My favourite joke in Jonathan Coe’s new novel is hardly a side-splitter, more what someone of my acquaintance would label “Radio 4 funny, not funny-funny”. In fact, it might not even be intended as a joke at all, though longtime fans of the author of What a Carve Up! will have their suspicions. A memoirist called Brian is recalling a mesmerisingly beautiful young woman he encountered as a student at Cambridge. “‘I heard her described variously as ‘elfin’, as ‘eldritch’,” he tells us, adding that “eldritch” is the word used by a minor character in the book, Tommy Cope, who is “always reaching for the slightly more recondite adjective”. The subtle joke being that “recondite” is itself pretty, well, recondite.
Cope himself features rarely, though his comic purpose as a Coe stand-in is clear. “He came from the Midlands and he was studying English literature and he was another grammar-school boy,” explains Brian of Cope/Coe (in a novel containing numerous word games, the author has literally taken the “p”); and he is also strikingly quiet and nondescript. Brian continues: “However, it turned out that he had also been writing short stories and even novels, which he began to publish in the years after we’d graduated. Much to the surprise of us all, some of them turned out to be mildly satirical in nature, and furthermore to suggest an interest in politics, something of which he’d never given any of us the least inkling when he was a student. I don’t really follow these things, but I was told that one of them – a sophomore effort under the title Quite the Mash-Up – achieved what in literary circles is known as a ‘modest success’. Who knew.”
All of which might sound tediously self-referential, except that The Proof of My Innocence – proof as in both demonstration and correctable copy, and innocence as in both lack of guilt and naivety – is a more serious examination of literature’s power and limitations than the mixture of whodunit and political chronicle in which it is wrapped at first suggests. That outer wrapper is itself diverting and instructive. Revolving around the murder of an investigative journalist at TrueCon, a rightwing conference held in a crumbling stately home in the early days of Liz Truss’s premiership, it features an exploration of how and why things fell apart, a deft tracing of the history of American conservatism and its arrival in the UK, and a white-haired, hard-drinking detective called Pru Freeborne (or, of course, Proof Reborn).
The murder victim, an editor with a dull day job at a respectable history magazine and a larger commitment to his truth-telling political blog, was on the cusp of uncovering evidence of the plot to sell off the NHS. Ranged against him are a cohort of éminences grises, demagogues, a particularly chilling handmaiden and – somewhat unexpectedly – a literary academic specialising in the work of a long-dead cult novelist.
The narrative comes at us in various guises including memoir, autofiction, present- and past-tense personal accounts and, most amusingly, the first draft of the kind of cosy mystery destined to sell millions in spite of the deficiencies of its prose, and certainly more than any novel by Thomas Cope. Murder at Wetherby Pond contains such gems as “the ducks on the eponymous body of water took flight with a volley of complaining quacks”, but successfully conjures an atmosphere of community cohesion and the prospect of wrongs being righted.
As ever, Coe’s study of the way we live now is underpinned by his interest in nostalgia, its personal allure – the lullaby half-remembered, the Morecambe and Wise sketch – and its larger dangers. In the aftermath of the pivot from collective responsibility to individual aspiration licensed and extended if not created by Thatcherism, we are nostalgic for “that brief postwar moment”, a time “when our bowler hats may have got run over by steamrollers and our song-and-dance routines may have gone comically wrong but at least we could depend on each other, at least we had each other’s backs”.
Where the novel sits in times like these is one of Coe’s questions, and if asking it involves deploying secret passages, treacherous hairpin bends, burned manuscripts and, naturally, a villain hiding in plain sight, then so be it. As he might observe, you have to move with the times.
• The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
