Capital

by John Lanchester

Paperback, 2013

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

Faber & Faber (2013), Edition: Main, 592 pages

Description

Residents of Pepys Road in London receive odd, anonymous postcards demanding "We Want What You Have" during the financial meltdown of 2008.

Media reviews

Reuters

Lanchester is a real expert on banking and the global financial crisis: his book I.O.U. is a great one-stop guide to what went wrong. And having written that book, he had no need to try to explain the crisis all over again here. Instead, he has rolled out a much broader, novelistic canvas,

stretching across creeds and classes and countries, which is a true pleasure to read, and which does an amazing job of evoking and showing what London has become. Anybody who loves London, or hates it, will love this book, and will find just as much detail in the descriptions of football agents and corner shops as there is on the trading floor.

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Klappentext

Alle Bewohner der Pepys Road suchen nach ihrem Glück: Roger Yount ist ein erfolgreicher Banker - mit zwei Kindern und einer verwöhnten Ehefrau. Dass er nicht die erwartete 1 Million Pfund Jahresprämie erhält, stürzt die Familie in eine Krise. Nebenan zieht die senegalesische Fußballhoffnung

Freddy Kamo mit seinem Vater ein - wird ihm der internationale Durchbruch in einem Premier-League-Club gelingen? Petunia Howe lebte schon in der Pepys Road, als diese noch eine einfache Arbeiterstraße war. Pakistanische Kioskbesitzer stehen unter Terrorverdacht, die nigerianische Politesse ohne Arbeitserlaubnis schreibt Strafzettel und der polnische Handwerker Zbigniew liebt die Frauen, und die Frauen lieben ihn. An einem ganz normalen Tag liegt bei allen stolzen Eigenheimbesitzern dieser Straße eine merkwürdige Nachricht im Briefkasten: »Wir wollen, was ihr habt.« Ein Roman voller Mitgefühl, Humor und Protagonisten, die man nicht mehr missen möchte.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member arubabookwoman

This is a slice-of-life novel, the slice being cut from Pepys Road in London and the families who live on or are connected with the 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. If you wanted to

move there, you had to be rich. It was the first time in history this had ever been true Britain had become a country of winners and losers and all the people in the street, just by living there, had won."

This is not entirely true, of course. Petunia, an elderly pensioner who has just been diagnosed with cancer, just scrapes by. She lives in a house purchased by her grandfather at a time when the houses had just been built, and were affordable--they had been built for the laboring class. Petunia is a winner only in that her daughter will inherit her extremely valuable house after Petunia dies. And there is a Pakistani family who live above the shop they own at the end of the road. We also become involved in the lives of a hedge fund trader/banker and his shopaholic wife, dreaming of how many millions of pounds he will be receiving as a bonus, not realizing that the world is on the cusp of the financial crash; a young soccer star from Senegal who despite advances in the millions suffers a career-threatening injury. Others are the graffiti artist grandson of one of the residents, the illegal immigrant working as a meter maid, the Polish carpenter who does many of the ongoing renovations undertaken by the wealthy residents, the nannys for the spoiled children. These are just the main characters--there are many minor characters whose tales are no less interesting--the assistant to the banker who feels that he is 100% responsible for the banker's success, the artist's assistant who also resents the artist's success. While it might be thought that such a myriad of characters and stories would be difficult to keep track of, that is not the case. Lancaster is such a good writer that the characters are all three-dimensional and memorable. I found myself wondering how Lancaster could know so much about such a wide variety of people.

The plot, loose as it is, is driven by a series of notes delivered to each resident of Pepys Road. The notes state, "We want what you have." At first the notes are ignored, or passed off as a marketing campaign by an overzealous real estate company. The notes keep coming, however, and the police become involved. This plot is all played out against a backdrop of the financial crisis, the London art world, the treatment of suspected terrorists, professional sports (soccer), illegal immigration--indeed the theme of the global and financial nature of the city itself. I highly recommend this novel.

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LibraryThing member NancyKay_Shapiro

Wanted to love this so much, and enjoyed it, and it kept my good-will throughout, BUT. There were too many characters, many of them not finely drawn enough; it was satirical but maybe not satirical enough; and by the end it was hard to either grieve or cheer for outcomes that felt curiously flat --

some characters seemed to get away too cleanly, and the suffering of others was somehow blunted by the essential cheeriness of the writing.

The book also disappointed in that it set up an expectation, in starting out with the premise that the real-estate boom in London created wealth for people who simply already lived in a gentrifying neighborhood, that somehow at the end we'd see this through to the crash at the other end. Yet the novel doesn't end with the inflated prices falling flat and the real estate market freezing; the banker who doesn't get his huge bonus and then loses his job still somehow is allowed to then sell his house at the hugely inflated price -- in fact no one in the book suffers the fate of being left upside-down, property-wise.

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LibraryThing member AlanSkinner

I enjoy titles which have layers of meaning. I enjoy the cleverness and I appreciate the sign-posting they provide so I can make sure that I don't miss a thread woven into the story. As layered titles go, John Lanchester's Capital isn't particularly difficult to penetrate: there is Capital as

Money, and there is Capital as London and the fact that, to Lanchester, the first defines the second adds an admirable tidiness to the layers. All in all, it's a good title. The only problem is that it's been given to the wrong book, for Lanchester's novel betrays both readings.

Capital is an infuriating book, superficial, glib and shallow. It mirrors prevailing opinions and prejudices, but not prevailing spirit. It is filled with stereotypes but few characters and no people. It doesn't even scratch the surface of what makes London the city it is; it records a pulse but no heartbeat.

The depiction of Finance, from Roger Yount's dashed bonus hopes to the collapse of Pinker Lloyd, is at best simplistic, at worst childish and unrealistic. The connection back to London is through a single front door - No 51 Pepys Road - behind which lives a family carefully constructed to conform with our most obvious preconceptions.

Yet, Lanchester's prologue astutely observes that there is a wider connection, a shift in the community's perceptions and values tied to the infectious heart of greed and aspiration. Sadly, the Prologue remains the best part of the book.

The microcosm device - a single street in London, Pepys Road - falls far short of its intent. Lanchester attempts to overcome the weaknesses of such an unrepresentative device by including a selection of peripheral characters who have a recurring relationship with the street: the builder, the traffic warden, the nanny and an assortment of relatives. But the links are too tenuous, too fragile. Often the link is made simply through an event rather than through the complex social connections that knit a city together. We are given the strands of wool but never the pattern.

The drama of community lies not in its connections, but in its dependencies and the conflict between what is valued and what is believed to be valuable.

It would take far more time than I wish to spend to write in detail of all the things that frustrated and irritated me about this book: from the weak plot resolution; its disjointed, episodic structure that reads like a series of newspaper observations; the deliberate pandering to topical public opinion in place of deeper analysis; the technical flaws and the improbable and implausible plot developments.

Capital is a book that touches on many issues but fails to go to the added trouble of exploring any of them. It doesn't do London justice nor does it do justice to the profound impact that the banshees of Finance and Fear have had on us all.

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LibraryThing member roblong

A year in the life of the residents of a London street, once ordinary but now a millionaire's row due to the property boom. I'll damn this with faint praise by saying it was very competent. It's extremely readable, and there are no real bum notes, but as a self-conscious 'state of the nation' novel

it doesn't really go anywhere unexpected or divert from a predictable set of characters. A Polish builder, a City banker, a failed asylum seeker working illegally as a traffic warden, a talented African kid who has signed for Chelsea, a Muslim with connections to jihadis...all are dealt with plausibly but without really forging an emotional connection or saying something new. By the end I found myself wondering why the book had been written - I can't imagine what made Lanchester sit down and write it, beyond the fact that there'd been a crisis and so a grand, Dickensian state of the nation novel might seem like a good idea. It's not bad, he's far too good a writer for that, but there's no sign of the charge running through it all that a great book would need.

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LibraryThing member Cassandra2020

Capital by John Lanchester - very good

This was everything that One Week in December (Sebastian Faulks) wasn't. A similar premise: we're following the lives of a selection of Londoners from December 2007 through to August 2008. In this case we're following the residents of an affluent suburban

street: Pepys Road. We're introduced to them and watch their lives as the economic meltdown commences. During this time, they're also all in receipt of anonymous postcards with the message "We want what you have".

All the characters are well written and mostly empathetic. I certainly wanted to know what happened to them and even after the finishing the book, I wondered about various outcomes and what would have happened next. Ok, some of them are stock characters: the Pakistani family that run the corner shop, the wealthy banker and his horrible wife, pretty nanny & small children, the Polish builder, the little old lady etc etc. But I wanted to know if Zbigniew would manage to salvage his nest egg & go home to Poland, if Quentina would get a visa, if the horrible Arabella would get her cum-uppance.

Secondary was the mystery of the postcards and who & why they were being sent. I kind of guessed, but not until close to the end of the book was I partially proved right.

One thing: I was surprised there wasn't more about the financial side of things. When I heard John Lanchester speak at the EdBookFest last year, I got the impression there was more to the book. He mentioned having done so much research that he'd had to write a second, factual, book (Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay) about what happened and why, so I expected there to be more included in this book. Having said that, after Sebastian Faulks 'Janet & John do hedge fund management' (thanks again to Pauline for that one!) it's probably for the best.

Well worth reading.

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LibraryThing member lizchris

This is a sprawling, Dickensian tale of London in the financial crisis. The opening is intriguing, as a street in London is targeted by someone who puts leaflets through doors saying "we want what you have".
But while is activity, there is consumption, on the street, there is no communty, no real

cohesion.
I enjoyed the novel, but my one criticism is that it is perhaps too sprawling and ambitious. Characters pop up with a storyline, then disappear again. There is a randomness here that perhaps reflects London itself.
The banker Roger, and wife Arabella are perhaps too obvious targets, though there is a nice lightness in writing Roger with many comic touches.
My favourite character is the traffic warden, an asylum seeker from Africa. When confronted by people complaining about parking she thinks to herself 'Be grateful, you live in a country where the state won't come and beat or imprison you..where the government does not lie about AIDS, where the music is not bad and the only bad thing is the climate and you find it in yourself to complain about parking. Praise god for the fact that you can even notice this minor irritation. Praise God for the fact that you can resent getting this ticket, instead of rending your clothes with grief because you lost another child to dysentery or malaria....'

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LibraryThing member isabelx

Summer was around the corner! Not real summer of course, but its British imitation. Then the sun would go in, the wind would rise, and all would be dark and grim, wintry, another British imitation, not snow and ice and wolves and drama but just dark grey cold.

The story follows the lives of a group

of people linked to a residential street in London called Pepys Road, and takes place over the course of nearly a year, starting a few days before Christmas with city trader Roger's anticipation of his annual bonus and ending as he says goodbye to the street the following November, after selling his family's house. Apart from Roger and his wife, the point of view characters include their Hungarian nanny, a Polish builder who is often employed by the residents of Pepys Road, a Zimbabwean traffic warden, an old lady whose grandfather bought a house on Pepys Road off-plan and who has lived on the road all her life, her daughter and artist grandson, the artist's assistant, several members of the family who run the shop at the corner of the road, Roger's second in command at work, a Zimbabwean traffic warden, a football club fixer, a seventeen-year-old footballer newly arrived from Senegal and his father, and the Detective Inspector who is investigating the a hate campaign against the residents of Pepys Road, which begins when they receive postcards featuring pictures of their houses and the possibly sinister message "We Want What You Have".

My favourite parts of the story are about Roger and Arabella, Quentina (the traffic warden), Smitty (the artist) and Detective Inspector Mills, but I was less keen on the parts about football. I liked the way it was just a slice of life, and although the mystery of "We Want What You Have" was solved by the end, not all the strands of the story were so neatly resolved, so I felt that the characters' stories would continue past the end of the story, just as they would in real life.

I liked this book more than I expected, given that it was one of the reads for for my book club that I had decided I would only read if I could borrow it from the library. I ended up downloading it as an audiobook and found it easy to follow, as the narrator was good at voices and accents and didn't speak too quickly.

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LibraryThing member Reesa111

I won an ARC copy of Capital by John Lanchester. Each chapter is different and plays off of the characters which was interesting- but you have to be in the mood to keep reading. I found that once I really got into that characters part in the story~ it would switch on me (sometimes caused me to put

the book down as a result- not in a bad way) This is a very large book- which I like. Overall I gave this book 5 stars. Capital by John Lanchester was loads of fun and included a few laugh out loud moments- (the end of chapter 27 with the letter to the husband that was awesome) I would recommend this book to all adults.....

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LibraryThing member lynndp

I love a good story and this book is chock-full of great stories. So I liked this book a lot. It is set in the London of 2008 when the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers is bringing an end to the easy money of the middle-level bankers, but hasn't yet caused the widespread unemployment and

foreclosures for the sensible members of the lower to middle class who are not living on credit. The main characters are residents of Pepys Road and other family members, including a rich banker, his shopaholic wife and their Hungarian nanny; an old woman dying from a brain cancer, her daughter and graffiti-artist grandson, and a Polish builder; a Pakistani family who own and live above a shop and the mother who is visiting from Lahore; and a 17-year old soccer "phenom", his father, and his honorable (I know, shocking!) agent. The story of each group of characters is tied to another group emphasizing the inter-relatedness of life. This is not a "feel-good" book, the stories are not "heart-warming" ; but many are tender and touching. The "good" are not rewarded with material gains but they and those who are open to change find happiness or perhaps better, peace of mind. I recommend this book and suggest that you take your time reading it. I may re-read it someday, reading each set of characters story in a linear fashion, the better to appreciate them.

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LibraryThing member neddludd

Such an enjoyable read. Lanchester provides a witty, moving, and sprawling portrait of who we are today by sketching out, and then providing details for, all the inhabitants of one block in central London. The characters range from a rich banker and his materialist, airhead wife, to the Pakistani

family who runs the news stand. There are triumphs and disasters, and some people rise while others fall; however, the author is generous enough to provide everyone a shot. Their free will and actions determines their fate. The book reinforces how wealthy some parts of London are, how overpaid the financial sector can be, and how tough it is to be Islamic in a Western setting. Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member Eyejaybee

I read this novel as soon as it was published earlier this year, and when I reviewed it then I forecast that I would re-read it fairly soon, though I didn't expect to do so quite so soon - in fact, I can't remember ever re-reading a book so quickly. However, this fine book stood up to such close

scrutiny without let or hindrance, and I am reinforced in my earlier judgement of it as one of my favourite novels.

The novel starts in late 2007 and revolves around Pepys Street, a small road in south London where house prices, from a modest start over hundred years ago when they were first built, have rocketed to well over a million pounds. The residents are a mixed bunch and include Roger Yount, a merchant banker with Pinker Lloyd, one of the more successful trading houses in the City, his spendthrift wife Arabella, Freddy Kamo, a highly talented seventeen year old footballer who has just been brought over from his native Senegal to play for one of the London Premiership teams at £20,000 per week and Petunia Howe, an elderly widow who was born in the street nearly eighty years ago and has lived there ever since.

As the novel opens, Roger Yount is desperate to find out how large his bonus for that year will be - he is hoping for at least one million pounds and, in fact, can't imagine how he will manage to make ends meet with anything less. On his way to the office he finds a card has been pushed through his letter box bearing a picture of his own front door with the logo "We want what you have". It turns out that all of his neighbours have received similar cards, each of them bearing a picture of their respective houses. At first they all assume that this is a marketing gimmick by a local estate agency, but the cards keep coming, followed by DVDs showing footage of the street taken at different times of the day, but never with anyone in shot. And then things start to get nasty ...

In the meantime Zbigniew, a Polish builder, has been making a decent living from the street. His building work is excellent, and always completed on time to a high standard, and as soon as one job finishes he finds another one waiting for him.

In fact, everyone seems to be getting on with life very happily until Petunia collapses in the local newsagent's shop, and then everything seems to start to unravel.

There are some fantastic set pieces - the scene where Roger goes to hear about his bonus, and Freddy's first appearance in a Premiership match stand out particularly, though there are dozens of other beautifully crafted vignettes. Similarly the characters, including some of the less central figures, are beautifully drawn, including a shadowy anonymous street artist, clearly modelled on Banksy, and Quentina, a Zimbabwean asylum seeker who is illegally employed as a traffic warden.

There was a lott of hype surrounding this novel, but to my mind it has fully lived up to expectations. I am sure I will be re-reading this book again in the not-too-distant future.

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LibraryThing member AnnB2013

Great novel about our times, but too long. Makes me want to read more Lanchester.

LibraryThing member otterley

After telling us all about the crash, John Lanchester returns to fiction and tells us - elliptically - all about the crash, through the medium of an upwardly mobile London street. Charting territory previously explored by Sebastian Faulks (but better), he uses the device of the street to bring us

all of the characters of the city from illegal immigrants to Eastern European workers, spoilt wives to elderly troupers, corner shop Asians to art world zeitgeist surfers - all linked and finding their way through our improbable world. It's fun, and interesting, if a bit far fetched, and speaks very much of our time and our place

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LibraryThing member jtck121166

I thoroughly enjoyed this proper novel - at first - and I thought - at first - that many of my fellow reviewers here were being a little churlish.

But there is a sense that it adds up to less than the some of its parts. In a large cast, some characters are more engaging than others (inevitably, I

suppose, but must it really be inevitable?), and I did have to fight quite hard to stop myself skipping over the chapters concerning my least favourites.

I kept waiting to find out how things would go as and when the various lives began to intertwine ... but apart from a couple of near misses, they remained isolated from each other, even as they inhabited houses on the same street. Realistic in this at least.

The 'mystery' was feeble and inconsequential, as, in fact, to a greater or lesser extent, were the stories of all the inhabitants of Pepys Road.

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LibraryThing member sometimeunderwater

Novels should complicate our sometimes-simplistic understanding of people and situations, not pander to them.

There are a lot of stereotypes in this book, but few actual people. The plot is banal, offering little in the way of insight or depth, and the writing reads at times like an A Level

creative writing essay.

Tired cliches drift in and out: an investment banker with a money-obsessed wife, a hard-working polish builder who wants a girlfriend, a middle-eastern shop owner arrested for terrorism, an anonymous graffiti artist who sells his work for millions: all lazy reflections of a city and time that John Lanchester has failed to actually grapple with.

The only chapter worth reading is the prologue. You'll learn more about London and late-capitalism from reading a copy of Metro.

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LibraryThing member Mercury57

London in 2008: a city of conspicuous consumption and financial whizz-kids with million pound bonuses in their sights. A city with an underbelly of political refugees and embryonic terrorists. A city that relies on a stream of incomers from Eastern Europe to satisfy its needs for nannies, plumbers

and builders.

John Lanchester's Capital is a state of the nation novel in which the lives of a group of disparate individuals intersect through their association with one fictitious street in a highly desirable part of the city

Pepys Road has undergone a transformation since the late 19th century when the houses were built for lower middle class families; respectable, aspirational people who worked as clerks for solicitors and bankers. Now they're occupied by people like Roger Young, an investment banker, and his self-centered shopaholic wife for whom ".... 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. If you wanted to move there, you had to be rich."

From the beginning of the novel it's clear that TROUBLE lurks in this residential Eden. A mysterious hooded figure is seen surreptitiously filming the houses. Soon the inhabitants each receive an anonymous postcard bearing the simple message: “We Want What You Have”. More postcards follow, then videos begin dropping through the letterbox. All bear the same mysterious message.

Who is behind the campaign? Lanchester provides a host of candidates from Pakistani newsagents and Polish builders to au pairs from Eastern Europe and a political refugee from Zimbabwe who tramps the neighbourhood issuing parking tickets using a forged work permit. They're all outsiders who are trying to establish a foothold for themselves and make a new life in England.

If they're not having an easy time of it neither are the insiders. Roger's hopes of bagging a million-pound bonus enabling him to sustain two homes, expensive cars and endless home improvements look increasingly precarious. Olive, an octogenerian who's lived in the street all her live, discovers she has an inoperable brain tumour. And the Kamal family who run the newsagents on the corner have to contend with two unwelcome visitors. The friend from the past who flirts with Islamic fundamentalism is bad enough. But far worse is the annual visit by 'Mother' for whom nothing her sons and daughter-in-law can do, can ever be good enough.

We get to know them through more than 100 short chapters each of which takes us into the mind of a different character and shows us a different side of the city. It's a narrative style that pushes the concept of the omniscient narrator to its extremes.

One moment we're walking the streets with Quentina the traffic warden, contending with irate householders who can't understand why, having paid a multi million pound price tag to buy the house, they have to pay even more for the right to park outside at any time they choose. The next we're exploring the neighbourhood with the father of a young footballing whizz kid from Senegal and experiencing his bafflement at seeing a city filled with people in constant motion. "Even when they weren't doing anything they were walking dogs, or going to betting shops, or reading newspapers at bus stops or listening to music through headphones or skateboarding along the pavement or eating fast food...." And then suddenly the focus changes to the perspective of a young religious zealot surrounded by "...women whose breasts were almost fully visible under , over, or through their thin summer clothes. Alcohol everywhere."

As a commentary on the turbulent nature of London on the eve of the financial crisis, it works far more effectively than Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December which tried to cover much of the same ground but ran out of steam long before the final pages. An enjoyable read in many respects with some well drawn characters ( my favourites were Quentina the traffic warden and Roger the investment banker) but I'm not exactly sure what point Lanchester is trying to make.

In the prologue, the narrator reflects that "Britain had become a country of winners and losers." It's easy to see who the losers are in the novel; there is more than one character whose status and wealth have diminished by the end of the novel, or whose dreams have collapsed. The winners are less clear to see - one of the characters finds love by showing that he's an honest man and another resolves to seize the chance given to him to change his life for the better. As for the others, without giving away secrets, all I can say is that one of them faces jail and another deportation.

If Lanchester's mission is to merely to observe and convey a microcosm of life in one small corner of London, then he succeeded. But I wish he'd gone further and given some indication of what he saw as some of the underlying forces at work in this society and whether the factors that influence his characters's behaviours are ones that present increasing concern. In short, I wish he'd come down from his perch on the fence. His book would have been all the stronger.

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LibraryThing member GingerCrinkle

Ended up being a bit disappointed. A good start but everything then fizzled out. There are some amusing passages, particularly about the financial services industry (in which I work). As a state of the nation novel, I thought it a little bleak but also a bit ambiguous.

LibraryThing member SandyMarshall

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and all the characters!

LibraryThing member Steve38

A sturdily constructed tale of a random group of Londoners about to experience the great financial crash. United only by the fact they all live on the same street. A banker, a footballer, a Polish builder, an Asian shop keeper, a pensioner. United in geography and environment but a group of

individuals. The construct allows the author to show how the political and economic events of the time work their way down to the lives of people on the street.

Well told, a page turner if a few too many pages if truth be told. But in the end it's a shrug of the shoulders and a so-what? We don't have any particular feelings about any of the peole we've met. Too little characterisation and too overt a structure. Too many words and too little to say.

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LibraryThing member eglinton

Very readable, and very current for us Londoners, the range of characters and plots reflecting the big and hectic Habsburg-style melting pot we live in now. The book’s size and scope and I suppose it's very defined London setting invite comparisons with Dickens; yet the episodic style - little

snippets of this and that - sometimes leave one adrift, unsure what the connection or flow is. But it’s all interesting enough, sustained by the suspense of each short vignette chapter halting at its own less or more dramatic cadence, by one mysterious thread binding the different stories together, and by the good realistic London light speech , and interior monologue that Lanchester uses. The style and level of insight can be a bit shallow at times – as in ready-rolled phrases like 'her face lit up like someone acting out the phrase 'her face lit up'. But the sum of the parts is substantial, and I happily recommend the book.

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LibraryThing member CliveDorset

Enjoyed it, but felt it 'sagged' a bit in the middle, could have been a bit shorter and covered same ground

LibraryThing member HeroicLeisure

Surprisingly insubstantial. Fairly stereotypical cast of characters. No great insight or action. Disappointing after all the hype.

LibraryThing member sianpr

A multi stranded story of the residents of Pepys Rd in SE London. Lanchester does a good job of bringing the strands together & getting under the skin of a number of disparate characters.

LibraryThing member freelancer_frank

This is a book about civic empathy. Using an empirical style and moving from character to character, Lanchester illustrates the similarities and differences between them, and the difficulty of subjective knowing. The work is something of a game of two halves. The first half sets everything up and

the second (more gripping) half resolves it. There's a tad too much telling and not enough showing but there is also a subtle undercurrent that repays close attention.

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LibraryThing member reader1009

adult fiction; economic collapse as viewed from the perspectives of varied London citizens living in a well-to-do suburb. Somewhat interesting but I have too much else to read at the moment; may return to it later but not likely.

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