“Travis was an avid fan of TV property programmes and felt at ease with the culture of wandering around other people’s houses and passing judgement on them.”
But as a novel that partakes so closely of the conventions of long-form journalism, Capital seems unnecessary, even capricious — taking a story that still belongs in the realm of fact and fictionalizing it in a way that seems arbitrary, or even dodgy, like it’s a way to bend the rules to fit in more (and more lurid) storylines. Hence the immigration storyline, and the terrorism storyline (which one scents from the first introduction of the Muslim family), and the Banksy character — each of which inflate a novel which might have been about the credit crisis in a strong and limited way into a comprehensive state-of-England bubble that has difficulty sustaining its own weight. It’s the license of fiction that allows this, that permits and encourages this looseness.
June 18, 2012, 10:49am Comments
