Capitalism as fiction

A review of John Lanchester's new book, Why Everyone owes everyone and no one can pay in the New Yorker aroused my interest in his novel, Capital. And what a good book that proved to be. It is long, 570 pages long, and I seldom tackle anything that daunting, but this is one of the best novels I have read this year. The others were Elizabeth Gilbert's The signature of all things, Zachary Lazar's Sway and Nadine Gordimer's No time like the present. Capital is a many layered book. On the face of it it is a novel about contemporary London with its mixture of people of different ethnicity, class and background. It was likened to Dickens, but it is about a very different London. As a writer Lanchester must have given thought to how he can capture the vastness of London within the compass of a novel. He concentrated the London experience in one street, Pepy's Street, and within that street, a banker from a comfortable middle class background, an old woman who was born and lived in that street all her life, her grandson, a painter whose key to success was the mystery about him, his anonymity, like Banksy, a Pakistani family who lived above their store, one of whose sons, a smart but aimless young man got caught up in an anti-terrorist investigation, a young woman, a stateless refugee from Zimbabwe who worked under a false name as a traffic warden, a Polish builder and handyman, who worked on the houses in the street, whose ambition was to make money, take it back to Poland and start a business with his father. All these people are vividly drawn and you long to learn more about them and turn the pages. The underlying theme is the rising property values in the street, which makes everyone living there feel rich. And the message that each of them receives that says 'We want what have'. And here the novel becomes a critique of Capitalism. The wealth of these people just keeps increasing simply because the increasing value of their house. Some spend money they don't have in the hope of the unrealistically high bonus payment. You might say that this book is a long parable about present day capitalism. There are winners, there are losers. The winners included the Polish builder who made his money, and got his girl, the losers included the banker's assistant, a financial and mathematical wizz kid, who used the bank to trade on his own account and was caught, the banker, who failed to get his expected large bonus and was dismissed because of his assistant's misdemeanour,  the refugee from Zimbabwe, who ended up in a detention camp, and could neither stay in Britain, nor could she be deported. 'We want what you have', the message that keeps recurring in ever more persistent and in the end odious form, is the capitalism of greed and envy.