IS Jonathan Coe the most prescient novelist working on these islands today? In his new novel, a grandson introduces his girlfriend to his grandmother. The young woman is black and the grandmother makes a racist comment.
We’re told: “His grandmother was almost eighty, after all, and had grown up in a different time, and he knew anything she said – daft or not – would always be well-intentioned.”
The naive grandson is way too apologetic. Coe thus predicts the recent story about Lady Susan Hussey and her resignation after making what Buckingham Palace called “unacceptable and deeply regrettable comments” to the charity worker Ngozi Fulani. Coe gets the here and now.
This is a state-of-the-nation novel, the nation being England and the right old state it finds itself in today. Bournville is an elegy of sorts from a writer, clearly proud to be English, despairing at seeing his home mutate into a land fixated on nostalgia and deluded triumphalism.
The novel is a family saga centred around a matriarch, Mary, a teacher, and we follow her and her family through seven key events in recent history: VE day, the Queen’s coronation, the 1966 World Cup (groan!), the Prince of Wales’ investiture, his first wedding, the funeral of his late wife, and the 75th anniversary of the initial event in this chain.
The narrative is propulsive; almost soap opera like in its flow. There’s an interest in the surface of events and their meaning worthy of Siegfried Kracauer: some of the more sketchily drawn characters are ciphers meant to be read as symbols, stand-ins for the common man or woman and how they lived through these dramatic moments.
There’s something of John Updike’s Rabbit novels too in Coe’s method: let’s study ordinary people trapped in extraordinary times.
Coe’s tone in the tale is as bittersweet as the chocolate made in the town of the title. He’s regretful and at times scathing at what has become of the Midlands.
Mary can be seen as representative of present-day England, she’s full of compromise and doesn’t pick winners. She can be wildly reckless – witness her decision to drive against her doctor’s orders, indifferent to the real risk this threatens to others. It’s hard not to read her behaviour as an allegory for the deluded Brexit vote.
Her husband is an old Tory fogey, another dull racist. As with Pink Floyd’s song the couple seems to be “hanging on in quiet desperation”.
Coe suggests much of their (and England’s) problems track back to the Second World War and the constant celebration of old glories. His is a view as cant-free as the classic films of Powell and Pressburger; he’s no Colonel Blimp.
There’s a long section set in Wales that easily mirrors Scotland. One character says of the Welsh: “They don’t like us, you know.” Another complains that there’s anger around “everything…with the way you lot treat the Welsh…we’re sick of being pushed around”.
James Bond is another recurrent obsession in the novel. Coe hints he’s had enough of the character’s “combination of nationalism and facetiousness”.
Margaret Thatcher and Boris Johnson are persistent bugbears; Coe has little time for either but it’s his antipathy to the latter that really makes you cheer him on, his insistence that the disgraced former PM is a “textbook example of English entitlement”. He sticks it to Johnson and his “bad jokes and barely relevant Classical allusions”.
Johnson is the villain of the piece and Coe’s real anger at his bumbling has a personal relevance revealed in a postscript.
As ever, Coe is great on music. His previous novels highlight the Canterbury Scene from the 1970s and Robert Wyatt duly gets quoted in Bournville. A large chunk of the novel alludes to Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time begging the question: whose time is up? Britain’s? England is an old country and we might imagine Coe as its geriatrician, a listener patiently musing on what might help its suffering, what needs palliation.
The novel is something of a cri de coeur, a howl against xenophobia, a demand that change must come. Bournville ends with nods to both Lampedusa’s The Leopard (“everything changes, and everything stays the same”) and Nabokov’s Lolita, with its concluding soundtrack of children shouting in a playground suggesting there’s always hope for the future. This is a truly patriotic work.
