Charles Dickens prefigured the modern urbanite’s obsession with the living conditions of his neighbour and the busybody enthusiasm to look through the keyhole. He was also adept at the street scene, of guiding readers down alleys and up staircases into his characters’ lives.
Fast forward to today and there are many new urban novels, mostly set in London, where bricks and mortar are brought to an unsettling kind of life and where property envy is rife. After all, houses have become so valuable in the capital, so important to the livelihood and self-worth of their owners, so why not make homes in fiction “central actors in their own right”, as they are in John Lanchester’s Capital?
This urban epic, along with Zadie Smith’s NW, is one of the most celebrated London novels in recent years. Both are full of astutely observed characters on different rungs of the social ladder of contemporary London, whose lives collide in a series of tense incidents. Yet, for me at least, the most memorable characters in either book aren’t people but the flats, houses and streets where the protagonists grow up.