Class in John Lanchester’s Fiction

Over the past two decades, John Lanchester has become one of the foremost surveyors of class in British fiction.While his earlier novels, including Mr Phillips (2000) and Capital (2012), dealt with a diverse set of class relations and class conflicts mostly set in urban environments, his most recent work, The Wall (2019), shifts the focus from human interactions to human-non-human relations.This paper traces the development of Lanchester's class discourses from Mr Phillips to Capital and The Wall, with a particular emphasis on how class relates, first, to urban environments and, second, to the Anthropocene. 1 It opens with a discussion of the relationship between class and the Anthropocene in order to contextualise the subsequent analysis of Lanchester's fiction and to foreground how discussions of class are changing in the 21 st century when taking non-human actors into account. Class and the AnthropoceneThe Anthropocene describes a new epoch in the relationship between human and nonhuman environments.In this new epoch, "humans have become a proper geological (rather than merely social or biological) agent akin to meteorites and volcanoes" (Vermeulen 2020, 3-4).The term was coined by Eugene Stoermer in the 1980s and gained visibility through the work of Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in the 2000s.Crutzen and Stoermer date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the "latter part of the 18 th century" when "the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable" in geological and ecological terms (2000, 17).For Crutzen and Stoermer, the Anthropocene defines a time in which human actions have thoroughly shaped and changed the non-human environment.Whereas the Holocene, which precedes the Anthropocene, was "an approximately 12,000-year epoch with a relatively stable climate within which complex human societies developed," the Anthropocene "is a new geological epoch" (Otter 2018, 568; original emphasis).In this new epoch, humans are in an ambivalent position.On the one hand, they have become fully-fledged geological agents.On the other hand, they are forced to become increasingly aware of their dependence on the non-human world.Almost paradoxically, human agency appears to lose some of its centrality in the Anthropocene.In an age when human actions have changed the globe, human agency is increasingly limited to short-term decisions whereas long-term agency seems to reside ever more in non-human agents.Linda Nash delineates one of the central questions arising from this paradox, namely the nature of agency itself."Typically, the 1 The novel titles are abbreviated as Phillips, Capital, and Wall in further in-text references.