Not for me. I'm a big believer a writer can do anything if they have 'it', the illusive charisma that makes their writing eminently, irresistibly readable. In this book, Lanchester writes perfectly well but the writing has no charm; Capital reads like the T&Cs of a combi boiler.

A commonly mulled-upon writing adage, show don't tell, is egregiously broken here as the book tells everything and shows nothing. It's almost 600 pages of telling you things about the various characters. Some of these characters were interesting but as each chapter is only around 3-4 pages, it's the worst of both worlds where the characters who are less interesting (for me, the shop owners) seem to pop up all the time, whereas the more interesting characters only get a few pages of development before we hop onto the next one.

I'm not sure who this book is for, perhaps Londonphiles may appreciate it but as a non-Londoner the above issue with the character development meant I had no insight to London in 2007/8/9 and the characters never felt truly fleshed out or 'real'. It just didn't feel particularly well-observed, even given the broad range of Londoners under the spotlight here. The whole thing felt like a classroom writing exercise in characterisation but there is more to making a good character than what a flash card of bullet points can express, and the characters in this book never became deeper than their flash card.

I didn't expect this to be a thriller per se, but for a book of this length, at the pace that it was, it needed the stakes of the mysterious postcards. That's what draws you in as a reader. But beyond the odd line here and there it has no relevance. It was almost laughable the way these postcards were thrown in every so often, as if a reminder to the reader and the author himself. It's like any potential thrill it could cause was purposefully squashed.

Likewise, Capital advertises that it is about the financial crash and yet this is only mentioned in passing, literally one or two lines at the very end of the book. The economic background of London throughout this story is utterly irrelevant beyond some small commentary on house prices - this is not the political read it makes out to be.

As it's not literary fiction either (as before, the prose reads like an email from HR half of the time), it must surely be comedy. Sure enough, the prose is light-hearted but for me there were very few funny moments or even really attempts at humour. A lot of the jokes stem from a male character remarking on how much they want to have sex and it just gives me the ick. If you're a middle-aged sexless man writing about sex you must make your reader forget that a middle-aged sexless man is writing it but I was always fully aware of that fact. ( My final ick came toward the end, the thoughts of a character ruminating on the lawyer who rescues them from prison -> 'she had the kind of upright, strict, buttoned-up and clipped British manner which made it impossible not to speculate about her sex life')

I don't want to critique comedy as it's all subjective, but really for a book about London you would expect some good British wit and I don't think that comes in the form of sex/toilet jokes which is mostly what category this book's jokes fall into. One line about the bank manager, Roger, did make me laugh - 'it can't be about Roger discriminating against female colleagues; he hardly had any'. If the book was shorter and focused more on humour like this it would've been bang on the money, but for a 600 page book, the reader needs to go away with a sense of why it was written. But here I am having read it and I still don't understand the point of it.

As an aside, 'kafir' (as in the derogatory Islamic term for non-believers) is often spelt 'kafr' in this book which was a little disorientating, not sure if this is a standard spelling but I didn't associate it with kafir until it had come up a few times.