Book review: Capital

IN THE sprawling megapolis that is London, capital of global finance, Pepys Road could be any street, in any district, in any suburb. Its location hardly matters. This strange and compelling story could have unfolded anywhere.

Built in the late 19th century, its modest houses were designed to appeal to lower-middle-class families: the respectable, aspirational, no-longer-poor. Nothing was really untoward or unusual about Pepys Road until… well, until a gentle rise in property prices slowly turned into a roaring market.

For the first time in the history of this street, the residents found themselves unthinkably rich: unpretentious houses were now being sold for an unthinkable £1 million. To their owners, a strange and anonymous card pushed through the letter box brought an unsettling realisation of their changed circumstance. The message was at once complimentary and menacing. It read simply: “We want what you have”.

Thus does John Lanchester set up his epic length novel of the biggest event of our time: the Great Financial Crash. He brings to it an intuitive understanding of the blind arrogance, self-infatuation and greed that puffed up the financial sector and which brought it crashing down.

He wrote the successful Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone And No-one Can Pay, a non-fiction guide to the banking crash, and his fictional debut, The Debt To Pleasure, won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

But Capital is his most ambitious work to date: an epic, 651-page bid to be, as his publisher puts it, the definitive “post-crash, state-of-the-nation novel of recession Britain”. It is not quite that, although its interwoven stories form an engrossing account of modern London life.

Of all the characters in Pepys Road, the most vivid are the occupants of No 51: City of London banker Roger Yount and his wife Arabella. How could a couple become so well off, and yet the breadwinner, on a salary of £150,000, a year still needs his next mega bonus to stave off bankruptcy? Well, that was straightforward enough.

The basic salary had become, in Arabella’s reckoning, her frock money. There was the initial mortgage to purchase No 51 of course. But this had been swollen by top-up loans for the loft conversion, the digging out of the basement, the re-doing of all the plumbing and wiring, the addition of the conservatory and the side extension, the Smallbone kitchen installed and then ripped out for a metallic German industrial model and the new wet room changed back to a deluxe bathroom.

Then there was the purchase of the weekend retreat in Wiltshire, plus subsidiary cottage, the ripping out and refurbishment of these; two weeks’ holiday a year at the rented luxury villa abroad, air fares there and back; the school fees for Conrad; then the nanny and the weekend nanny and the two cars; and finally tax, pension contributions and the sheer expense of living in London, where money just seemed to melt.

Little wonder Roger had come to count on that £1 million bonus – indeed, he had already spent it before his meeting with the bank’s head of compensation. In a brilliant scene Lanchester describes Roger’s reactions as his expectations first leap to £2 million then begin a sickening implosion as the boss stumbles through the mantra of “wider problems in the industry… difficulty with Swiss subsidiary… areas of genuine loss”. The envelope is slipped across the table and when Roger opens it he finds, instead of the £1 million figure, just £30,000. He staggers out, goes to the toilet and is sick. Meanwhile, the disconcerting “I want what you have” cards keep landing on the Pepys Road doormats. Who is posting them? What do they mean?

Given the setting of this novel and the material at Lanchester’s disposal, his characters get off rather lightly. This is not, in fact, a “recession novel” since he started it in 2003, well before the crisis and its long-tail aftermath had begun to set in. Roger Yount loses his job, but few other characters suffer in the way that much of Britain is now suffering.

The rise and fall of the Younts is a bull’s-eye tale of our time, told with skill and an eye for killer detail. That said, I’m not sure if all the characters in Pepys Road merited the space given them. At times I yearned for some austerity of plot and a tighter edit.

The financial crash and its long tail of consequence has much further to run and will make us view the decade of debt and delusion in an altogether unsparing light, rather than as a state to which we should strive to return as soon as possible.

But for now Lanchester has put a marker down on the unfolding story of the Great Contraction. The carnage of aftershocks, blighted lives, betrayals and broken dreams will make Capital and Pepys Road seem a gentle primer.