Book Review: Jonathan Coe has a gift for placing fictional lives in real context

Author Jonathan Coe is a master of the ‘state of the nation’ novel. Picture: Getty Images

• Bournville
• Jonathan Coe
• Viking, €25

JONATHAN COE has an enviable gift for placing fictional lives into political context. He is a master of the ‘state of the nation’ novel. Englishness is a recurring theme in his fiction, most memorablely perhaps in his incisive 2018 novel, Middle England. While his writing is typically satirical, there is always an underlying seriousness, a certain gravitas. Bournville is anchored by its exceptional attention to detail. There’s a huge conviction here about the overwhelming affect of political events on personal lives. Coe treats his characters with wry affection. As in most of his books, there’s an unsentimental warmth that humanises even the most difficult characters. The impressive examination of Englishness is insightful and intuitive in the manner of writers such as Ian McEwan, David Lodge, and Tim Lott.

This is an artful, structurally inventive novel which cleverly plays with expectations. There’s so much guile here, a lot of subtlety. There’s also an elegiac, wistful quality, an affecting tenderness.

The novel can still be hard work though. It requires a lot of concentration and a fair amount of intuition. On casual assessment it might appear that Coe has a habit of abandoning some crucial issues and storylines without resolution. Early on, especially, it might seem easy to dismiss the writing as inconclusive, indeterminate. However, Coe eventually does provide answers to the many weighty questions he poses. His timing tends to be unexpected, his answers dramatic, even explosive. Secrets dormant for decades are suddenly, sometimes alarmingly, exposed. Characters meet after decades in vastly different contexts.

We realise that this is an author not averse to misdirection, a storyteller who is partial to springing surprises when it suits his purposes. When the time comes for revelation we see how patient, stealthy and even cunning he has been. Confronted by truth, we have to view the entire novel differently. The novel is far more challenging than it initially appeared. The dramatic revelations lead to astonishment but also some relief, some sense of justice. The characters do not all react the way we would accept or like, but we invariably have to concede that it all makes narrative sense, and has been expertly executed.

Coe views his world with a kind of bemused tolerance. The novel is never fuelled by rage, there is no looking back in anger. He does not blame, indict or even admonish. The past he so carefully depicts is not a ‘foreign country’ — it is massively relevant and influential. How people react to change is what seems to fascinate him most. Bournville is fundamentally about change.

It’s appropriate then that the novel itself changes so significantly as it progresses. For a long time it seems to trust in logic and coherence. It is patient and measured. However when Coe eventually plays some dramatic cards we move towards a more complex and satisfying kind of clarity. Earlier, there’s an element of elusiveness about the characters. Coe deliberately leaves silences, gaps, mysteries to ponder. When the truth finally comes into view, secrets are revealed in dramatic, powerful, convincing ways. There are a number of exhilarating and cinematic scenes that are vintage Coe. Characters who felt peripheral emerge as crucial to the narrative

What lingers for the reader is a strong sense of surprise, a rueful belated dawning of understanding. The author has given us some hints and clues. However, in a novel as dense, as thoughtful, as carefully constructed as this, nothing is obvious.