The dynamic character of happiness in Capital by John Lanchester

kaleidoscope of personalities whose perception of happiness and of what is good for their well-being changes throughout the narration.

As Leo Tolstoy puts it in Anna Karenina , “All happy families are alike…” the happiness fundamentals may vary from family to family, and in this respect, Roger Blunt’s family is an epitome of this variety. On the surface, Arabella and Roger have everything that is usually attributed to happy families: a loving couple, married, with children and their social and financial stability is ensured by the very fact they live in Pepys Road:

Having a house in Pepys Road was like being in a casino in which you were guaranteed to be a winner. If you already lived there, you were rich [Lanchester 2012: 7].

Still, as any family, the Younts also have their issues to tackle. Thus, if we walk around their house and take a closer look at the relationship between the couple, we see Arabella lamenting over her ‘competitive tiredness’. At the same time, if we knock on Roger’s office door we will find him ruminating excessively on his forthcoming million dollars. Later, though, we will see him suffering from a looming talk to Arabella – the talk where he will have to tell to Arabella about what seemed to be his failure – that he didn’t receive the bonus they dreamt of. Throughout the novel, John Lanchester shows how his characters gradually change their focus from pursuing money to pursuing happiness – and to follow the protagonists’ pathways in search for these points in their lives seems to be one of the most exciting avenues of research that the writer suggests to his readers.

In Roger’s life the first glimpse of the turning point began when he was having a picnic with his boss, and saw a rabbit running across the hill. Why a rabbit? Probably, the rabbit caught Roger’s attention because the rabbit had the freedom to choose its road, its pathway.

[…] Roger felt a surge of feeling that he for a moment could not recognize. The sensation was like a shiver. He realized that he was free [Lanchester 2012: 99].

The word shiver seems to be characterizing Roger’s psychological state rather than his physical perceptions (see, e.g. [Suleimanova, Demchenko 2018]). And here starts the first realization of the need for change:

[…] he was still young enough, strong enough, to do anything he wanted with his life. He could just walk off now, get a lift to Eric’s house, pick up Arabella and the kids, drive back to London and announce that from now on they would all be living a different life, a simpler and economically smaller life, […] and then he would retrain as a teacher and they would move out of London, somewhere like this where you could walk and breath and see the sky, and the kids would go to the local school and Arabella would look after them and they would pick out good-value cuts at the local butcher and he would drink tea from a mug while helping the kids with their homework […] and then one day he would look into mirror and see a different man [Lanchester 2012: 99].

Roger seems to have mirrored all his life in this long, dynamic and a rhythmic sentence. If read out loud, this sentence sounds like a recitative and brings a certain change into the narration that was a relaxed one – due to the very atmosphere of picnic in the open air. From the deep places of his heart, Roger brings his dream to light. Once found, this dream was destined to become “a pearl of great value”, but in his inner dialogue Roger hastened to explain the dream as coming from the air around him and hid it within his heart till the time for change came. If we look at this moment in the retrospect, probably, this very insight gave Roger strength and power to face the challenges his life offered to him with tenacity and fortitude. For somewhere inside he was already open for “change, change, change”. Lanchester finishes his novel with this word, thrice pronounced by Roger, but for Roger this is the beginning of a new life. The same word, repeated several times in a line, means more than the same word but pronounced only once. Interestingly, when Roger says I promise, I can change he uses the word change as a verb, while all the iterations can be perceived as a noun. The verb adds a certain dynamism, though.

If Roger’s happiness is in his hands and it is connected with action and change, Petunia Howe’s happiness is largely dependent on other peoples’ attitude to her and the way people treat her. Petunia, the oldest inhabitant of Pepys Road, seems to be a fragile and an unhappy person who never tried to define happiness for herself. One can picture Petunia’s happiness in simple actions. But they are accompanied by if – it’s not a positive and a promising if like the one in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”. Petunia’s if is the if that is used in the English language for expressing lamentations over unfulfilled actions:

Petunia would much, much rather have had Mary, or

Mary’s son Graham who lived in London, come and do her shopping with her, and give her some help in person; but that option hadn’t been offered [Lanchester 2012: 13].

If we substitute would much rather with if we will have: Petunia would be happy if Mary or Graham did shopping with her. She would also be happy if her doctor looked at her with more care and attention. Petunia, being lonely deep inside, would be only too happy to discuss some of her symptoms with a benevolent and a patient-oriented person. She did feel inhibited while visiting the doctor (who was not ‘her’ doctor, which added to her self-consciousness), but by the fact that she felt exotic, an alien there among people using their gadgets and not abiding by the hospital etiquette.

Petunia’s grandson Smitty contributed to her feeling of happiness when he visited her. Even visiting the corner shop and having a chat with Ahmad was a small, but meaningful contribution to her happiness.

Petunia’s well-being is not a complete and utter happiness – the state which might have been described as a sunny day with small periods of cloud coverage. She describes her life as grey. But if we extend the weather metaphor and imagine her life as a cloudy weather, we still may see that there are patches of sun on that cloudy sky. We see them in Petunia’s life when she describes Albert (though he is depicted as a grumbler and complainer-about-modern-life):

The things that had been good about him, his warmth and kindness, and unpredictable sensitivity, the way he’d do good deeds for people and not tell her about them (loans of cash, a lift home, writing letters when people were bereaved), the sense that he was basically a loving man […]. His good side had been fully on show only to her [Lanchester 2012: 65‒66].

This is for the first and for the last time when the reader learns anything good about Albert. But it seems that’s enough to understand that Petunia’s husband was the person one could rely on, for he had values and fundamentals, and all those household peculiarities he had, faded in comparison with the good he did.

When Petunia is portrayed through Mary’s perceptions, one can’t but feel the irritation and reproach for this very fact – that she did not live her life fully . At the same time, Mary questions her own ability to live to greater extent. Petunia’s perception of happiness was largely determined by Albert’s attitude to his life, while Mary was influenced by both Albert and Petunia, so Mary’s awareness of her own well-being could not but have been influenced by her parents’ worldviews.

Readers learn about Petunia’s inner personality only when she is pictured through Smitty’s (her grandson’s) loving memories (and here another beam of light comes):

She was good at looking-after, keen on cuddling, and had never once lost her temper – in fact, at the age of twenty-eight, he’d still never seen her angry [Lanchester 2012: 85].

Cuddling and caring – the things that made Petunia happy and the memories that Smitty will treasure forever about his deceased Granny.

The character who did not live on Pepys Road, but who was connected with it through his work and whose attitude to life is worth analyzing, is Zbignew. His happiness is the happiness of a man who loves his job. The reader encounters him for the first time while Zbignew is talking to Arabella over the alterations she wanted to have in her dressing room. The builder is depicted through his attitude to work and one can conclude that he loved it:

He liked walking past places where he had done things. […] The memory of the work in these places was a muscle memory, a physical sensation […] Real work never left you feeling worse [Lanchester 2012: 70‒71].

Further on, we learn that ‘he was an early riser, a getter-up’. The fact that his job made him happy is obvious from the following description:

His initial feeling on coming awake was a happy sense of busyness, with a day to be conquered, things to be done, tasks to be ticked off, progress to be made [Lanchester 2012: 215].

It seems that only industrious people like working, and if initially he just wanted to outrun and outperform his competitorbuilders, further on, his urge to do everything perfectly was day in and day out being instilled into his nature. He was picturing his happiness in Poland with his parents in a house built for them. Bogdan’s self-trial started when he found a hidden bag of money while reconstructing Petunia’s house. It seemed that his happiness was in his hands already, yet, the inner struggle about the money made him confide in Matya:

The Pepys Road era for Zbignew’s life would be over. Maybe another part of his life would begin; he certainly hoped so. It all depended on what Matya said [Lanchester 2012: 535].

And, it turned out that his happiness was in Matya’s hands, for, deep in his heart, he hoped that she would advise him to give the money back to Mary. And here comes the moment of joyful insight, for through this hidden bag of money Zbignew realizes that he found his true love. Zbignew felt it was unjust to flee with the money, and Matya’s answer proved they had a common ground. Happiness is to find a true love – the person who looks not at you, but in the same direction, who breathes your thoughts and shares your feelings. The bag full of money was a test for Matya, as well. Her reaction to Zbignew’s words and the advice to bring money to Mary right now, this minute were a blessing for Zbignew – both prospectively and retrospectively, because it could have taken years to learn a person, to see, whether she is a right match for him, or not. As the Russian saying goes, to understand a person, to learn what to expect from them, one should eat a pood of salt (a little bit more than 16 kilograms) with this person. This episode with the money is worth several good poods of salt.

And here the change in Bogdan’s attitude to life arises: if previously he pragmatically approached to matters romantic, he had maxims rather than rules , in Matya he found a soulmate, the one to trust to, and to love. If, initially, it was mainly his job that constituted Zbignew’s happiness; after Matya’s advice about the money, his happiness spanned to greater extent.

As for Matya, her perception of happiness changed as well, for, initially, she was keen on marrying a rich man from London. But she understood that it was Bogdan who was destined to constitute her happiness , or составить счастье , as Fyodor Dostoevsky puts it.

“Lanchester cleverly moves from character to character and mingles his voice with their [characters’] different voices” [Hewitt 2016: 25]. This is why it requires a closer look and more effort sometimes to differentiate between character’s own perception of happiness and the author’s view of character’s well-being, for “postmodern novels frequently deploy a plurality of perspectives” [Baron 2018: 24]. Still, the journey once undertook, opens up the horizons of other characters’ worldviews and gives the cues to analyzing other personages’ minds. This is the journey yet to be taken, for Capital gives us an insight into lots of characters who contribute to the overall perception of what it means to live in the capital. “The practice of close reading leads directly to evaluation” [Hewitt 1997: 61]. And the latter is connected with values. When regarding happiness as a value, I mainly focused on Roger, Petunia and Zbignew for their perceptions of happiness vary considerably. For Petunia, happiness is compassion and care from others, for Roger happiness is a change towards a simpler life, for Zbignew happiness is a loving person beside him. What unites the characters, is the need and longing for being understood and appreciated by their nearest and dearest. But it took a long footpath to understand that.