Watching a book

Capital by John Lanchester




This book begins like a novel, and somewhere in the middle turns into a television series. This is not a bad thing; at some point I began to be strongly reminded of a British show from a few years back called The Street in which each episode was about a different household with characters from other household overlapping.

That street was working-to-lower-middle-class; the street in Capital has evolved over the years into a very posh street, although the characters we meet are from all walks of life: an African refugee, a Muslim shopkeeper and his family, a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny, a city banker, a promising young soccer-player, a City banker and his spendthrift wife, and a dying old woman - plus a dozen others.

Lanchester does an admirable job of inhabiting each of these very different characters, and the narrative is very compelling - even if the ending is not all that surprising.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see this televised in the not-so-distant future.



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