A Microcosm of London: John Lanchester Talks About
‘Capital’
By JOHN
WILLIAMS
In his new novel, "Capital,"
John Lanchester tracks the lives of several characters living and working on
one London street: a banker and his wife; a Polish house builder; a Muslim
family running a shop; a teenage West African soccer star; and a political refugee
who works illegally as a traffic warden, to name a few. The street's residents
have been receiving notes in the mail with pictures of their own houses and the
cryptic message: "We Want What You Have." In a recent interview via
e-mail, Mr. Lanchester discussed fiction and nonfiction, Dickens and Tolstoy,
immigration, the changing behavior of the English, and more. Below are excerpts
from the conversation.
Q.
The organizing principle for the book is
that its many characters all have a connection to Pepys Road, a street with
houses that were mostly built in the late 19th century. What was it about that
particular street that inspired you to anchor the book there?
A.
It's a fictional street - at least I
thought it was, though it turns out that there are a couple of real Pepys Roads
in London, none of which was my model. I was thinking of a composite of streets
around near where I live in Clapham, with features and properties borrowed from
all around the place. I liked the idea of a street that was a kind of microcosm
of London in the same way that the city is a microcosm of the wider world.
Q.
I count about two dozen characters in
the book who have at least some claim on the reader's attention and emotions,
and six storylines. Can you trace all of that complexity back to one moment of
genesis? A scene that came to you? Or a character?
A.
It was in the DNA of the book that it
would have a large number of characters and storylines. I don't remember a
single "eureka" moment when that occurred to me. The family groups
were always at the heart of the book, and I don't remember there being a
sequence so much as I remember all of them being there all along. I should say,
it's an odd thing about the fiction writing process for me in that I often
don't remember much about it; it's as if it happens in a sort of semi-dream
state. Nonfiction isn't like that at all.
Q.
Your last book, "I.O.U.," was a nonfiction look into the
complicated world of finance. Was it tempting to get wonkier about the
financial aspects of "Capital" than you did?
A.
It might have been if I hadn't written
"I.O.U." What happened was that I completed a draft of
"Capital" in early 2009 and then stuck it in a drawer for a few
months, as I always do when I get to that point in a book, in order to get some
perspective and see it clearly before I go back to finish it. I normally
promise myself that I'll do something constructive with the time - take up
Pilates, write a screenplay - but instead mess around doing nothing in
particular, before I wake up with a start and go back to finish the book. This
time, though, I decided to use all the stuff I'd found out about the world of
finance, from observing the real-life crash going on. I'd guessed that one was
coming; in fact, when I started writing "Capital" in 2006, the whole
shape of the book was based on the idea that one was coming. So I had a
built-in interest in the bust, and I ended up writing a nonfiction account of
it, and that certainly had the effect of quarantining the novel from too much
detailed explanation of financial specifics. You can do a lot of things in
fiction, but sustained explanation isn't one of them.
Q.
There are four subplots that involve
people being in London and not feeling fully at home there. Some are there
legally, some illegally, but there's an overall sense of displacement. Is the
book meant to say any particularly pointed thing about immigration issues?
A.
Immigration is a huge issue in Britain
at the moment, as it is in most developed societies. It speaks to me deeply as
a subject, because I am a well-disguised sort of semi-immigrant myself: my
father was born in Africa and brought up in Hong Kong and Australia, my mother
was Irish, I was born in Germany and brought up in Asia, mainly Hong Kong,
where we lived until I was 17, so although my passport and everything else
about me seems straightforwardly British, I have quite a strong sense of having
arrived in London from somewhere else. So that sense of displacement - which I
would also argue is a fundamental feature of modernity - is something that
interests me. As for immigration as a political issue, the debate here is so
narrow that any portrait of it in the round is bound to seem pointed, just by
being at odds with the grotesquely one-sided media version.
Q.
You write that one character, a builder
named Zbigniew, "had once had a sense of the British as a moderate,
restrained nation. It was funny to think of that now. It wasn't true at
all." How much of that reflects your own thoughts about the country?
A.
I oscillate between thinking that
something fundamental has changed in Britain, in the direction of abandoning
previous restraints, and conversely that what's happened is really just the
reversion to a historical character that is largely intact. The English used to
be notorious in Europe for being vulgar, obsessed with money and trade, drunk,
and bellicose; that changed in about 1870, when everything became buttoned-up
and Victorian, but now it is changing back, at speed. So I veer about on this
one.
Q.
There's something sprawling and
old-fashioned about this book. The novelist Claire Messud compared it to
Dickens. Did you have any models for it as you were writing?
A.
I did think about the 19th century a
lot. Not Dickens so much, though I'm deeply flattered and embarrassed by the
comparison, but I don't see Dickens as a realist and I had been brooding on the
realist novel. I was thinking about Stendhal and Balzac and Tolstoy in
particular, especially in terms of all the permissions they had that, I came to
realize, I didn't feel I had. They could know anything they wanted about
characters, they could tell you anything, they could go in and out of their
heads at will, they could be omniscient. I thought - hang on, how come writers
from over a century ago had more freedom than I do? So I gave myself a special
pass to know as much as they were allowed to know.
Q.
Do you know yet what you'll be writing
next? Another novel or back to nonfiction?
A.
I have a novel in mind, but I like to
brood quite a lot before I start writing fiction, so I have a nonfiction
project to write in the interim. Before that I'm writing a short book about the
London Underground, as part of the celebrations for its 150th anniversary next
year. In the course of researching it I got to fulfill a lifetime's ambition by
sitting in the front of the train with the driver.
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