What You Can Learn from John Lanchester...

Well, loads of things, of course, he's a brilliant writer.  But having just read Capital, which is set in a single London street and anatomises the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on its inhabitants, what struck me most was the way in which he was able to accentuate the foibles and of fallibility is of his characters, while still making them seem sympathetic.  It can be a difficult trick to pull off, but it has the effect of giving greater depth and subtlety to characterisation.

I'm always intrigued by any tension in a narrative.  I don't mean narrative tension or suspense, but something at a more structural level:  the sense that the warp and weft of the story are pulling in slightly different directions.  It adds timbre and texture.

In John Lanchester's case, Capital's hot shot banker Roger is lazy, greedy, selfish, concupiscent and utterly lacking in self-awareness, in other words the perfect vehicle for all our prejudices about city high flyers. But at the same time, he is disarmingly human: he does enough, more or less, to get by; he tries to please his insatiably avaricious wife without much success; he lusts after the nanny but is unable to seduce her; whether or not he will get his coveted bonus is open to doubt.  There is something forlorn and disappointed about him; he has shortcomings we can recognise, in spite of ourselves we feel sympathetic.

Lanchester portrays most of the other inhabitants of Pepys Road with similar ambivalence and ambiguity. I think it is part of the alchemy that lifts them from the page and transforms them into credible, complex beings.  It's something to think about in your own work: people are never wholly admirable so, when you are writing, see if you can conjure up a character who is just about likeable, warts and all.