The thing that has drawn this heterogenous group together in the capital is, of course, capital. Twenty-first century London, as Matya notices, is now, whatever different or more humane thing it may have been in the past, just money-money everywhere, distributed with blind caprice, withheld from the deserving, lavished on the worthless, moving around in what looks like obedience to general laws; laws which, of course, remain finally elusive, especially from those who claim to be its adepts (like the soon-to-be-sacked Roger Yount, and also his sackers, who are themselves also soon to be sacked when their firm collapses in the aftermath of the fall of Lehmans). London is the home of money, and so everything in London requires lots of it. As well as being home to the Younts and the Howes and the Kamals, London is the home, too, of the £5 sandwich and the £30 taxi ride. Most are drawn here to make money; others, such as Iqbal, are drawn because money and the things it builds are a legitimate target in the jihad. But for all of them, it's capital that imparts magnetism to the capital. So it is richly comic when cards bearing the menacing but also obvious message "We Want What You Have" begin dropping through the letter-boxes in Pepys Road, and no one seems to understand why. Londoners, our novelist is saying, allow me to introduce you to the real reason you are here. 

Capital, like Capital, focuses on the moment when money, originally a mere facilitator of economic activity, has cuckoo-like ejected its siblings from the nest, and become nothing less than the end of economic activity. Marx's Capital drew its indignant strength from an incipient nightmare — its author's apprehension that capitalism was nothing less than a gigantic process of dehumanisation which would transform human beings into instruments for the accumulation of capital. Lanchester's vision is softer-oases of human contentment are still possible, notwithstanding the malign influence of capital, as Matya and Zbigniew discover. But at once the question arises: is this consolation substantial, or merely a translation of the content of the novel form?