Tackling Brexit, Boris and his mother’s death during the pandemic, Jonathan Coe’s new state-of-the-nation novel puts Britain on the couch
Back in 2017, comic novelist and chronicler of Englishness Jonathan Coe met Liz Truss at a dinner at the French embassy. The event was also attended by Coe’s good friend Kazuo Ishiguro, who had recently been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. “Books didn’t seem to be her thing,” he says of the encounter. “We didn’t hit it off, put it like that.” Though we are speaking before she announced she was standing down as prime minister, Coe tells me he feels more uneasy now about the state of the UK than he did after the Brexit referendum. “I think power has been handed over to a very extreme cabal of people who, on the basis of their first few weeks, seem to combine a kind of ideological extremism with incompetence. That’s a pretty worrying combination.”
From What a Carve Up!, the novel that made Coe’s name in 1994, to his prize-winning novel Middle England in 2018, the Tories have often been the target of the author’s particular brand of political satire and national scrutiny. His new novel, Bournville, which takes its title from the village built by Cadbury outside Birmingham where many of the author’s family lived and worked, is no exception – except this time it is personal.
