The novel “Capital” by John Lanchester is about the financial crisis, money and, to a certain extent, gentrification.
Don’t worry, we are not recommending Karl Marx’s standard work at this point. Nevertheless, it is a book on capitalism, albeit by the British author John Lanchester. It deals with money, power and the financial crisis, but is a slightly more relaxed read.
The 2012 novel Capital takes a look at the lives of different residents of one and the same London street: Pepys Road. It takes place over several months in 2007 and 2008, shortly before the bankruptcy of Lehmann Bank. Pepys Road is exemplary of the gentrified city: at the beginning of the 20th century, the houses were originally built for high-end employees. A century later, more and more academics and managers are settling there, driving up the prices of London houses. But some of the original residents still live there.
As a reader, you stroll through the street with Lanchester and take a look behind the front doors and at the different characters who live there: For example, the banker, whose thoughts revolve all day long around how he is going to finance his wife Arabella’s high standard of living. Or Freddy, a rising soccer star who moved to London from Senegal to play for a world-famous club. Petunia, an old widowed lady, also lives in Pepys Road and has done so for 50 years.
Episodically, the reader looks into the lives of the different protagonists, who at first glance have nothing in common except that they live in the same street. However, the residents of Pepys Road all have one thing in common: “They were rich because, miraculously, all the houses in the street were now worth millions of pounds.”
“We want what you have.”
Life in Pepys Road seems to be a perfect world. Until one day, the residents of the street find postcards in their letterboxes. They each have their own front door on them and only one sentence is written on them: “We want what you have”. At first, no one knows what to make of this, because who wants what the residents have? The old lady Petunia rightly wonders who, like her, would want to live alone.
But the cards seem to be the harbinger of a much bigger catastrophe: The financial crisis, which is approaching step by step and turning the residents’ lives upside down. For as different as the protagonists are, their relationship to money is just as different. The author relates people to sums of money in order to show howfar the protagonists will fall. At the beginning of the novel, banker Roger is still worried about whether he will finally get the bonus with the six zeros this year, while at theend he wondershow long he will be able to afford the 30 pounds for the cab.
Reading the novel gives you the feeling of looking ata complex painting whose details only reveal themselves on closer inspection. John Lanchester’s portrait is a portrait of Western society in times of financial crisis. He manages to take something as abstract as share prices and banks sliding into insolvency and show the immediate impact on people.
