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Books and Arts; Book Review;New fiction;The City dark;
文藝；書評；新小說;城市的黑暗;
Capital. By John Lanchester.
《首府》；約翰·蘭徹斯特著；
Any neighbourhood in London might merit its own novel. But John Lanchester, author of the bestselling “Fragrant Harbour”, chose the fictional Pepys Road as the setting for “Capital”, his new state-of-the-nation story. Like many streets in London, Pepys Road was smartened up by the glory days before the financial crisis. And like others elsewhere, the tenants of this street lived on rather shaky ground.
任何倫敦附近的街區都可能成就自己的小說。但是，暢銷書《芬芳海港》的作者約翰·蘭徹斯特為《首府》一書選擇了虛構的佩皮斯路作為背景，講述他的新國情故事。就象倫敦的許多街道一樣，佩皮斯路在金融危機前有過輝煌的歲月。同時也象其它地方的其他人一樣，這條街上的房客住得有點兒搖搖欲墜。
The novel begins in December 2007 and ends a year later, after the unwieldy collapse of Lehman Brothers. This is a London of swagger and hubris, and the story is cluttered with more characters than Roger Yount, the banker protagonist, knows ways to spend money. Each character lives on Pepys Road or orbits it, and their stories are fraught with a sense of impending loss.
這本小說的故事開始于2007年12月，一年后結束在雷曼兄弟公司棘手的倒閉之后。這本書講的是倫敦的狂妄自大與傲慢，書中除了擅長花錢的主角羅杰·揚特外，還擠滿了其它眾多的人物。每個人物都住在佩皮斯路，或是圍繞著佩皮斯路而存在，他們的故事都充滿了即將失去的感覺。
At the outset residents receive eerie postcards that say “We want what you have.” Petunia Howe, the only tenant born on Pepys Road, wonders how anyone could envy her. Her struggle with a brain tumour is the book's most emotionally resonant subplot. There are countless others, including a City banker and his self-obsessed wife, a Polish construction worker, a Senegalese footballer and Pakistani shopkeepers. What binds these stories together is a growing awareness of how quickly fortunes can change and how easily perception diverges from reality.
一開始，居民都收到令人毛骨悚然的明信片，上面寫著“我們想要你擁有的東西”。唯一出生在佩皮斯路的房客皮丟尼雅·豪懷疑怎么會有人羨慕她。她與腦瘤的抗爭是本書最感人肺腑的陪襯情節。本書還有其他無數的人，包括市銀行家和他自戀的妻子、波蘭的建筑工人、塞內加爾的足球運動員以及巴基斯坦的店主。這些故事交織在一起，讓人越發清醒地意識到命運可以改變得有多么迅速，以及感知偏離現實又有多么輕易。
Mr Lanchester is not the first post-crisis novelist to consider Londoners and their money. There was Justin Cartwright's very funny “Other People's Money” and Sebastian Faulks's “A Week in December”. “Capital” manages to be both less entertaining and shallower than these books, while also running quite a bit longer. Flabby and repetitive writing explains some of this heft. There is also plenty of lazy imagery, which compares one character's breakdown to “an iceberg cracking or a huge sheet of glass shattering into fragments”.
蘭徹斯特并不是第一位思考倫敦人及其金錢的后危機小說家。這類書還有賈斯廷·卡特賴特的《別人的錢》，寫得非常有趣，以及塞巴斯蒂安·福克斯的《12月的一個星期》。《首府》試圖比這些書少些娛樂性和膚淺，同時也寫得篇幅長些。松散而重復的寫作手法讓本書的篇幅過長。書中還有很多懶惰的比喻，把一個人物的崩潰比做“冰山開裂或一大塊玻璃碎成片片”。
This might be forgiven if Mr Lanchester's characters could carry the weight of his book. But there are so many of them, and they are so lightly sketched that only ten pages before the end of the book he feels the need to remind readers about the identity of a central figure. In this way “Capital” is like the city he is trying to evoke: so crowded with people that they pass each other impersonally. No one needs to read so many pages to recreate that experience.
這可以得到原諒，只要蘭徹斯特的角色都可以在他的書中占有份量。但有許多人物只被輕輕勾上幾筆，以致在本書結束前十頁，他才覺得有必要提醒讀者主要人物的身份。因此《首府》一書就象他正試圖喚醒的城市一樣，擠滿了互不關己的人。沒有人需要讀這么多頁來得到這一經驗。
