This book came out last year and it's been on my radar for a while but my book club have finally pushed me to read it now. It's over eight-hundred pages long so I knew iBook was the way to go rather than some weighty tome that would either give me an aching wrist from holding it up or give me a sore neck from stooping to read it on a table or on my lap.
So far it's a pretty accurate picture of London in 2007-8, at the peak of the financial and property bubble. It's giving me an aching nostalgia for our life back home because of the familiar stories from the media of that time, the familiar characters and lingo ('realised' - with an 's'! 'Nappy' not 'diaper'! Sigh...) but it's also verging on twee at times. It has a Dickensian feel to it that is putting me off. Everyone is somehow too neatly sketched out as characters, one or two little defining traits that mark out their individuality but nothing too in-depth. It is a very English style of novel, very Dickens. Lots of jolly chaps and awfully nice gals gadding about being frightfully eccentric and funny and darling about everything and oops! look out, Matron! there's a villain about, can't be doing with that now, can we! Most of the characters are a cipher for some social trend or other rather than deeply thought out characters with deep drives and desires - the Rich, Bored Housewife, the Jolly if Misguided Muslim Chap, the Hard-working, Dour Polish Builder, the Tim-Nice-But-Dim Banker. Their actions sometimes don't make sense as a result.
For example, the character of Arabella is clearly meant to be some hateful personification of rich hedonism and self indulgence, a banker's wife who is too lazy to even take care of her own children despite not working outside the home. She is also a mystery though because she puts her husband to the test by leaving him alone one Christmas to fend for himself without her or their nanny (who has just quit) and as a reader you are left wondering why on earth she would do that. From the women I know who are in her position in life, you basically cut a deal with your husband that he pays bills and creates wealth and you get to be with your children and / or do nothing. There would be nothing that could motivate a woman in that situation to leave her children alone at Christmastime and test her husband's childcare skills. They're not some struggling middle-class couple, both working long hours, both juggling childcare and her resentful, feeling angry that he's not pulling his weight and wanting to prove a point. They're a rich couple and the deal is very clear: he makes the money, she takes care of everything else. I don't see why she would flounce off and then return wordlessly as if nothing had happened. It doesn't make much sense. This is where it becomes clear that the characters in this novel are tools in the hands of the author, not intended to be believable people. That is the Dickensian element to the novel that is putting me off, I think.
On the other hand, I do get where the author is coming from, wanting to build a tapestry of his city where he lives, a wry portrait of an intense time. He mostly succeeds in that portrait and I did smile with recognition at some of the scenes. In this article, John Lanchester refers to the book as his 'Big Fat London Novel' and mentions an aspiration to paint a Dickensian portrait of the city in a time when Victorian levels of social inequality were returning. He does manage to achieve his aim in the book. The problem lies in the tension between the depth of Lanchester's message about globalization and inequality and social change and the superficiality of the characters demonstrating that message. As a novelist, you either write action that is driven by the desires and drives of the characters or you have an overarching story that you want your characters to tell. I can see with this novel that it was written to deliver a story rather than being organically formed from the characters telling it. It still works as a good read though. Despite the Dickensian element that irritates me, it's ultimately the kind of novel I would be interesting in writing myself, if I had to pick a type of novel to write, as it combines social and economic issues with a diverse range of characters in a portrait of a place. Thinking about it, however, there is no city where I belong wholeheartedly in the way that this author seems to belong to London.
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