Book #50: Capital by John Lanchester
Capital by Lanchester J Staff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a book that I'd thought about reading for some time, and then I spotted it being sold secondhand.
The whole story revolves around the residents of a single street in London. The fact that there are a number of storylines for each character, which occasionally intertwine, made the whole book feel like the plot of a soap opera.
At the outset, every resident has started receiving anonymous cards that bear the simple message: "We Want What You Have".
However, this mystery only takes up a small part of the book, which charts the fortunes of several characters during 2008, the year of the infamous "credit crunch", and its effects on them.
This book took a while to get into, and I started wishing that I'd made notes along the way, to remind myself who everyone was. I also found the book to be quite dense, but it did give all the characters very detailed backstories (for example, one character known only as "Smitty" was meant to be a sort of pastiche of Banksy).
After I got into this book, and got used to the fact that some characters seemed to vanish for upwards of 100 pages at a time, I started to enjoy it. This felt like a portrait of London as a multicultural place. One character is an Eastern European builder, and another is a footballer from Senegal, and both have stories that are at times comical, and at other times very tragic.
Overall, I was glad that I took the trouble to read this, and would recommend it to others.
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50 Book Challenge Complete for 2023!