John Lanchester's ''Capital'': rethinking city spaces and identities

made and the general public is left with it. This violation or redesigning of a public space resonates quite well with how the novel is constructed and how the cityscape shapes the narrative.

John Lanchester’s ‘Capital’ can be defined by some as a typical state-of-the-nation novel or city life novel, in the sense that it indeed gives its reader a sense of the current state, at least, a part of it, of London life as lived by some. Yet, looking at ‘Capital’ solely from that angle would be an overt simplification, as it is more than a gallery of charters or, ‘types’ or, for that matter, a snapshot of modern London life.

The pun implied in title of the novel gives a very interesting suggestion concerning how we might read the novel. The two meanings of the word ‘capital’ - ‘assets’, ‘money’ as well as ‘political and, arguably, financial and cultural centre of country’. Like these two meanings, which form a very complex unity is the idea of city as a peculiar space which shapes the characters of the novel and is shaped or re-shaped by them. The grand city of London which revolves around capitals of various sorts, assets gained, put at stake and lost, affects and is affected equally by the ostensibly rich Roger Yount or Micky Lipton -Miller and less secure newsagent Ahmed Kamal, stateless traffic warden Quentina Mkfesi or Zbigniew Tomascewski, known as ‘Bogdan the Builder’.

If we look at the opening pages of the Preface we will immediately see that the ‘brief history of Peyps Road’ cannot be reduced to the mere explanation of why the house prices are such. It rather a ‘history of space transformation’. Interestingly enough, the initial transformation was executed by the people who were not local, i.e. ‘a Cornish architect and Irish builders’ [Lanchester 2013: 1]. If we look at the end of the Preface we see that we end the ‘historical part’ with re-shaping: ‘There were builders in the street all the time....’ [Lanchester 2013: .6], and the owners of the houses craving for more space, with the narrator describing this ‘re-shaping’ as something ‘...sinister... as if the earth was spreading, vomiting, rejecting its own excavation’ [Lanchester 2013: 7].

If the narrator looks at the transformation of the space in terms of financial gain or loss for the owners, I would rather like to focus on how the characters try to shape the macro- and micro-spaces they live in, i.e. London in general and Pepys Road in particular.

It will be true to say that virtually any city novel is about urban spaces, with examples ranging from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and James Joyce’s Ulysses, to more recent ones like Zadie Smith’s NW and Teju Cole’s Open City. In Capital we see how transformation of the urban landscape results in or is driven by the character’s identity. Yet, in the case of Capital this statement cannot be reduced to the cliche of ‘new multicultural forces giving the city new vigour’. The mechanism is much subtler and works on several layers and does not follow the ‘multicultural pattern’.

If we follow the logic of the novel, we will see that the first character we meet is actually the one who was most connected with the place and ‘her connection with the place was went back further ... because her grandfather ... bought the house before it was even built.’ [Lanchester 2013: 11]. Petunia Howe, a person confined to her private space at 42 Peyps Road, has lived there all her life, but for the time of the Blitz, is probably the only person had seen the so far biggest event in the history of the street - the V2 explosion in 1944. Petunia’s space is somehow ‘frozen in time’, or ‘out of date’ as Petunia puts it, yet it does not trouble her.

Looking at the Younts who live just across the road at No.51 we see a very interesting juxtaposition. In a sense, they, newcomers by Petunia’s standards are a complete opposite of her. If Petunia is more or less happy with what she has in terms of her private space - home - the Younts (mostly Arabella) are in the process of permanent redecoration and rebuilding, which seems to some, e.g. ‘Bogdan the Builder’ pointless and even wrong. Lanchester very cleverly emphasizes the richness of the Younts not only through constant and expensive home construction projects, but also through an extension to their private space - a late 18th century parsonage in Gloucestershire with ‘smallish rooms’ [Lanchester 2013: 21] which too was redone, plus an ‘extension cottage’ to accommodate visitors when it ‘becomes too cosy’ (ibid). Indeed, how else can you make a sharper contrast between the ‘haves’ with hundreds of square meters of private and owned space and the ‘have nots’ like Quentina with her ‘transition lodgings’ or Zbigniew, the lodger under illegal double sublease. This is further intensified by the comparison of flying on a private jet and in ‘scum class’ (ibid), where space is the thing that matters most. Interestingly enough, it is the space in Pepys Road that they have to give up in the end, that becomes the biggest blow, arguably even bigger than Roger’s sack from the bank.

If Petunia and the Younts are definitely the epitome of ‘local residents’ such characters as Zbigniew and Quentina are definite outsiders, who are actually in charge of the space. Quentina Mkfesi can from the very beginning be identified as one of the key characters whose identity is shaped by city space and who actually shapes it herself. Quentina is a traffic warden and in this capacity she administers parking space, a scarce and, consequently, precious resource or even capital for that matter. She views the streets as an asset and notices in Pepys Road only the house owned by the football club. However, her own lodgings, the Refuge, makes quite a different contribution to her image. The ‘shabby’ [Lanchester 2013: 205] Victorian house, a shelter for the stateless and failed refuge-seekers acts here as a place, where Quentina feels disempowered, very much like in the apartment of Kwame Lyons. Here we see a very interesting trick which is played in the novel at least twice but on different scales and which can be described as a space-determined identity switch. When we see Quentina putting on her ‘colonel’ uniform and going into the field we are actually observing her transformation into someone other than a political immigrant from Zimbabwe, into a person of purpose, power and importance. Someone who enforces the law. In the Refuge and in Kwame’s apartment we see Quentina stripped of her uniform and of this invented identity. She is her actual vulnerable self, and yet, it is her vulnerable true identity that allows her to meet Mashiko. A similar situation, at least formally, occurs with Matya, who is attending a social event instead of Arabella and imagines that she is ‘a woman of mystery’ while being considered by some of Roger’s colleagues to some sort of an escort girl. But in the end it is not ‘roses and champagne’ but her standard job as a nanny.

Zbigniew, the Polish builder, is probably one of the central figures in this space-identity model. From the very beginning of the novel we see that Zbigniew is ready to give up his name and take up another one, not real, since his real life was not in London. So it is under this ‘fake’ name he undertakes to reshape Pepys road, at least part of it. In a sense, he rounds up the street’s lifecycle: constructed by Irish builders, and reconstructed by their Polish counterparts. Zbigniew does a lot of construction jobs and performs them even better than his British counterparts. The key episodes in Zbigniew’s line are the discoveries of spaces which lead to some moral transformations. The first one is definitely the discovery of a trove in Petunia’s house, which, though having no financial value, has a great test of his moral stance on money and the concept of wealth, while the other being taking Matya for a walk on the South Bank. This episode is important in the sense that Zbiniew sees the London he failed to notice before and does it very poetically, thus revealing to us this true romantic self, something different from a very down-to-earth builder. This again is brilliantly played over in the episode on the London Eye, where Zbigniew and Matya are not only quite literary ‘lifted up’, but also see the city from a completely different perspective.

Still there are some characters for whom space becomes an instrument of the rite of passage, which is particularly true of Shahid Kamal, who has a love for virtual and actual spaces, i.e. his passion about walking and watching people and going online, and whose private space is violated and reduced to a prison cell, which makes him rethink who he is in terms of ideology. Paradoxically enough, it is the violation of his private space, his wife hotspot, that leads him into prison and this same thing takes him out of it, thus rounding up the book’s cycle - a challenge of somebody’s private space with the ‘We Want What You Have’ post card is countered by a physical challenge of temporary space deprivation.

The novel closes with the Younts’ ‘changing places’, or rather ‘place’, Quentina being sent off to an asylum seeker’s camp, and Smithy’s identity disclosed. This all somehow gives the narrative a new spin, the transformed city stays where it is and the transformed identities go on with their lives.