John Lanchester and Daniel Soar: The Wall

John Lanchester’s new novel, The Wall, is a Kafkaesque nightmare whose richly-imagined world is very different from our own and yet all too familiar. Like 2012’s Capital (recently made into a TV series starring Toby Jones), Lanchester speaks to our contemporary preoccupations with an unnerving exactness. Keith Miller, reviewing Capital, noted that, ‘like Balzac, Lanchester has the brains to relate the particular to the general; the ruthlessness to make bad things happen to good people; the steadiness of hand to draw unpalatable conclusions’. Lanchester was in conversation with Daniel Soar, editor at the LRB.