A shot at the great London novel

FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews CapitalBy John Lanchester Faber, 577pp. £12.99

THERE’S NO DOUBT about it: the financial crisis remains good for a few laughs, as do social snobbery, greed, self-delusion and good old vanity. John Lanchester has a great deal of fun with these all-too-real human traits in his long, clever, somewhat slap-happy satire, set in a London that is creaking from the weight of it all: the old and the new, the trendy and the fake.

It is a topical and likable yarn, heaving with popular culture, sharp observation, depictions of racism and standard social commentary such as: “Everybody hated being ticketed just as everyone hated all the traffic on the roads except themselves. Everyone knew that the city would grind to a halt without restrictions on where cars could and couldn’t park, and everyone knew that everybody would disobey all the laws without compunction if they weren’t enforced. It was just that nobody wanted the laws to apply to them.”

Throughout Capitalone might think one was reading a series of wry newspaper columns stitched together and presented as a bird's-eye view of the way some of us live. Sustaining a character-driven novel over such a long haul would take the burlesque aplomb of one Charles Dickens, and Lanchester isn't Dickens – but then who is?

As with the title’s double meaning – capital as money and as metropolis – much about this cartoon of a novel and its sitcom characterisation is obvious; so obvious, too obvious.

Roger Yount, the tall, presentable but sadly – as women appear to notice – unsexy trader in the City, has become so rich that it may have driven him mad. His wife, Arabella, is ridiculous beyond belief, inconsistently drawn and not very funny. Their existence is based on excess. But with a cast as large as this of stereotypes, there are bound to be other duds, such as Zbigniew, the calculating, zealous Polish builder who conceals his contempt for his clients and never relinquishes an opportunity to show up his lazy British counterparts.

There is also a subversive artist who appears to have been inspired by a TV chef, and then there is his disgruntled assistant, whose relevance becomes apparent all too early. And don’t forget Matya, the gorgeous Hungarian childminder with the tragic past who has come to London intent on bettering her life.

When the book is good, as when dealing with the elderly Petunia and her slow, lonely death, or the plight of a young African footballer, it is very good; when it is poor, it is cliched and laboured. Still, it is often funny.

Roger has an ambitious assistant, a creepy toad named Mark. Mark hates him and reckons that he is an unworthy superior. Mark speculates that "the inside of Roger's head was like one of those Simpsonscartoons depicting what Homer was thinking about: tumbleweed drifting past, a mechanical monkey doing somersaults, a hamburger. Yeah, that's probably what it was like to be Roger. Like being Homer Simpson, except taller and richer and working in a bank. For now, anyway."

Most of the central characters share an address in common: Pepys Road, a slice of Victoriana that has seen all manner of inhabitants come and go, all except old Petunia at number 42, who has spent her entire life there. The property boom has pushed prices into an unreality that has also made the street the target of a rather sinister postcard campaign: "We Want What You Have." Perhaps this plot device owes itself to Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin(1947), but Capitalis more like a weary echo of Tom Wolfe's overrated The Bonfire of the Vanities(1987).

Lanchester relaxes his comic tone with only one or two of the characters. The passages with Petunia, a relic of a different world, are at times genuinely moving. In her own way heroic, she experiences the coldness of the medical system and sets about living life, but just not quickly enough for her guilt-ridden daughter.

Also sympathetic is the handling of Quentina, an illegally appointed traffic warden on the run from her political past, and Freddy, the freakishly gifted footballer who arrives all excited from Senegal, accompanied by his father, Patrick, a quiet man ill at ease in a country he neither likes nor understands. In one wonderful sequence the father considers his son and remembers the baby he once held.

Best of all, though, are the Kamals, the Pakistani clan who run the corner shop. Much of what Lanchester writes about them is predictable, and many Indian and Pakistani writers have already created similar dynasties, but Lanchester’s finest comic moment comes when the matriarch arrives from Lahore to visit.

When one of the Kamal sons is arrested on terrorism charges, the old gorgon takes control and tracks down a leading civil-rights lawyer.

The mother disputes that her son has, as the police claim, waived his right to legal representation: “He has not just come down from the hills. He is not some Urdu-language monoglot from the tribal areas who’s never seen a knife and fork. This is a young man who was offered a place to read physics at Cambridge University. He is lazy and he has his faults, but he is not an idiot.”

Overly long and repetitive, Capitaldemands more than it gives; Lanchester the commentator has a thesis, and he works it hard. There is no denying that, with a good scriptwriter, it would transfer well to the TV screen. But a plot this thin would require the linguistic panache of a Martin Amis, whose Money(1984) and The Information(1993) are both so much better, to elevate it.

Capital, published in Dickens's bicentenary, may well be a homage to the master, but it is not the great London novel, never mind the great state-of-the-nation book it may have been intended to be. Although there are flashes of art, they are undermined by the commentator as polemicist.

John Lanchester can do better, and he already has, in the brilliantly comic Mr Phillips(2000), his second novel, which surpassed his Nabokovian debut, The Debt to Pleasure(1996). In Mr Phillips, the eponymous antihero, like Roger in Capital, loses his job, but in doing so he discovers himself far more convincingly than is the case with Roger, whose epiphany is more of an afterthought. Ultimately, Capital, with a banking-crisis symbolism that may or may not be coincidental, runs out of puff, as did the world economy.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent; she is also the author of Ordinary Dogs, published by Faber