‘Capital’ fails to captivate

Despite what the title of John Lanchester's new novel — or his chops as a financial journalist — might suggest, Capital isn't about money as much as it's about the capital of England.

The story is set in South London during the 2008 financial crisis, just as the global economy and banking institutions start tanking. But, rather than focus this epic tale on that high-finance world of buyouts and bankruptcies, Lanchester observes the parallel lives of ordinary people living and working on the fictional Pepys Road.

Lined with Victorian houses built a century earlier as dwellings for middle-class workers, Pepys Road has become a gentrified neighborhood of remodeled multimillion-quid townhouses. While the novel is "fluent in money," as Lanchester writes of one of his characters, what it really speaks to are the intimacies and trivialities of his characters' microcosmic lives there. It's no coincidence the neighborhood is named for the diarist Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) who set the benchmark for recording the minutiae of daily London life 350 years ago.

Each brief chapter in the first third of this massive book introduces or develops one of those characters: a wealthy investment banker and his annoying wife who face losing their expensive home and lifestyle; an 82-year-old widow who is dying of a brain tumor; a Pakistani family that owns the corner grocery store; and others. Lanchester's secondary characters further overpopulate Pepys Road, including a Polish-immigrant builder, a Zimbabwean refugee meter maid; a lovely Hungarian nanny; and the dying widow's performance-artist grandson.

Other than Pepys Road, all they have in common are the anonymous postcards residents receive that picture their homes and read: "We Want What You Have." Who's behind the sinister harassment and why is the novel's only mystery.

A London resident himself, Lanchester is the award-winning author of three other novels — The Debt to Pleasure, Mr. Phillips and Fragrant Harbor. His non-fictional account of the financial crisis, I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, demonstrated his ledger-sheet talents. But in Capital he's at his best rendering characters, painting them like literary impasto into a huge monetary and moral still life.

The emphasis is on "still life," however. This novel is epic only in size. No epic heroism takes place, nothing major happens, only mundane events over a single year in the characters' lives. The high-action moment of the first 60 pages is when the widow faints in the corner store (off-camera except for the thud). The Zimbabwean meter maid slipping a ticket under the windshield wipers of an Aston Martin competes for excitement.

The book's only mystery progressively gets nastier and more threatening, which seems promising enough. But, ultimately, it's a thin strand of diminishing plotline rather than the lit fuse snaking toward an explosive denouement it might have been. After some 500 pages of over-reaching characterization, learning the identity of the postcard miscreant hardly matters.

Which is to say, if strong plots, action and passion are among your prerequisites for taking on a long read, this may not be your cup of Earl Grey. And never mind those suggestions from across the big pond that it's Dickensian, because Capital is not the new Bleak House. It has more in common with Upstairs, Downstairs. BBC execs should be thinking new soap opera.