Ah, the joy of Christmas - being given books as presents. I received some wonderful ones this year: Trollope's Barchester Towers (my dad), Jenny Uglow's The Pinecone (fascinating-sounding biography of the nineteenth-century woman who designed a church near Carlisle; Gregory) and John Lanchester's Capital (my brother).
John Lanchester started writing a novel set in the City of London a few years before the financial crash, but what he found there inspired him to turn to non-fiction instead. The result was Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-one Can Pay (2010), an account of the crisis which I found dismaying and exhilarating in equal measure. The sheer excitement of discovering exactly what a Credit Default Swap is prevented me from feeling quite as angry as I should have at the way they and other financial instruments were used to undermine the global financial system. Bailing out the banks has left us all poorer: some missed their bonus for a year, others lost their jobs, others their disability benefit and yet more their access to public libraries and parks. And yet I found Lanchester's book curiously empowering. Those of us who are not mathematically minded tend to think that we couldn't possibly understand the complex workings of the financial markets; as it turns out, there were good reasons for keeping us in this subserviant state of ignorance. Never again, shows Lanchester, need we let anyone pull the wool over our eyes: if we want to know what's going on, who's selling what to whom under what spurious triple-A credit rating and why, we can. Knowledge may not be power in this instance, but it might inspire us finally to get on with it and take our overdrafts somewhere else. And that can only be a good thing.
So I was already positively disposed towards John Lanchester - not just for Whoops, but also for Mr Phillips and Fragrant Harbour, his second and third novels. Set over the course of the year leading up to the financial crisis, Capital zooms in on just one London street. Pepys Road is London in miniature, a microcosm of a city whose property market has brought rich and poor into uncomfortably close proximity. Petunia Howe, now 82, is still living in the house at no. 42 bought by her grandfather before it was even built. Roger and Arabella Yount, by contrast, bought theirs, no. 51, for two and a half million pounds around the turn of the millenium. The Kamal family live in a flat above the corner shop which services the needs of Pepys Road's diverse community. Freddy Kamo, a seventeen-year-old football star fresh from his recruitment in Senegal, has just arrived at no. 27 together with his father. Quentina Mkfesi, an asylum-seeker from Zimbabwe, patrols the streets as a traffic warden, while Bogdan (real name Zbigniew, but that's a bit of a mouthful for Arabella Yount), a builder from Poland, attends to the insatiable hunger in the street for new wet rooms and conservatories.
Pepys Road is fertile territory for a novel about having money, trying to get more of it, and losing it all. Capital is also about the forces which shape the life of a city and how they intersect with the lives of its inhabitants as they flow in and out, seeking a share of its wealth and opportunity. From the young footballer totally uncorrupted by his sudden rise to fame to the 40-year-old banker who finds himself in genuine need of his million-pound bonus to sustain his family's lifestyle, Lanchester demonises no-one. If I have a criticism of Capital, however, it is of its tendency to pit the honest immigrant worker against the over-privileged native. The builders and traffic wardens gain our sympathy while the bankers and their wives do not. Nonetheless, this is a very enjoyable novel - one of those big 600-odd-pagers that you can devour in a week, and as such it gives a very particular pleasure.
What else have I been reading? Some folk will know that we moved once again in January, this time to the Quaker Community in the Peak District, and the upheaval has caused several books to be read without being recorded. Before Christmas I read a number of books on simplicity, the Quaker testimony and spiritual practice, in preparation for a weekend on decluttering which I was due to facilitate at the community. I read Alison Moore's Booker-shortlisted The Lighthouse and thoroughly recommend it: spare, menacing, impressively taught and easily worth its many accolades which have also brought its publisher, Salt, a well-deserved higher profile. Since Capital I've read Catherine Fox's novel Angels and Men, an evocative and enjoyable campus novel set among students at a thinly-veiled Durham University. The richness of its fictional world made me reluctant to start another novel too quickly, and so I've turned to Mark Cocker's Crow Country, which is already making me gaze upwards and try to distinguish between a rook and a jackdaw, and which I'll write about next.
