There comes a point where a cultural phenomenon reaches a point of ubiquity such that the London Review of Books, the Leftie literary magazine, feels it has no choice but to look down from on high and get one of its writers to pontificate thereon. Such, recently, has been the lot of novelist John Lanchester, enthusing at some length over George RR Martin's epic fantasy series Game of Thrones, available in a WH Smiths near you and serialised on Sky for a third series.
Lanchester has done a similar job, repeatedly, for LRB readers on the subject of the financial crisis, and his novel Capital aims to put the fruits of his research into literary form.
I have read the first two Game of Thrones books; someone bought the first for my 13 year old daughter for Christmas (although given the amount of "seed spilling", as Martin often - very often - puts it, I rather wonder whether this was wise). In the fictional worlds of Westeros and Esteros various houses - the Lannisters, Starks, Tyrells and so on - compete for influence under King Robert, and then (spoiler!) compete to replace him upon his demise. Westeros is bounded to the north by a 700 foot wall of ice, keeping out the various rag-tag of wildlings and Undead who range beyond it.
If you like a sweeping narrative, full of knights, bleak landscapes, abrupt violence, serving wenches and intrigue, G of T serves a purpose. It is competently written at least (far less turgid than Tolkein), though perhaps a little purple for my taste. Martin's imaginary world is, at least at first, extremely convincing on its own terms. Moreover its people behave in ways which struck me as rather life-like (certainly in comparison with Lanchester's Capital, which I'll come to in a minute). That's to say quite often the people you are supposed to be rooting for do unpleasant things, whereas the horrible people sometimes do things that are unexpectedly nice. The baddies survive when you hope they won't, whereas Martin is utterly ruthless in killing off really good people if he feels like it.
And there's another thing. Although Game of Thrones is fantasy, Martin succeeded in persuading me at least that I was reading about real people whose behaviour faithfully reflected their culture. There's an early scene in the first book where Lord Eddard Stark, played by Sean Bean in the TV series, beheads a man for desertion. He insists on doing it personally because, he says, if you give the order you should be prepared to do it yourself, be prepared to listen to the man's last words. It's not just that Martin is happy to see his readers like Eddard Stark less (he is actually one of the most attractive characters in the first book); the scene, viewed through the eyes of his watching children, is shocking, as is the discovery that all the onlookers think better of him for his willingness to as it were put his sword where his mouth is. These are people who are like us, but whose sense of ethics and culture are utterly different.
How unlike the feted Hilary Mantel, I found myself thinking, whose characters talk and think like we do and yet behave differently in ways in which her novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies don't see fit to explain.
Martin's books are very long. The second one was over 800 pages (approximately one for each foot of the ice wall). Half way through it I thought with regret that there were only another 400 to go. By the time I reached the end, however, I was pretty sure I wouldn't read any more. There are too many characters, and despite all the room Martin allows himself, only a few of them are developed to any degree. I found it hard to work out which knight was which, and harder to care.
Secondly, the supernatural element in the books, peripheral at first, becomes all pervasive. Sorcery is a bit like CGI in the cinema: when anything is possible, part of the magic dissipates. When Game of Thrones was brutally naturalistic, it packed a punch. But when a boy becomes a wolf in his dreams, or a sorceress gives birth at will to a murderous succubus, the things which Martin made so real at first come to seem less substantial and important. Although Martin is a much better prose writer than J K Rowling, one of the great achievements of the Potter books is that magic is integrated into the stories as a problematic, tricksy and unreliable element. We know magic can't make everything right, particularly when the chief bad guy is so much better at it than almost everyone else.
The nicest thing I can say about John Lanchester's Capital is that I didn't want it to end. Sometimes in a novel you get to like the characters, or some of them, so much that it's painful to tear yourself away from them. Capital has been much touted as a State of the Nation novel, and I enjoyed it very much, but it seemed to me, although readable, engaging and intriguing, to say rather more about Lanchester (and perhaps more broadly his political and intellectual class) than about Britain.
Pepys Road in South London is one of those streets where the process of embourgeousification has left elderly Londoners living alongside nouveau bankers and Premiership footballers from Africa. Lanchester constructs a varied cast of characters and a mystery to go with them in the months leading up to the collapse of Lehmann brothers in 2008.
The really striking thing about the book is that almost all the immigrants (or descendants of immigrants) - the owners of the Asian shop on the corner, the various Polish builders, the Hungarian nanny, the African footballer and his father, the asylum-seeking traffic warden, are lovable and sympathetically treated. In a large cast of characters (thankfully smaller and better drawn than Martin's) only one foreigner (the fraudulent paymaster of the traffic warden, appearing in just a few pages) is unpleasant. OK, Iqbal the Belgian may or may not be a terrorist, but all the others are really nice.
On the other hand, almost all of the white people are shits, obsessed by money and house-prices. Of the bankers, Roger and his wife, her friend Saskia, Mark the creepy deputy, Little Tony, Jez, Eric the barbarian are horrible. Mickey the football club's fixer admittedly gets a bit nicer as the book goes on; Smitty the conceptual artist does not; Parker his assistant gets worse. Mill, the policeman, is a dreary non-entity, and the human rights solicitor is a vain publicity-seeker.
Again, all the asylum seekers are genuine asylum seekers, the arranged marriage between Ahmed and the sexy Rohinka works fine, the foreign workers aren't taking jobs away from British-born people (of whatever skin colour), and the astronomical house-prices are all to do with City bonuses and nothing to do with excessive housing demand caused by immigration.
In view of the author's convenient name, it's tempting to call this La-La Land. Capital is a book in which the dice are so heavily loaded in one direction that it's as boring dramatically as it is likeable. The only man I know personally who might be described as a banker is also intelligent and thoughtful; so such people do exist. A novel where some of the so-called bad guys were quite nice would have been much more interesting, and freed its readers to think a little more carefully about the issues. A novel where all the bankers are horrible is just as tedious as one would be if, for example, all the asylum-seekers were fake or all benefit-claimants scroungers.
One of the reviews on Capital's cover describes the book as "humane", and perhaps it is, to the characters Lanchester wants you to like. But Lanchester makes the other characters so lacking in virtue of any kind that I can't help but wonder if he isn't being patronising to his readers as well as his asylum seekers and Polish builders.
George RR Martin, aspiring only to tell a gripping story, is far less guilty of such authorial favouritism. We know of course that writers decide who lives or dies, who prospers and who flounders, but Game of Thrones has some of the arbitrariness of life. Although Lanchester writes beautifully, Martin's novels in this respect are so much truer and so much more demanding on the reader's sympathies.
The key to this is of course that Lanchester's studies in banker-land have led him to the conclusion, so beloved of the Left, that It Was All The Bankers' fault. Actually his own novel gives a clue to the lie that this is.
Roger's firm goes under, we are told in an aside, because the wholesale money markets dried up. That's to say, it caught the same disease as Northern Rock, borrowing short to lend long. Why did that happen? Because bankers had sought more and more ingenious ways of spreading the risk of loans made to people who were probably not going to be able to repay them. In other words, to satisfy our society's demands for living off debt. When those loans started to go wrong, no-one knew who was bearing the risk; banks stopped lending to each other. Firms like Northern Rock and Roger's went under. Thus the Credit Crunch.
If Lanchester had really wanted to write a novel about the attitudes which caused our current mess, Debt might have been a better title. And better protagonists than the rich banker and his spendthrift wife (who end the book still financially afloat, having sold their £1.5 million house to retreat to the country) might have been people who borrowed too much and went under. Now that would be a metaphor for the state of the nation.
Actually, like so many of the narratives beloved of the deluded, Capital reads more like a prop for Lanchester's world view, with its convenient scapegoats and multikulti feel-goodery, than it does an analysis of the real world outside his study window. I read in Larry Elliott's column in the Guardian this morning that 85% of new jobs created in London between 1997 and 2010 went to people born outside the UK. This is not new news - versions of this figure have been around for years, although I have never seen the number put so high. The British people - quite a lot of them with brown or black skins, and the rest white working class - who didn't get these jobs don't figure in Lanchester's State of the Nation novel.
Like the rest of us, immigrants are good and bad in equal measure. Like bankers, for example. But the forces which allowed them to come to Britain, the forces which allowed bankers to lend their way to riches, and the consequences for British people generally are not explored in Capital. Lanchester thinks it's enough to show bankers as greedy morons and immigrants as figures of cutesy wholesomeness, as if somehow this was a good enough way of dealing with two of the principal phenomena of Gordon Brown's boom years.
Reading Capital and Game of Thrones side by side, John Lanchester looks more like the writer living in fantasy land.
