It’s not a bad time to be a journalist, not wholly bad. Sure, the industry is in apparently irrevocable decline and it is being flagellated before Lord Justice Leveson. But, for the first time in years, there is a species more hated than the Hack. The vitriol against bankers is unrelenting — each week brings fresh acrimony and recrimination. The Guardian is running a TV advert that has reworked the nursery rhyme, Three Little Pigs. The pigs commit insurance fraud by framing the wolf for the destruction of their houses after having failed to keep up with their mortgage repayments. The banks, reads one fictional headline, are to blame for the tragedy.
John Lanchester’s latest novel, Capital, is a testament against a culture built on acquisitive greed. Rapacious banks are to blame, but so are the three little pigs for living beyond their means. Lanchester charts the transformation virtue of aspiration into the vice of consumption. The action turns on the words: ‘We Want What You Have’.
The critical reaction to this state of the nation novel has been fevered, but there are some dissenting voices. Here is a selection:
Claire Tomalin in the Guardian: ‘A few strands of the narrative don’t quite work, but the best ones make you turn the pages faster to find out where they are going…He tells a good story. He gives you a lot to think about. This is an intelligent and entertaining account of our grubby, uncertain, fragmented London society that has almost replaced religion with shopping. Read it.’
Toby Clements in the Telegraph: ‘I’d hoped for wise words from a sage, someone to tell me how it really is. What he seems to be saying is that we shouldn’t panic, that despite appearances things are still pretty boring and they’ll carry on being that way for the foreseeable future. Perhaps that is true. We do tend to plug away and things tend to come out in the wash, but it doesn’t make for great drama.’
Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times: ‘It is a panoramic novel and, in every sense, a very traditional one. In fact, Lanchester went out of his way to tell his stories as straightforwardly as possible. While writing it, he read big, solid Victorian novels, and there is a feeling in the book that, in literary terms, the excesses of the 20th century never happened, that the experimental novel is dead.’
Antonia Senior in the Times (£): ‘Lanchester verges on being too heavy-handed with his message that money corrupts. With this slightly adolescent underlying theme, lapsing into caricatures would have been fatal. But Lanchester is too fine, and too clever, a writer to allow that to happen. His characters are richly and sympathetically drawn, even the ones we are not supposed to like much, such as Arabella.’
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