The ‘state-of-the-nation’ has always been a popular topic for novels – Middlemarch, Little Dorrit, Midnight’s Children – and it was about time someone had a crack at one again. Lanchester, novelist and economic journalist, has taken on the challenge in Capital.

The novel documents the life of a street, Pepys Road in Clapham. A potted history of the street’s history concludes: “For the first time in history, the people who lived on the street were … rich.” And so we are shown Roger Yount, an investment banker, Arabella, his wife, Freddy Kamo, a professional footballer, and 83 year-old Petunia Howe, the last Clapham aboriginal. Not that this is only about rich people: Zbiegniew, a Polish builder, Matya, a Hungarian nanny, and Quentina, a Zimbabwean traffic warden, also feature. Enough of lists. The gist, as someone who I can’t remember said, is that all walks of life are here. Lanchester does well to prevent chaos: each chapter is devoted to one of the multiple story lines and the changes between them are generally fluid and well managed.

It’s very nice that the book is not extreme in its inter-plot relations. So many books have all of the different characters bumping into each other constantly, none of them aware that the others also happen to occupy the same 500 pages as themselves. The difference is, I suppose between a narrative of the Cambridge bubble and a narrative of a country. Taking the middle way, Lanchester has got London street life down to a tee.

Capital is not, however, just a book about people. It is a book about politics and, as one might expect from the journalist who predicted the financial crisis, ‘capital’ is as much about the City of London as it is about the city, London. All the characters are tied to the same 2008 credit crunch. Which would be great. If it were better done. However, in dealing with his favourite topic, Lanchester falls down. His book Whoops! explains the reasons ‘Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay’ because that is its purpose. Unfortunately, Lanchester tries to turn this novel into a political manifesto too. There are moments (read: ‘pages and pages’) when characters slip into the role of left-leaning journalist, as the author shamelessly uses their private meditations to peddle his own opinions.

Characters with opinions are fine: characters should think about the society they live in. But the opinions don’t quite connect with the people who express them. Something jars. I think the trouble may be that not everyone can be as ‘wise’ as Lanchester seems to make them. Lanchester is trying to be clever, in fact, Lanchester is very clever, he is unafraid of saying that the poor resent the rich, and that the rich resent the poor, even that immigrants resent natives. A reader wanting to hear character can only hear Lanchester himself.

Lanchester had noble aims and clearly knows his stuff. He has got the panoramic novel sorted in a way very few people have managed. His structure is great, his idea is great. The trouble is that he won’t let his idea speak for itself. The city, the money, the people: they have stories to tell. Disappointly, Lanchester couldn’t leave them alone to do it. 

Faber and Faber, £17.99, hardback