reviewed by Eileen Zimmerman Nicol

Even though I truly enjoyed this book, my overwhelming impression while in its midst was that it was totally not what I expected. Standing in the bookstore and reading the back cover, I imagined a sort of mystery, crime, thriller genre with a good dose of humor. I am not a big crime or thriller reader, but the idea of it mixed with quirky British characters and a London setting intrigued me. In fact, my impression could not have been further from the truth, as the story of the mysterious postcards is SO secondary that for great stretches it is seemingly forgotten by the author. Instead, this is more aptly a look at the lives of archetypal London types from all rungs on the societal ladder during the time period of the 2008 financial bust. And when I finally realized this fact and stopped waiting for the crime mystery to take center stage, I was able to simply sit back and become engrossed in the cast of characters.

Pepys Road hasn’t always been such a tony address, so there’s a mix of the old-timers and the newcomers with money. For instance, Petunia Howe is an 80-year-old widow who’s lived in her house since childhood, while banker Roger Yount and his airhead wife are an upwardly mobile, yuppie family type who’ve recently moved to the neighborhood. Then, there’s Freddy Kamos, a 17-year-old just off the plane from Senegal to play professional soccer, as well as the Pakistani family who run a convenience store on the block. There are quite a few more supporting characters, such as Zimbabwean Quentina Mkfase, the illegal immigrant parking enforcement attendant, and Petunia’s grandson, Smitty, and a host of worker bees like nannies and handymen who add flavor to the story.

Each chapter focuses on a particular character’s circumstances and rarely do the characters’ lives intersect, which was a bit disappointing. However, the more I think about it, the more I realize it mirrors real life. People of different backgrounds and on different rungs of the social ladder rarely mix and mingle, and this is simply art imitating life. Regardless of their non-intersecting lives, the characters’ stories are captivating and totally believable. Having lived in New York, I think I overdosed on meeting financially over-extended yuppies in the rat race with wives whose only concern was what to buy next. Roger Yount fits the bill to a T, and his lady-who-lunches wife Arabella is so aptly painted, I wanted to climb into the pages and kick her in her teeth myself. Lanchester’s portrayal of the plight of immigrants, both legal and not, is also moving. What can happen to a Muslim immigrant who makes an innocent mistake in today’s Islamophobic climate is addressed in Ahmed Kamal’s family story, and how an asylum seeker fares in the West is told through Quentina’s poignant tale.

What is also inviting about this book is that even though the characters are dealing with some heavy issues, Lanchester is able to inject much humor into his stereotypical characters and their thoughts. Nevertheless, I feel the book is a tad too long for the subject matter it treats. At almost 600 pages, it’s a definite time commitment, and I found myself wondering when the heck something was going to happen other than character development in the first 300 pages. In the end, if one looks at the novel as more of a social commentary on the varying attitudes, fortunes, and societal pressures of different social classes in modern Western society, it is a much more enjoyable, thought-provoking read than imagining it to be a mystery novel and being disappointed. If one wants a slice of life look at modern urban life, this is a good place to start. If one is looking for a mystery novel, keep looking.

Fascinating. Too many characters to count, with short chapters for each. Their lives intersect in ways both obvious and subtle.The title has two possible meanings, the multicultural city of London, and money. Sometimes a page turner, sometimes too long. I found Lanchester's portrayal of female characters less thorough and nuanced than male--for instance, what happened to poor Davina? Much as I liked Zbigniew, I couldn't forgive him for that. But probably part of Lanchester's point is that all human beings are imperfect. Also, my favorite among them all was Petunia, a woman in her 80s. The description of her entering the door of the house where she had been born and lived her whole life, in every physical and emotional state imaginable, was deeply moving in its simplicity. Highly recommended.

An excellent story. And now it's being made available for streaming and/or DVD viewing of the adapted BBC miniseries with a fantastic cast. It is well worth your time.
One upscale fictional street of South London gets mail, everyone alike, and the street is eclectic. White, Pakistani, Hungarian, Polish, African, families, singles, young, old, different faiths and each homeowner’s real estate value is their ‘CAPITAL.’ The mailed card reads: “We want what you have.” Who’s it from—what’s it mean? Then things really begin to go strange. It is an intellectual relationship drama.
Read it or view it or both.

Capital

Cities are big places. Great cities have two other qualities alongside their size: they are also sophisticated and cosmopolitan. If thus applied, these three criteria deny the attachment of "great" to all but a handful of cities. But one that passes all the tests, and has done for centuries, is London. In his latest novel, Capital, John Lanchester celebrates London and its life via the sophistication and cosmopolitan identity of its inhabitants. Perhaps paradoxically, he largely ignores size by housing all his characters on a single street in Clapham called Pepys Road. And of course the capital of the book's title refers not only to London's status, but also to the finance industry that enriches it and especially the asset value of the properties along that suburban street, values of which the occupiers and owners of the houses have become fully aware.

There is a plot in this novel, by the way, but not one that really need bother the reader unduly. It is eventually resolved, rather inconsequentially, but the person or persons who covet the real estate value of these properties and put cards bearing the words "We Want What You Have" through their letterboxes soon become less important that the characters' relations to their own lives. It is this theme that truly enlivens Capital and makes it such a joy to read. It perhaps illustrates that lives are the only plots that fiction needs. Thus a book like John Lanchester's Capital could have been written at almost any time in London's history. Family pressures, financial dealings, relationships with power, snobbery, social class, profit and loss, and cultural clashes were present when Dickens wrote Bleak House a century and a half ago. In that era, however, the real money was still hidden under the country seat on the landed estates, decrepit though they may have become. Challenged by new money, the task was to hold on to what tradition might serve to stave off threat. In Capital, the houses are far from bleak, especially when done up by a competent and honest Polish builder like Zbigniew.

The Younts provide Zbigniew with a good deal of work. Roger Yount is a manager in an investment bank. His office is actually in Docklands, though his work, he would claim, was still very much based in the City, since it claims the same kinds of bonuses to be found there. At least that is what he hopes when the annual review comes round. Arabella, his wife, is a compulsive consumer who values nothing and ignores all prices. She regularly has her walls repainted because she doesn't like the colour, but, like most consumers, she operates with no apparent working understanding of the word "like". Zbigniew, whom she calls Bogdan, for some reason, services her needs, as does her maid and nanny, her close friend and her husband, as the world rotates around her whims. Her two children were probably picked from a catalogue because they fit the colour scheme. Petunia at number 42 has lived her life in the street. Her house has not seen a lick of paint in a generation and is in much need of renovation. But she has reached the age when the holes in the kitchen lino are not even visible. She has other concerns, such as her daughter, Mary, who lives with her husband Alan in Essex and a son called Geoff who does things out east. Oh, and there is the matter of her health as well...

Michael, who regularly parks his expensive car in Pepys Road, has other kinds of concern. He is an agent for a professional footballer, an apparently clumsy young lad called Freddy who hails from Francophone Africa. He has arrived with his dad, Patrick, to play for a Premiership club. Pepys Road is as good a place to live as anywhere, especially now that property prices have risen so much. Quentina is from Zimbabwe. She is a refugee working illegally as a traffic warden. She likes to hang tickets on Michael's expensive car and then stand back to photograph the evidence.

The Kamals have links with Pakistan. They have the shop along the street that never seems to close. They too have two young children, but there are brothers in the family with differing interests, some of which have led in the past to an excursion to Chechnya aimed at helping fellow Muslims resist the violence to which they are being subjected. Mrs Kamal the elder makes a visit of her own to south London from Lahore. She stays with her daughter in law in Pepys Road. Sparks will surely fly.

So this street in Clapham is pretty much like most others in this great city. The inhabitants are sophisticated and cosmopolitan, the properties they live in have values that have shot through their roofs, and much of daily life is an oft-repeated, but sometimes vicious farce. Capital thus presents an impressionistic portrait of a metropolis in microcosm. And, as such, it offers a completely plausible and compellingly convincing picture of one slice of contemporary London life. Forget the plot, since most of the characters do. Just enjoy being in this great city, made great by those who live in it. The real joy, of course, is that the next street's story would be just as good and probably different as well.

Take Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December, add in healthy dollops of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Hector Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries and you'll have some idea what to expect from John Lanchester's CAPITAL.

Like these other books, CAPITAL presents a panoramic view: in this case, of London at the cusp of a new and turbulent economic age. Mr. Lanchester focuses on a cross-section of residents and workers from a fictional and prestigious London street including a well-heeled banker and his shopaholic wife and Hungarian nanny, an elderly widow dying of a brain tumor with her middle-aged daughter and alternative-arts grandson, a talented Senegalese young soccer player on the cusp of stardom, three Pakistani brothers with varying degrees of political involvement, a Polish builder, and a political refugee from Zimbabwe who is supporting herself on forged work permit.

Each has his or her own ambivalent relationship with money. One reflects, "It was brash and horrible and vulgar, but also exciting and energetic and shameless and new...If the city was one huge shop window, she was on the outside on the pavement, looking in." Indeed, "having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be rich." The haves and have-nots are clearly delineated and to muddy the waters, someone is sending creepy postcards to all of them, stating, "We want what you have."

Those of foreign origin - the Polish builder, the Zimbabwe refugee, the Hungarian nanny, the Pakistanis - appear to have a stronger moral compass than those for whom wealth is a given. They are the fiber of the story, a direct contrast to those who enjoy ease and comfort. This is, perhaps, my biggest gripe: the all-too-often stereotypical portrayals of the characters. Arabella, the shopaholic wife, has virtually no redeeming characteristics, for example. The Pakistanis - well, we know what's going to happen to at least one of them because it is highly telegraphed.

That being said, this is a good London saga, with interwoven characters who hold your attention. It may not be the quintessential London novel - as is being touted - but it's a page-turner nonetheless.

Stephen King might use the phrase "one gorgeous read" to describe CAPITAL. It's a novel that is both expansive of scope and character. It tackles a time period of financial crisis in London, a city that is one of the beating hearts of our international financial community. While it does bounce in and around a number of characters that are somehow tied to Pepys Road, I felt like I intercepted their lives and understood their various stories rather well by the end.

As for the ending, even though it did leave open-ended questions unanswered, I didn't feel cheated, and I felt like I had learned enough about the characters along the way to ascertain the ultimate ending. Or at the very least I could make an educated stab at it. Not all books require a definitive, absolute ending. It really depends on your genre, and the ultimate message to the reader. This novel, while not always happy, does mimic life, and in some cases offers the reader a sense of hope.

John Lanchester's sense of place takes the reader to the very streets, shops, and homes that are scattered throughout the historic city of London. If you like grand, expansive novels, then CAPITAL is certainly worthy of your time and consideration.

I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

Robert Downs
Falling Immortality: Casey Holden, Private Investigator

Getting some things out of the way, DEBT TO PLEASURE is one of my favorite books and Lanchester is a absolutely fine writer. Both of these make it very difficult to understand why Capital was so bland and unsatisfying. At times it felt like an updated BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES but without the emotional rollercoaster ride.

My only thought after finishing seems to be that the book is intended as an allegory. Largely, things will tend to work out in the UK/First World in general, more so for the white upper class. It's tough to be an immigrant or young during such time. I don't often leave a novel saying "Why did I read this" because reading is a pleasure in its own right. I less frequently say "Why write this" because, working in publishing, few need justification for their work. This time, I feel compelled to say both.

It's well written. The characters are well drawn. Ultimately, the small details, which Balzac could illuminate, just failed to captivate me.

This book is very reminiscent of Tom Wolfe's "novelistic social realism" at its best, with a myriad of disparate but interlocking characters developed in depth as they confront the vicissitudes of modern life in a large bustling city. Several laugh-at-loud moments, interspersed with moving episodes of sorrow, avarice, despair, cynicism, rampant materialism and heartfelt humanity. Contains many "Britishisms" that may be unfamilar but which can be readily interpreted by the context. All-in-all, a satisfying reading experience very worthy of your attention.

Hugely enjoyable and compulsively readable though "Capital" is, I felt that it's ambition was thwarted by its structure. The vignettes of characters never really develop beyond sketches because of the need to move onto the next stage of another character's development. At one point I was looking forward with great anticipation to Arabella's return after abandoning her husband and children for the weekend, and her reaction to her husband's studied nonchalance. Having set the state for an epic, mouth watering confrontation it was glossed over and only referred to after the event. I felt disappointed about this omission.
There is scope for another novel if the author felt so inclined, and I would avidly read it.

What an absolutely wonderful book. It was like what Don Delillo was trying to do with Underworld except successful at it.

If I had one small complaint, it's that maybe there could have been a bit tighter plot and there were no characters representing the white or black middle class.

Other than those two things, Lanchester was marvelous in this book. Even though it was very "literatury" meaning there wasn't some thick plot like a grocery store paperback or prime time action drama, the characters within it shined. Each and every one crushed terrible stereotypes and celebrated ones based on reality and most of all every character even the shallow rich ones felt real.

I can't and won't go into detail here, but the Polish immigrants, the Pakistanis, the rich banking upper class all looked very much like you would expect but also did some things that set them apart as individuals. For example the rich housewife didn't just become automatically jealous at the hot nanny her husband hired.

That example was minute but still it's one that shows how rich each of these characters are and helps shed light on families that may not be like our own.

On a different level I'm an American and I love reading about things and ideas foreign to me and although I visited London and have physically been there I didn't feel like I knew the spirit of the city and Lanchester's Capital has helped me understand it a little better. This book is today's Dickens novel.

John Lanchester's "Capital" is a book that means well but is a mass of confusion at times. The story is set across the early years of the financial meltdown & follows the lives of people on Pepys Road in London. The story itself is full of multiple plots that really don't have anything in common with each other. Yes, we have variations in types of people from all walks of life, but the story itself while being relatively easy to read is so complicated by the sheer number of plots that the only common thread in all of them really feels neglected at times. This one is a pretty much skip at any cost.

A most enjoyable and successful novel -- big, sprawling, Thackerayesque. No pyrotechnics on display here; Lanchester is not Martin Amis, and some of the plot lines work better than others. But Lanchester is very dextrous in bringing cultural insight to contemporary trends, especially in the financial world. His depiction of Roger Yount is a modern classic! At its best, Lanchester's work is like David Lodge's: fun, true-to-life, and with a spiny core of moral judgment that repays close attention. I really liked the book and have turned into a serious Lanchester fan. His family memoir was also terrific.

There's an intelligence and humanity about John Lanchester's novels which make them profoundly satisfying. Even when the central character is a murderous monster, Lanchester portrays him with such erudition and verbal dexterity--including, but not limited to, cadenza flourishes of 176-or-more-word sentences--that I could no more stop reading than take my eyes off a high-wire walker. They can be funny, too: the rich but incompetent banker-father's Christmas in hell, at which he is left alone to look after two infants dumped on him by his vengeful wife, is a masterpiece of droll humour. I read all four of them within the space of ten days.

The banker-father appears in Capital: A Novel the most recent and the one which got me started. A sprawling 527-pager, its sweep and London setting and variegated cast of characters summon up the ghost of Dickens. It's not so much a novel as a series of interlinked stories, held together by Pepys Road, the spine from which narratives poke like mismatched ribs. There's a sulphurous whiff of Hugo or Balzac or Dostoyevsky in the underlying theme: money. In Capital it appears and disappears in large part by luck. Property owners in Pepys Road are propelled willy-nilly to vertiginous riches by the rocket-like rise of house prices, from thousands of pounds to tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions and multiple millions--an experience Lanchester likens to "being in a casino at which you are a guaranteed winner." In a casino the only guaranteed winner is the casino itself. In the wider world it's banks, which Lanchester thinks are the same thing.

For everyone else money is unpredictable in its ebbs and flows. The Polish builder who discovers half a million pounds behind a false wall wrestles with his conscience over whether to keep it, only to find it worthless. The young African soccer genius whose contract promises wealth beyond imagining loses it when he breaks a leg. The banker and his wife live comfortably beyond their means until the Isfahan is whipped away from under their well-shod feet.

Lanchester grew up partly in Hong Kong, and Fragrant Harbour tells of that city's rise to wealth through the characters he writes about. Again, there are stories within the story, and its eventual shape is not quite what you might expect from the beginning. Why does that bitchy English journalist, drawn so well in her own words --"Not for nothing was the HQ of Jardines, a skyscraper with hundreds of porthole-like windows, known as the Palace of a Thousand Arseholes. If you worked for Wo, people would occasionally try to needle you at parties, until they saw clear evidence that you simply didn't give a shit"--disappear from view for two hundred pages? Lanchester is clearly not the product of a writers' workshop.

His skill and extensive savoir manger won him the Hawthornden Prize for his first novel, The Debt to Pleasure. The gift for getting characters to reveal themselves through their words had already reached dazzling heights. Tarquin Winot would be insufferable in the flesh; on the page he is mesmerising. Carapaced in snobbery, he looks down at the world with exquisite contempt. He is eating his way across France toward... what? Something nasty, that's clear from the start. What unfortunate ends so many of the people around him have met. Winot is an artist, of a very peculiar sort. The epitome of archness, he could well be homosexual. Yet apart from eavesdropping on a pair of newlyweds, he shows little interest in sex of any kind. Not like his late brother, who was himself an artist and also a womaniser.

As would be Mr. Phillips, given the chance. Mr Phillips is the eponymous hero of Lanchester's second novel, another solitary odyssey. But while Winot has a destination, albeit veiled, Mr Phillips is trying to avoid something, not reach it. He, too, has had the rug pulled out from under him. On Friday his boss in the accounting department told him he'd lost his job ("not necessary to serve out full notice period ... sense of gloom on these occasions ... fresh fields and pastures new... better for all concerned ...").

Mr Phillips hasn't told Mrs Phillips yet. We can only imagine what his weekend was like. But on Monday morning he puts on his suit and picks up his briefcase, as he has done for thirty years, and takes the train toward the City. He wanders around numbed by shock and taking refuge in sums, as befits a now ex-accountant. Sex is the first shelter, not having it but figuring out the likelihood of having it. Or of other people having it. Hard on the heels of sex comes death, computations of time taken to hit the water from various bridges. He doesn't whine, or consciously brood over what has happened. He is somewhat comforted by the first person he meets, a publisher of pornographic magazines who has been in the same situation himself, "sacked for being drunk, for being chronically late, for being lazy, and then for planning to nick personnel and set up my own company--which was justified, incidentally. But then so were all the others."

Mr Phillips's family life has not been a roaring success: one Father's Day he bought himself his own Best Dad in the World mug. He is not particularly heroic in any respect, not particularly determined, not particularly resourceful. Nor, until close to the end, does he appear particularly brave. Is it the suicidal impulse that makes him do something unexpected, take a stand? As with all of Lanchester's characters, he leaves us with much to ponder.

A wonderfully warm and compassionate writer. I highly recommend all four.

Witty, energetic and interesting - it kept me up late reading, especially towards the end. As others have mentioned, it's not hugely plot driven, but more about the lives of various characters who interact with their locale, their time, their economic and personal realities, and (occasionally) with each other. Still, there was just enough forward motion to keep it interesting, and enough historical reality to keep it grounded.
My main criticism was that the economic collapse didn't seem to affect very many of these people. Perhaps I am projecting my American reality into an expectation of what it was like in London, but with the exception of the banking sector characters, everyone else seemed to be unaffected, right up to the end.
With that only exception, the book was a satisfying read, and I look forward to finding more from this author.

The novel Capital was a wonderful surprise. I thought it was too long, too complicated, but not so at all. I read through and began to make the connections and found it very entertaining and with a very complete set of differente personages. Very well narrated. A bit long? But not at all dull.
Here I can thank my sister Susan for sending it to my ipad for my birthday.

I am very surprised by reviews that indicate the book has not enough "plot".

The reader is introduced to a cast of characters who represent the global character of London. London attracts the world, because in London there is a chance to make a living - even for an illegal immigrant. And apart from the old lady who has lived there all her life, all the characters have a greed for money, for business, or for better chances, and a number of them are sick with envy.

The plot asks us to consider our relationships with money and with each other. The people who end happiest are tested with a huge suitcase of money, (funnily enough, just like the people in The Hundred Year Old Man who Climbed Out of the Window) but their decision sets them up for happiness.

In the banking world we are introduced to people who are really neurotic about making money, and we glimpse where it leads in terms of shaping a warped personality and the far-reaching effects of neurotic reasoning.

On the domestic front there is one character who is not properly drawn, is a stereotypical rich man's selfish wife who has no inner life at all. Is this possible? She has charm but her sense of what she deserves in material terms has gone through the roof, for no reason at all. Yet such people exist, and we only need to look at pics of Victoria Beckham to get the general idea, and know that such pics are what fuels the whole ghastly circus.

I felt that the book did an injustice to Banksy. I think people look at the commercial items with Banksy's work on them and imagine that he makes money from them. He doesn't - he does try to make it clear to the world that these items are nothing to do with him - the whole point of his work is that it is political and provocative, not commercial. There is a character in the book who is sufficiently like Banksy to constitute a kind of libel.

I found all the characters hard-going to start with but by a third of the way through I was drawn in and thoroughly enjoyed the book after that. Sorry to finish it.

This was one of those long, let-yourself-get-lost in the neighborhood of Pepys Road, watch, comment, shake your head or commiserate with the people who lived there. Lanchester creates a slice of life in London, right around the time of the 2008 crash, and everything either directly or indirectly relates to capital. Manchester j

This is one of those luxuriously long, let-yourself-get-lost in the neighborhood of Pepys Road, and the people who live there. Set around the time of the 2008 financial meltdown, Manchester creates characters whose existences are directly or indirectly governed by capital. It's a slice of London life as detailed and as obliquely observant as any of Trollope's novels.

This is a book about civic empathy. Using an empirical style and moving from character to character, Lanchester illustrates the similarities and differences between them, and the difficulty of subjective knowing. The work is something of a game of two halves. The first half sets everything up and the second (more gripping) half resolves it. There's a tad too much telling and not enough showing but there is also a subtle undercurrent that repays close attention.

John Lanchester is an excellent writer and this multicharacter look at London just before and after the financial collapse of 2008 could have been a British Bonfire of the Vanities. Sadly, it falls short, as after an excellent start, it becomes very repetitious and devoid of surprises and further insight, although it does have a sweet love story in its midst. For example, the many virtually scenes of shopaholic Arabella, envious Mark and shallow Roger become boring. What should be major confrontations between Roger and Arabella do not come to life. Despite its length--and hype in the NY Times--the book ultimately lacks depth.

It is a good read, but a missed opportunity for a great book.

Capital is immensely readable. Despite jumping to a different character every few pages (the chapters are very short) their stories are different enough to make it possible to keep all the different threads in your mind as you read. The large cast against a London background in a specific historical period reminded me a little of London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins but I wouldn't rate Capital as highly. I cared enough about the characters to want to know what happens to them after the book finishes and the author drops some neat hints about most of them. However the book lacks a punch line - it builds up a mystery which then fizzles out at the end.

There are a couple of editorial errors - a character's husband died "five years ago" in chapter one but his funeral was "decades before" in chapter 62. Also needed was better research about Maldon where the one of the characters lives - Maldon doesn't have a Sainsbury's and is half an hour and a lot more than £5 away by taxi from Chelmsford station. There's always going to be someone picky out here who knows this stuff!

I enjoyed reading Capital, finishing it in about 9 days. The story chronicles a cosmopolitan group of people that live in a fancy urban area of London called Pepys road. It is fair to say that the title "capital" is more likely connected to the scandalous behavior money has on the residents of Pepys road than it does to the fact that London is the "capital" of England. The emergence of an interesting story line appears to take shape when a series of anonymous postcards with the words: "we want what you have," start appearing in the local mail, alongside close-up photos of each owner's home. There is clearly somebody with an axe to grind and it appears to be directed at the rich home owners of Pepys road, who I might add, initially appear somewhat dismissive of the threat posed by such covert behavior. The postcards i believe are symbolic of capitalism - there is always someone that wants what you have; yet, it is never what it seems i.e. there is a blind extravegance to the rich, particularly in the case of Arabella, the banker's wife. The suspense, in the early stages of the book, which was created by these unsavory notes does not evolve much further, to my disappointment. In fact, it becomes secondary to the unraveling narratives of its residents. I enjoyed watching the hidden dramas of the homeowners lives unfold despite the pervading gloom with which they assumed - maybe this was why I liked them? This book had an enjoyable tone, with each narrative flowing nicely along despite several of them not reaching any great climax.

I really enjoyed this book. The multiple strands of the story are tied together by one street, Pepys Road, which was once a bad area but has improved over the years. This has led to a mixed group of people living there and we glimpse their lives and through them, London in all its variety. The rich banker, the dying widow, an immigrant Indian family, the Polish worker ... all the characters are richly drawn and a mystery ties the book together. It has echoes of One day In September by Sebastian Faulks, another fantastic London centric book. Recommended if you love this city.

Beautiful and realistic description of a set of diverse people living in London in 2008. Some are well off and some are poor. Their lives are intersecting slightly only because they all live in the same street in south London. The key weakness of this novel is the lack of a normal narrative. The author is so occupied with description in the first two thirds of the book that he forgets to think about the story line. The book picks up a bit of speed in its final third but the plot is not exactly moving forward. It is a shame that so realistically portrayed people engage in such a tepid storyline.

If you want a book with a strong storyline, give this book a pass. You would just feel really cheated in the end. If you want to have a realistic description of life in modern London, then seriously consider this book. Personally, I like a decent storyline so I cannot give the book more than two stars. Had the author paid some attention to actually telling a story this could have been a great book.

UPDATE: But in 2014 I still remember the book. It is the description that is so spot-on. Maybe I should give the book three stars/