Jonathan Coe: Contemporary British Satire 9781350027671, 9781350027701, 9781350027688

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Jonathan Coe

Also Published by Bloomsbury: The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley, Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson British Fiction Today, edited by Rod Mengham and Philip Tew British Working-Class Fiction, Roberto del Valle Alcalá Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London, Niall Martin London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City, edited by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, Patrick O’Donnell

Jonathan Coe Contemporary British Satire Edited by Philip Tew

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Philip Tew and Contributors, 2018 Philip Tew has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover images © Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-2767-1   ePDF: 978-1-3500-2768-8  eBook: 978-1-3500-2769-5 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Jonathan Coe: for a friend and fellow aficionado of the work of B.S Johnson, in fond recollection of many days spent together in the Manuscript Reading Room with Dr Julia Jordan in the British Library preparing Well Done God!

In memoriam: Dr Stephen Patrick James Knapper 6 May 1964–4 July 2012

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Contents Notes on Contributors viii Preface Philip Tewxi A Critical Introduction: or, (Re-)contextualizing Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!  Philip Tew1   1 Jonathan Coe: The Early Novels  Merritt Moseley21   2 Jonathan Coe’s Stories of Sadness  Joseph Brooker35   3 Sexing Britannia: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! or the Re/de-Sexualization of Thatcherite Britain  Raluca Iliou  51   4 A Comedy of Horrors: Thatcherism in What a Carve Up!  Emma Parker67  5 ‘These are my books’: What a Carve Up! and Video Aesthetics  James Riley  81   6 What Became of the People We Used to Be?: The House of Sleep (1997) and the 1970s Sitcom, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–5)  Nick Hubble  95   7 From Prog to Punk: Cultural Politics and the Form of the Novel in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club  Nick Bentley109   8 Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle and a Satiric Mirror  Sebastian Jenner125   9 A Terrible Precariousness: Financialization of Society and the Precariat in Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim  Francesco Di Bernardo  141 10 Jonathan Coe’s Rewriting of Popular Genres in Expo 58  José Ramón Prado Pérez155 11 Gothic Horror and Haunting Processes in Jonathan Coe’s Number 11  Vanessa Guignery  169 12 Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity in Jonathan Coe’s Satire, Number 11  Philip Tew185 Afterword: An Interview with Philip Tew on Number 11  Jonathan Coe201 Index205

Notes on Contributors Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University in the UK. His main research interests are in post-1945 fiction and literary and cultural theory. He is author of Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh UP, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005). He is currently working on two books: one on Contemporary British Fiction: The Essential Criticism for Palgrave; and the other on the representation of youth subcultures in fiction 1950–2010. He is also co-editing, with Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson, a book on British fiction of the 2000s. Joseph Brooker is Director of the Centre for Contemporary Literature and Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. He works on modern and contemporary literature and culture, concentrating primarily on Britain, Ireland and the United States. He is the author of Joyce’s Critics (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) and ‘Reception History’, a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to ‘Ulysses’, edited by Sean Latham (Cambridge University Press, 2014). His other books consider Flann O'Brien, and British writers of the 1980s. Francesco Di Bernardo holds a PhD in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Culture and Thought from the University of Sussex. He is interested in representations of capital, money and neoliberalism, the financial crisis, liquid society, and the precariat in contemporary literature and culture. In 2014 he completed a thesis focused on the representation of British history from the 1970s to the post-2007 financial crisis in the works of Jonathan Coe and other contemporary British authors. Jonathan Coe began writing fiction at around eight, and he published his first novel – written while completing a doctorate on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones at Warwick University – The Accidental Woman with Duckworth in April 1987. He has published nine further novels, including The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004) and Expo 58 (2013). His work has attracted numerous prizes including, for his most famous novel, What a Carve Up! (1994), Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1995; the Prix Médicis Étranger for The House of Sleep in 1998, and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for

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The Rotters’ Club in 2001. His biography of B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004), was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2005. In 2004 he was elected Chevalier l'Ordre des Arts and des Lettres. Vanessa Guignery is Professor of Contemporary English Literature at the École Normale Supérieure in Lyon and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is the author of several books and essays on the work of Julian Barnes and published a monograph on B. S. Johnson in 2009. She translated Jonathan Coe’s biography of B. S. Johnson into French and recently edited The B. S. Johnson – Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence (2015). She published a collection of interviews with contemporary writers, Novelists in the New Millenium, which includes one with Jonathan Coe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Her most recent book, a monograph on Jonathan Coe, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the New British Fiction Series in 2015. Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London. He is the author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2006; second edition 2010); the co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (2013); and the co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (2013) and three volumes on Contemporary British Fiction: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015) and The 2000s (2015). Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B. S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward.  Raluca Iliou is currently a Doctoral Research Fellow at Brunel University London after teaching for more than eight years at Ploiesti University, Romania. Her research interests include political discourse analysis, Thatcherism and post-1979 British and American fiction. Sebastian Jenner is a PhD candidate at Brunel University London, researching ‘The British Aleatory Novel, 1959-1979’. His other research interests include the intersection of literature and the musicological, the representation of chaos, and of multicursality in fiction. He has contributed a chapter to B.S. Johnson and PostWar Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and a chapter on Will Self to London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City (Bloomsbury, 2016). Merritt Moseley is Professor and Department Chair of Literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, USA. He is the author of monographs on David Lodge, Kingsley Amis, Michael Frayn, Julian Barnes and Pat Barker; and the editor of five volumes on British and Irish Novelists since the Second World War and Booker Prize winners. His book Understanding Jonathan Coe (University of South Carolina Press) appeared in 2016.

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Emma Parker is an Associate Professor (Reader) in Post-War and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published widely on contemporary fiction. She is a founder member of the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association and a former co-editor of  the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing (2012–17), published by Oxford University Press and winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ ‘Best New Journal’ award 2009. Currently she is committed to the Joe Orton: 50 Years On project. José Ramón Prado Pérez lectures at the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) in Castelló de la Plana, Spain. He specializes in post-war political drama in contemporary British theatre, and has research interests in popular culture and literature. His works include Revisiones críticas del teatro alternativo británico contemporáneo 1968-1990 [Critical Revisions of British Alternative Drama 1968-1990] (2000) and the co-edited New Literatures of Old: Dialogues of Tradition and Innovation in Anglophone Literature (2008). He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Cultural, Language and Representation, a cultural studies journal. He was a member of the ‘Estudios sobre intermedialidad como mediación intercultural’, a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and also participated in ‘Representations of the Precarious in Contemporary British Theatre’, a project funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD). James Riley is Fellow of English Literature at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He works on modern and contemporary literature and is currently at work on a study of William Burroughs and tape recorders. Recent publications have focused on cult film, magic and supernatural fiction. He maintains a blog at the website Residual Noise. Philip Tew is Professor in English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London. He serves as the Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) and the Hillingdon Literary Festival (HiLF). Among Tew’s main publications are: B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester UP, 2001); The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum, 2004; rev. second ed. 2007); Jim Crace (Manchester UP, 2006); and, co-edited with Glyn White, Re-reading B.  S.  Johnson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He co-authored a policy report on ageing, Coming of Age (Demos, 2011); and with Nick Hubble, Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); edited Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); and, with Jonathan Coe and Julia Jordan, Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S.Johnson (Picador, 2013).

Preface Philip Tew

This volume represents a scholarly output that is an outcome of my personal relationship with Jonathan Coe for the past twenty years. As he reminded me by email, when I erroneously suggested that we might have first met early in the 1990s (yes, to be sure, one’s memory does play tricks with age), in fact I first encountered him on a sunny summer’s afternoon in Waterstones bookshop in Hampstead High Street where he was publicizing The House of Sleep, first issued several months earlier in May 1997. Curiously, given my later academic interest in his work, to prepare for the possible meeting, the previous weekend I had bought and read my first Coe novel, the paperback edition of what would become his most famous book, What a Carve Up! (1994). It had been discounted at half price (I know because an orangey-red £3.50 label still adorns my copy). On that day I was not drawn primarily by Coe’s fiction, rather my motivation to cycle up Rosslyn Hill from Pond Street on a hot day to this particular venue was because of his interest in B. S. Johnson, a writer we both greatly admire. In fact, as I got to know him, Coe was to lavish much time and attention in producing the magisterial and innovative authorized biography of this 1960s experimental novelist, entitled Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson (2004). This volume, which I was privileged to read in its first draft, rightly won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Much later he and I (together with Julia Jordan) would compile and edit an anthology of Johnson’s prose and drama from material newly acquired by the British Library for its Manuscripts Reading Room, a project that we two had hatched many years previously in around 2001. It took a deal of time to acquire permissions, find an appropriate publisher and wait for the archival material to be transferred the approximate 1.25 miles (as the crow flies) from the author’s final home behind St. Mary’s Church in Islington to its current depository on the Euston Road. Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson (2013) finally appeared a dozen years later. During the years since our first conversation in Hampstead I have read all of Coe’s fiction with increasing admiration, pondering at times why on earth he is

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not more celebrated and does not feature far more on the academic curriculum. Although rightfully celebrated for his Thatcherite satire, What a Carve Up!, the other novels, even the early ones, deserve equal attention, although there remain subtle differences. He admits as much in a journalistic essay reflecting on writing his Johnson biography, ‘Nothing but the truth’, where he observes ‘Like many novelists (myself included), he started off by writing about thinly fictionalised versions of himself ’ [emphasis added]. Like Johnson, perhaps even more so, in later works the self-reflective elements lay deeper, with hidden motifs and emblems invoking the authorial self. Significantly, recent scholarship covering his work has started to emerge in several monographs; most notably two volumes produced by contributors to this volume, namely Vanessa Guignery’s Jonathan Coe (2015) and Merritt Moseley’s Understanding Jonathan Coe (2016), published only seven months apart. As Guinery observes in her study, Coe as a novelist is ‘resolutely anchored in the present, dealing with topical issues’ (15), adding that his most famous satire was a response to and rejection of the faux nostalgic historicity, what Guignery labels ‘retro-Victorian fiction and pastiche’ that so dominated literary prizes, ‘epitomized by the 2001 Booker Prize longlist on which only three out of 22 books were set in contemporary Britain’ (15). For Guignery, his most famous novel ‘combines political awareness with a comic satire of the worst excesses of Thatcherism and the ruling elite’ (16). For Moseley, The novel is not about Margaret Thatcher as a person, and she is almost unmentioned by name; it is about the whole complex of attitudes embodied in the society that developed during her premiership, to some extent with her encouragement and that of her party. The ruling force was greed, and it was unleashed by a growing heartlessness about the weak and unfortunate. (38)

One ought perhaps to mediate such claims by extending the context to the realworld reception of books that are on one level very funny (although as Joseph Brooker explores in this collection, sadness very much features too), and as Coe explained in an interview with Vanessa Guignery, ‘So, primarily, I put funny things in my books – I hope they are funny – to give people pleasure. That is the first reason. There are other reasons, but they are secondary.’ In addition I would suggest thematically either real or perceived vulnerability or a precautionary timidity are central threads to the whole of Coe’s oeuvre, to which one might add other sub-themes or expressive motifs such as passion, often unrequited, and the symbolically charged mundanity of everyday petit-bourgeois existence, with people almost always manipulated by authority or fate. Finally, though,

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a zealous need to admonish permeates the text at various levels, much as the author admitted to Guignery: One of the key lines from What a Carve Up! comes at the end of the novel when Mortimer Winshaw, the head of the Winshaw family, tells the narrator, Michael Owen: ‘there comes a point when greed and madness become practically indistinguishable’. The implication is that Britain – and the West generally – has crossed that line between the two at some point and Mortimer Winshaw adds that if we learn to live alongside greed and even tolerate it, then we’ve crossed a line into madness.

Some readers might well assume Coe’s origins were radical, combative, given what in his study of the author Moseley describes as ‘Coe’s anti-Thatcherism’ (42) with critics and readers drawn to ‘his domestic, class based analysis’ (43). As Moseley indicates there is more, and certainly one might understand this aspect better by examining Coe’s own ruminations about his upbringing and roots. In 2010 he contributed to a multi-authored article in the Guardian, ‘A Return to Grassroots’, published prior to the then impending 2010 general election, in which he recollects the area of Bromsgrove which ‘was my home, after all, for the first 19 years of my life […]. It may be almost three decades since I left, but I have been coming back ever since, and that sense of ambivalent belonging never goes away. Not for me, at any rate’. He knows the area intimately. He accurately predicted the electoral demise of Labour MP, Jacqui Smith, in nearby Redditch, and reflects on the political instincts of his hometown: ‘Bromsgrove, however, is a solid Tory constituency. Always has been. Well, ever since I can recall, anyway, apart from an aberrant three-year interlude in the early 1970s’. Ironic, then, that such a committed opponent of Thatcherism came from not only a Tory heartland, but was the offspring of conservatively inclined parents. Coe’s fictional world is replete with such contradictions.

Works cited Coe, Jonathan. What a Carve Up! or The Winshaw Legacy. London: Viking, 1994. ——. The House of Sleep. London: Viking, 1997. ——. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2004. ——. ‘Nothing but the Truth’. The Guardian. 17 June 2005: N.Pag.; https://www. theguardian.com/books/2005/jun/17/biography.samueljohnsonprize2005. —— et al. ‘A Return to Grassroots’. The Guardian. 10 April 2010: N.Pag.; https://www. theguardian.com/books/2010/apr/10/writers-election-memories.

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——, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan (eds). Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B.S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2013. Guignery, Vanessa. Jonathan Coe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. ——. ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation’. Études britanniques contemporaines. 51, 2016: N.Pag.; http://ebc.revues.org/3371. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Jonathan Coe. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2016.

A Critical Introduction: or, (Re-)contextualizing Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! Philip Tew

Jonathan Coe is a novelist who offers both great variety (especially regarding settings, scenarios and the subjects of his humour and satire) and consistency (offering dark themes, celebration of the everyday, characters who endure an often maudlin, nostalgic sense of loss and failure, and cultural and filmic coordinates used allusively and suggestively) and he is arguably emerging as one of the most important of British novelists to bridge that period encompassing the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays hopes to both contextualize and analyse his work through a variety of approaches useful to both the academic and general reader of his fiction, which has attracted critical attention in particular in mainland Europe. Regarded as a significant writer, he has been awarded: the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1996 for What a Carve Up! (1994); the Prix Médicis Étranger in 1998 for The House of Sleep (1997); and the Premio Literario Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente in 2004 for The Rotters’ Club (2001). As I write on 20 June 2017 to date he has published eleven novels, three non-fiction books which included his celebrated biography Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson (2004), which was awarded the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, and two books for children (published in Italian). Having studied English at Trinity College, Cambridge University, Coe undertook a PhD in eighteenth-century literature at Warwick University, which was awarded for his thesis on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. During this period he also completed The Accidental Woman (1987), which was the first of his novels accepted for publication and published in April of that year in the UK by Duckworth. His work reflects a divide between (and occasionally a putative synthesis of) a regional perspective derived from his provincial origins having been born on 19 August 1961 in Lickey, a suburb of south-west Birmingham, and a metropolitan worldview reflecting his post-university life in London, to which

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city he moved and has subsequently lived there since the late 1980s. Musically inclined, his aim in the capital was to write songs and perform. He participated in short-lived band The Peer Group and an even shorter-lived feminist cabaret group called Wanda and the Willy Warmers. With such ambitions frustrated, he returned to writing fiction, a passion explored from around age eight, his early attempts recollected vividly during an earlier interview with me published in 2008: My earliest memory of writing was when I was about seven or eight. I don’t remember having read many proper books at that stage, but I was constantly reading comics; in particular one called The Lion, which had one particular neogothic comic strip, called either the Necromancer or the Sorcerer. I began a story in imitation of that strip, which is the earliest thing I can remember. […] I wrote in a small notebook, around 150 pages, proud of myself because I assumed I had written a novel. My father got his secretary to type it up and when the typescript came it was only twenty-four pages. Each chapter which I imagined was full length was less than a page. I remember being deflated and realizing that I had a long way to go still. (35)

Coe’s self-effacement and humility about his youthful self ’s literary ambition is also typical not only of the writer in adult life, but his reflections capture something of the zeitgeist of the type of suburban, provincial community in which he was raised, and to which his affinities and understanding of life are inextricably bound. He comments ‘Increasingly I feel more comfortable writing novels which are set outside the capital; because at heart I think I’m a provincial writer, not meaning that in a negative sense’ (45). For Coe the metropolitan centre remains suspect, a focal point for the advantaged to congregate while exploiting the rest, dismissing ‘the London Literary Establishment – whatever that means – [who] quite often gets its choices wrong because it has its own agendas’ (43). Subsequently in this introduction I will revisit and re-contextualize what is undoubtedly Coe’s most famous work to date, What a Carve Up!, in which such a binary divide of affiliation outlined above features in what is a sprawling, layered and complex gothic tale of various generations of the Winshaw family and their associates. In a general sense Coe emerges as belonging to a phase and strand of the Anglo-American novel described by Colin Hutchinson in Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel as ‘social’ fiction which ‘can be understood as more or less direct representations of the deleterious effects of Reaganite and Thatcherite economic policies upon both individuals and the social fabric’ (6), later commenting on ‘the pessimism of the contemporary social



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novel’ within a context of Thatcher and Reagan undertaking ‘an appropriation of a more general popular discontent’ which might yet offer ‘the left-liberal writer the possibility of unmasking the ideological nature of that appropriation’ (17). Michael Owen, the novel’s protagonist, is a left-liberal in crisis; he seems distant, detached, neurotic and even brooding. Ryan Trimm effectively summarizes the scope and context of the novel, including certain aspects of Coe’s pastiche approach which offers a cultural coordinate drawn from popular, nostalgic art, suggesting a link between the monstrous in the imaginary and their political afterlife, as if Thatcher haunts the present as these filmic encounters provided the spectral fears and obsessions of the past, the ridiculous becoming the reality: What a Carve Up! lifts its title from a campy 1960s horror film, a slasher comedy the 1994 novel raids to satirize the economic and social cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The Thatcher years targeted the postwar consensus on social welfare and nationalized industries and services. These transformations […] severely impacted the lower and middle classes. Coe’s novel uses its generic source to offer a furious indictment of the prime minister and the impact her economic slashing had on Britain. The novel personalizes these wounds through the complex relations between novelist Michael Owen (Carve Up’s narrator) and the aristocratic Winshaw family. Owen is hired to chronicle the Winshaws, whose Conservative members lead a vast array of Thatcherite projects in politics, finance, the media, industrial agriculture, and trade in art and arms. (158)

Certain businesses are horrific on a local level, such as Dorothy Winshaw’s agribusiness which industrializes cruelty and death; the food produced from such slaughter is unhealthy and unnatural, leading very largely to the early death of Owen’s (apparent) father. Others are global in their impact. Death is also central to Mark Winshaw’s trade as an arms dealer, but vicariously so given he exports shamelessly the capacity for others to torture and kill, remaining indifferent to the consequences of his sales to dictators and despots, such as Saddam Hussein.1 As Trimm notes, ‘Thatcherite enterprise is revealed to be so centred on greed as to operate without regards to consequences, even when military wares might be turned against British troops’ (168) and the latter scenario proves to be the outcome, concerning which Mark seems disinterested. This is a crucial and most evocative detail that mirrors an underlying reality of these years when such sales grew exponentially. As Mark Phythian explains, ‘Mrs Thatcher viewed such competition in personal terms and, especially during her first two terms in office, became in effect Britain’s premier arms salesman’ (276). Such active promotion is far more direct an involvement than Trimm’s notion

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concerning the novel that ‘Mark’s rise is redolent of Thatcher’s sly winks to the arms trade’ (168). According to Phythian, her son, Mark Thatcher, was also involved, facilitated by his mother, securing for him commission fees (through a corrupt intervention and abuse of power), for which trading Phythian offers evidence that includes commentary by Howard Teicher, a member of President Reagan’s National Security Council (283). Andrew Feinstein refers to the ‘most corrupt arms deal in history, the Al Yamamah deal […]. Mark Thatcher, son of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who had negotiated the deal with the Saudis, was paid £12 million on the deal’ (198). Hence Coe’s use of the name ‘Mark’ plays a double function, satirizing activities that would have been dismissed at the time if made the substance of direct accusations.2 Through dark and oblique humour Coe has enshrined in cultural memory a vital link in understanding how our world functions, perhaps indelibly so, which would not have been the case with press coverage of the son’s activities, which were easily dismissed. As Feinstein reports in 2015, ‘Of an estimated 502 recorded violations of United Nations arms embargoes since their inception in 1990, two have resulted in legal action, one of which ended in conviction. It should therefore come as no surprise that the trade in weapons is less regulated than the trade in bananas!’ (197–8). Hence in the last resort the Thatcherite ethos and ideology are marked up (excuse the pun) by Coe correctly as an undeniable symbol of an immoral political system of cronyism, corrupted, corrupting and offered as a sign of a culture with inverted values, generationally undifferentiated, like mother, like son. And, moreover, in effect the overall conceit is that Coe’s novel is the book Owen ought to have completed, when in fact he feels overwhelmed by what he uncovers. Initially he thinks the commission an act of fate. ‘It was purely by chance that I found myself writing a book about the Winshaws’ (87), which of course turns out not to be the case, as ever such details being highly significant retrospectively, and doubly ironic. As Owen concludes, the outcome of Thatcherism seems dire as represented by the Winshaws’ misdeeds: They’ve all got blood on their hands. It’s written all over their faces. […] Roddy and Hilary have certainly done their bit. If imagination’s the lifeblood of the people and thought is our oxygen, then his job’s to cut off our circulation and hers is to make sure that we all stay dead from the neck up. And so they sit at home getting fat on the proceeds and here we all are. Our businesses failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down, the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath. I hate the Winshaws, Fiona. Just look at what they’ve done to us. (413)



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And yet ultimately Coe’s narrator is defined by what in Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel Colin Hutchinson observes of his group during this period: ‘Ambivalence is the distinguishing feature of the contemporary white male left-liberal’ (3). Unsurprising in a way, since in the real world, as Feinstein suggests, ‘corruption, poor decision making, and outright criminality, as well as the efforts to conceal them, undermine the rule of law, distort the market, and pollute the business environment, the political process, and the functioning of the state’ (198). Such undermining subversions of democracy are the bedrock of Coe’s view of how contemporary Britain functions, explored in a number of his novels, critiquing Blair and Cameron as well as Thatcher, including in the most recent novel, Number 11 (2015), a novel I discuss at greater length in my contribution to this collection, which shares key themes and certain characters (including some Winshaws) with What a Carve Up!. The narrative revolves in part around perceptions of the contested death on Harrowdown Hill of Dr David Kelly in July 2003. A scientific authority on biological warfare, employed by the British Ministry of Defence, and former weapons inspector with the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq, in the period running up to the Iraq War his evidence had raised questions about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, the official justification for the UK government’s decision to invade Iraq. Kelly was pressured by authorities, ‘outing’ him as a source of certain reports, so as to undermine his credibility. In 2010 Lord Hutton deemed related evidence, including the post-mortem report and photographs of the body should remain classified for seventy years, but both were made public later that year. Many commentators find the death highly questionable, a suspicion and possibility that animate aspects of several strands of Coe’s text, linking them. Owen is far from the sole powerless person in What a Carve Up!; all the characters are revealed as either willing or more often unwilling (accidental) accomplices to each member of the family’s particular greed, whose viciousness and malice are sanctioned very largely by Thatcherite ideology, although as such malignity has a dynamic of its own for those drawn to such behaviour and attitudes. As François Flahault points out in Malice (2003), Now – as we saw when we compared the respective advantages of love and hate – being nice means internalizing the split between oneself and the other; it means limiting oneself in order to make room for the other, and is therefore a kind of renunciation of being whole. The monster’s malignity is a kind of affirmation of its wholeness. (87)

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However, it is essential to concede that implicitly in Coe’s novel such negative dynamics are evident even in earlier periods than Thatcher’s governments, but remains dormant or secretively obscure (as with the odd and mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Godfrey Winshaw during the Second World War, and whether his brother, Lawrence, was complicit in that tragedy). As Hutchinson notes, Owen’s research allows him to ‘discover that the riches of the Winshaw’s have been ill-gotten for centuries, and that in Thatcher’s Britain, the family’s unscrupulous methods are flourishing’ (50). One of Coe’s overarching points seems to be that such latent nastiness and madness might have lain dormant or at least out of sight until amoral tendencies (Thatcherism) create the circumstances to unleash such forces destructively on a widespread basis, and his satire of the Thatcher government and its acolytes demonstrates how wilful and savage such policies were as regards the cultural and sociopolitical perspectives they engendered more broadly in the general population,  but among the wealthy and influential in particular. Such negativity has its own logic, for as Flahault observes: Hatred serves the undertaking of occupying the mind of the other, and it can get there by itself without having to depend upon his or her consent. By hating, I can enjoy the power of affirming myself absolutely and unconditionally. I can haunt the other with my hatred and impose myself upon him as the image of the beloved possesses the lover; in this case it is the other who depends on me, not me on him. (71)

This dynamic of the Winshaws is represented as typifying the selfish, egotistical spirit of the age, a genie released from the bottle, although there was opposition and protest, however ineffectual. As Coe writes in ‘1980s’ of the Tory party election rally in 1983: ‘You realised then that the 70s were over, and there was a new spirit in the air: a new meanness, an aggressive triumphalism, which of course was a post-Falklands feeling as much as anything else.’ In the novel, Mortimer Winshaw cautions Phoebe, ‘“Let me give you a warning about my family,” he said eventually, “in case you hadn’t worked it out already. They’re the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the Earth. And I include my own offspring in that statement”’ (209). At one level, this particular novel serves as a fictionalized compendium of Coe’s various responses to those Thatcherite years, and its perceived excesses. Hutchinson says of its protagonist (in part a self-deprecating persona for Coe himself): ‘Owen is infuriated not only by Thatcherism, but also by his own failure to channel his anger into effective political action’ (50). Apart



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from the political, ideological contexts, as to the novel’s wider literary origins, in my interview with Coe, he describes: discovering a series called The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, from the original novel by David Nobbs (one of the best of the 1970s), The Death of Reginald Perrin. The latter had a very powerful influence on me. Although unknown as literature, it deserves better, possessing a combination of melancholy, satire, farce, seriousness, and a distinctive melange of tones which I have tried to capture in my fiction probably from What a Carve Up!. (37)

Clearly the comedy in What a Carve Up! is exceedingly dark, different strands overlapping or interwoven, and as Vanessa Guignery details its concerns itself with much murder and blood, both literally and in terms of various repeated allusions to the mystery and detective sub-genres of the novel and their filmic adaptations (428–9). There is an irony concerning Owen, being as Guignery observes someone ‘who had assumed the role of uninvolved observer (as in classic detective fiction), [and who] realises little by little that his life is intricately linked with that of the Winshaws as he probes into his own past’ (430). As Coe indicated in my earlier interview, ‘In my youth there were no book-lined rooms, no bookish family. My Dad used to read Harold Robbins and Arthur Haley, my Mum Agatha Christie. Those were the names on our bookshelves’ (36). Such unravelling of certainty and use of revelation, as Coe would surely be well aware as a bookish son of an aficionado of such works, was typical of a subset of detective fiction, which included the sixth detective novel by Agatha Christie and the third featuring Hercule Poirot, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). This tale is finally revealed as being narrated by the murderer himself, Dr James Sheppard, who has ‘assisted’ Poirot and writes of the detective’s failings before committing suicide (presumably implicitly leaving behind his manuscript to be discovered and read posthumously, which is presumably the same conceit inherent in What a Carve Up!’s ending). Such curious and vexed complicity with complex strands and dimensions are evident even in classic writers of the form, which is an element Coe often foregrounds, but particularly in What a Carve Up!. Coe is noted for his satire and humour, but its elements remain often poignant and melancholy, imbued more with a sense of fatalistic admission of the inconsequentialities of existence rather than any sense of doom or dread. Emanuela Gutkowski says of the reader: In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the receiver [reader] is deceived twice: First, because, in most cases, he or she does not arrive at the same conclusions as Poirot (but the game is unfair: Who ignores the power of the Belgian’s ‘little

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Jonathan Coe gray cells’?). Second, his or her intuition is offended, because the murderer is the narrator – the kind, reliable figure who took the reader by hand from the first page and accompanied him or her through the comforting English environment, in which all people seem incapable of doing harm to others and the frantic course of life is replaced by the sleepy rhythm of everyday activities. (52)

In Christie’s novel the environment, characters and readerly expectations are rendered as entirely paradoxical and implicitly multilayered engagements, and the underlying truth resides in the unpalatable quality of the various sets of relationships that make up the apparently liberal and stable village community. This is a truth embraced by Coe, using Owen as a naïf whose expectations will always be refuted, whose innocence is a set of vulnerabilities and neuroses. His reading of Tabitha ignores the self-evident clues, which he misses. ‘This, Michael guessed, was Tabitha Winshaw: her resemblance to Aunt Emily, the deranged spinster played by Esma Cannon in the film What a Carve Up! was unmistakable’ (431). Given the mystery and detective sub-genres are the models paraded and alluded to throughout the text, significantly he does not deduct or observe closely enough. In this collection Emma Parker notes that Owen ‘assumes the role of detective’ (74). In considering him perhaps one ought to focus upon Poirot as a precursor, but an Anglified version cursed with petitbourgeois timidity rather than pride, perspicacity and certainty, and whose typically English characteristics naturally recur with Thomas Foley, part of Coe’s recalibration in Expo 58 (2013) of a Graham Greene protagonist accidentally and comically pitched into the world of espionage and intrigue. Returning to Poirot, in general terms, too, the archetypal detective figure is subverted by Christie, in a fashion both co-opted and parodied by Coe, aware that any ‘postmodern’ reflexivity and instability are prior possibilities of that sub-genre, what Guignery labels its ‘decenteredness’ (431). Clearly at the beginning of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Sheppard seems to be one type of paradigmatic character, helpful, beneficent, but is revealed finally as representing quite another, indifferent to killing. In a sense so too does Owen, seemingly a recluse and subsequently discovering from his mother his hidden father, but the double irony is that any secret concerning his underlying identity is hidden from him until toward the end, until told by his mother after the man Owen had believed was his father had died, and after that revelation still the true connection of his real father with the Winshaws remains hidden from him as well as from the reader until a comment by Tabitha Winshaw forces him to guess his father’s identity, and so Owen is triply transformed: first by his second paternal bereavement, second by Tabitha divulging the truth, and finally by becoming another victim of the Winshaws,



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not a perpetrator of foul deeds like Sheppard, mirrored in this by the  two Winshaws, Mortimer and Tabitha. The latter, an apparently kindly eccentric and spinster who commissions Owen to write a family history, is exposed as a pathological manipulator, monster and madwoman. Even fate conspires against Owen as Tabitha concerning a magazine given her because of an article on the Mark 1 Hurricane aircraft where she found: ‘A picture of you, Michael! You as a little boy! Fate has delivered you into my hands, at last, and not only that, but it turned out that you’d become a writer. It was all too, too perfect!’ (476). Despite transformations of a kind, Owen is a dupe at the beginning, and remains so at the end, acted upon, excluded, sustained in his marginal status, and finally killed. As to the repeated, matter-of-fact awfulness of the Winshaws, why would such a diminishment of others and the associated violence (symbolic, ideological or literal) be so compulsive and recurrent for these family members? Why is it not simply farcical, unbelievable? I would argue that first the popular cultural references ground the behaviour drawn from genres where it is familiar and accepted, but second, I would also suggest, it is a way of being all readers recognize, however reluctantly, at least unconsciously, even while Coe’s gothic allows them to position its familiar, but unusual otherness. Much as people turn away from such realities, sublimating them, as Flahault reminds us: ‘Being decent, just and benevolent is a way of existing. Being malicious is equally a way of existing’ (167) and he concludes too that ‘Every form of relationship between human beings, even if it contains something intolerable, engenders an “addiction”’ (173). In truth, such degradation compels us in our appalled spectatorship in the main, hence Coe’s fascination with the super-rich and the Gothic monstrous in Number 11, nastiness both casual and deliberate found intertwined amidst all the trappings of contemporary popular culture. As with the Thatcherite arms dealers highlighted in What a Carve Up! , one comprehends in Number 11 the proximity of casual, careless evil, which produces and is mirrored in the swarm of huge black spiders at the end chasing Alison, one of the central characters who watches as ‘they clambered on to cars, overturning them, toppling the massed rows of Range Rovers, Porsches and Jaguars. They ran up the walls of the vast arrogant houses, tearing into brickwork, smashing glass. Property was their first target; after that would come people’ (343–4). By the chapter’s end the literal quality of the events is interrogated, by implication they are symptoms of Alison’s breakdown, but other possibilities remain, including a dark, brooding vengeance to which Coe returns, with its possibility of rough justice.

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Coe’s earlier, vehement literary rejection of Thatcherism – part of what Parker in this volume describes as ‘Coe’s oppositional stance’, arguing that What a Carve Up!’s multiplicity of voices resists Thatcher’s ideological claims (69) – is both instinctive and can be located autobiographically, for in ‘1980s’, he admits, ‘Mrs Thatcher comes to visit Warwick University, where I’m doing my PhD, and we all – as a matter of course – turn out to demonstrate,’ adding: ‘Five years into the Thatcher revolution, I can only remember feeling depressed, penniless and powerless.’ And he describes too both his despair at the American bombing raid on Libya on 15 April 1986 from RAF Lakenheath, an episode whose revulsion is incorporated into his novel, and his anger at Yuppies which also features. Yet as he later records there is an inherent irony (or paradox) in his position, that of his background, one Coe revisited consciously in ‘Perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s Death Will Bring Us Clarity’ (referring to the figure who died in the same year as his beloved father). He wrote: ‘He was a great admirer of Thatcher, my dad. An instinctive and lifelong Conservative, he was full of praise (as much as such a quiet man can be) for the Iron Lady and all those who surrounded her.’ And for all his later rejection of the Thatcherite project he admits: ‘I would have voted for her myself, if I had been old enough, in 1979’. Coe as a writer seems animated by such awkward and everyday contradictions; he observes the corrupt dynamics of British cultural and economic life, but understands what animates and inspires the ordinary people who are at times beguiled and deceived by the ideological parameters of that kind of exploitation, realizing it is not these citizens who are monsters and is not they who are the architects of any pain and suffering. Owen’s initial withdrawal is intriguing as it seems to mirror a quality that Coe admits to in ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation’: To be more precise, what you often find in my books is humour and nostalgia. Nearly all the melancholy in my books comes from nostalgia for something or other, looking back on the past as an era of opportunities which were either not taken or choices which were made badly. […] Maybe that is a quintessentially British – or at least English – quality as well, that we are a nostalgic nation which is sometimes forward-looking but also obsessed with tradition.

This dynamic Coe admits as a strong personal impulse, and in its written forms such retrospection serves to militate against the forward momentum of the narrative itself, offering a strong sense of futility, of the contrariety of the world where people are swept along by larger forces. Hutchinson notes that in the novel opposing Thatcherism ‘a communitarian alternative is invoked, as during Owen’s childhood reminiscences, or his visit in 1982 to a friend in “the Socialist Republic



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of South Yorkshire” where he experiences “envy at the thought of a community which could so closely unite around a common cause”, but is always associated with an irredeemable past’ (3). Hutchinson argues that the complex structure of Coe’s novel ‘prevents too ready an identification between the reader and Owen’ (53), and a similar distance also defines the ironic gap between localized events and their more global, often overarching meaning. Owen is also distanced by his emotional limitations, a dampening of empathy for others, a bemusement, but also his obsessional behaviour described by many of the contributory chapters to this volume concerning this novel. In ‘Jonathan Coe: The Early Novels’ Merritt Moseley explores The Accidental Woman (1987), A Touch of Love (1989) and The Dwarves of Death (1990), outlining their limited sales which is more than offset by their critical importance in anticipating elements of What a Carve Up!. According to Moseley the first exhibits a provincial perspective, a feminist consciousness in a narrative ironically of violence perpetrated on Maria, its protagonist and importantly a political consciousness inspired by American attacks on Libya from airbases in Britain, mirrored in What a Carve Up! by those on Iraq, a theme revisited concerning the second Gulf War in The Closed Circle. Moseley examines Coe’s use of anti-heroes, focusing on The Dwarves of Death and a lack of agency on William’s part, his archetypal passivity found later in Michael Owen. The chapter also considers both the reflexive nature of these texts (that is sustained in later novels) and their comic tonal effect; as Moseley demonstrates Coe’s early work, his fictional past is prologue to what will become his fictional future. In ‘Jonathan Coe’s Stories of Sadness’ Joseph Brooker sets out the case for recalibrating the interpretative focus concerning the author’s oeuvre, arguing that any self-evident comedy is mediated by intense sadness, unhappiness, misfortune and melancholy. He examines The Accidental Woman in terms of the protagonist, Maria’s joyless life, and the suffering and brutality inflicted upon her. Brooker describes the narrative’s curious diminishment of pathos. He next numerates the isolation of Robin Grant, protagonist of Coe’s second novel A Touch of Love, his maladjustment signalled as a forerunner of that found in later fiction, including Lois Trotter in The Rotters’ Club (2001) and Michael Owen in What a Carve Up!. The latter’s inability to be decisive is prefigured in both Robin and Maria, subject to forces beyond their control, equally in a political and a romantic context. Such marginality and regret, as Brooker details, recur in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010) and its eponymous protagonist, and with Thomas Foley in Expo 58 (2013) despite his marriage. Brooker argues in Coe’s fiction pervasive sadness as a condition of being is threaded through

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What a Carve Up!, with its pervasive Larkinesque negativity concerning the past, aspects echoed in Number 11. Finally Brooker turns to the humourless The Rain Before it Falls (2007) illustrating a monochrome emotional register through the ‘privations and limitation’ (48) of the life of protagonist, Rosamond. As Brooker concludes, ‘Coe has written of various kinds of unhappiness, including versions that can seem extreme and somewhat pathological’ (49). Raluca Iliou explores a key theme for the novelist in ‘Sexing Britannia: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! or the Re/de-Sexualization of Thatcherite Britain’, offering a chapter that determines the emphasis of Coe’s most successful novel. Commencing with Coe’s own ruminations on the meaning of Thatcher’s death and much-debated legacy, Iliou positions the anti-Thatcherite ideology underpinning What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club (2001), exploring his own conservative origins, the mystique attaching itself to the former prime minister, and the radical importance of both a gender fluidity and a curious eroticism to her ideological presence. Iliou analyses how in such a context with an innate rejection of Thatcher’s presence by opponents, Coe imbues his characters with various contested and divisive aspects of gender either negatively resulting from or reflective of the Thatcherite ethos, including a ‘sexualization connected to and derived from Thatcher’s image and projections [which] is characterized by an odd sense of sterility’ (58). This permeates both protagonist, Michael Owen, and others in or connected to the Winshaw family. Emma Parker’s ‘A Comedy of Horrors: Thatcherism in What a Carve Up! reconsiders the novel’s relation to Thatcher from first her renowned lack of humour, comedy’s opposition to Conservatism in the 1980s and Coe’s deployment of both ‘both comedy and horror to critique the social and economic policies introduced by Thatcher in the 1980s’ (67). Parker examines the novel’s satiric intent through the prism of Joe Orton’s ‘comedy of horrors’, and argues the latter is equally critical to the exposure of the excesses of the 1980s. Blending popular and literary forms Coe’s novel synthesizes these various sources with the horror film to challenge Thatcherite orthodoxies, which as Parker indicates ‘echoes Karl Marx’s Capital (1867), which likens capitalism to a vampire and a werewolf, and argues that capital commits ‘“monstrous outrages” that leave it “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”’ (70). She also examines the novel’s allusive relation to variously post-war British comedies, Pat Jackson’s 1961 film What a Carve Up! which evokes a variety of classic horror films itself, and Georges Franju’s graphic documentary about a Parisian slaughterhouse, Le Sang des Bêtes. The latter provides a central metaphor for understanding Thatcherism and its indifference to suffering and death, a context exemplified by the Winshaws. For  Parker



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Michael Owen’s obsession with Jackson’s film and its passive protagonist mirrors his own detachment, but also his complicity, in stark contrast to a novel in which comedy not only ‘affirms the value of collectivism’ (75) but its pleasures also offset or dilute the bleakness of Coe’s vision of Thatcherism. James Riley in ‘“These are my books”: What a Carve Up! and Video Aesthetics’ considers the significance of media and other technology, including its advances, its exploitation and ubiquity. He also considers how such technology would tend to periodize a narrative, whose propensity, Riley argues, Coe’s novel resists. He details just how this particular fiction subtly incorporates video whereby Coe ‘absorbs the technology and its operational possibilities into the fabric, or texture of his novel’ (83), an inscription working at two levels, one diachronic, the other synchronic. Riley explores how the novel details various manifestations of video and its market, and its relation to three characters, Graham Packard, Michael Owen and Thomas Winshaw. Like Terry Worth in The House of Sleep Owen obsesses about film, specifically Jackson’s What a Carve Up! and Riley suggests his ‘fetishization of the film through video seems to amplify this oneiric, if not hypnagogic status rather than dissolve it’ (87). Elucidating its aesthetic use more generally, Riley contextualizes how Coe’s fiction transcends the video format’s economic, marketized role, and ‘can be evaluated not as a carve-up of 1990s Britain but functions as a 2016 guidebook to the way in which contemporary culture seeks to carve-up the video culture of the 1990s’ (90). In ‘What Became of the People We Used to Be?: The House of Sleep (1997) and the 1970s Sitcom, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–5)’, Nick Hubble investigates the underexplored relationship of Coe’s fiction to the BBC light entertainment and comedy of the 1970s that was such a significant influence on his formative years. Not only do the male protagonists of The House of Sleep have the same names as the two main characters in Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais’s iconic sitcom,  Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, but it also emplots a similar temporal structure, in that we see the lives of the main characters in two different time periods that are separated by significant number of years. Hubble suggests that the adoption of the intimate, everyday approach of the television series enables Coe to produce what is perhaps a different version of the past to that represented in his better-known novels, What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club. Rather than a combination of nostalgia and male protagonists shackled by their own inability to get over their early sexual hang-ups, The House of Sleep is characterized by a comedy that is as much bitter-sweet as cruel, and that also seems to hold out the possibility of a transformed future in which Britain can finally move on from the trauma of the Thatcherite years. Drawing

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on the Birmingham School’s classic sociological discussion of subcultures, in ‘From Prog to Punk: Cultural Politics and the Form of the Novel in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club’ Nick Bentley considers the role of contemporaneous music in Coe’s novel, in particular the transition in musical styles, especially given on the part of the characters an ‘emotional and intellectual investment in them and despite an element of ironic distance, this aspect of the novel is treated with a seriousness that diminishes the conventional distinctions between high and low culture’ (109). Bentley illustrates how Coe incorporates popular culture and in The Rotters’ Club he integrates a factually oriented framework of Britain in the 1970s where music was central and the microcosm of Benjamin Trotter’s school-life where ideology is played out ‘in affiliation to, or engagement with subcultures and the cultural forms they produce and experience’ (112). Bentley  explores how this is played out in the lives of several of Coe’s central characters, including ironically Philip Chase’s prog rock masterpiece, ‘Apotheosis of the Necromancer’, played by his band, Gandalf ’s Pikestaff, at the very moment punk is born, indicating as Bentley emphasizes ‘“The death of the socialist dream”’ (182). He contextualizes these styles into a broader ideological and aesthetic struggle. Finally ‘the novel stitches together the complexities of the structuring organization of prog rock, with the avant-garde cut-up bricolage effect of punk’ (122). Sebastian Jenner explores fiction and satire in ‘Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle and a Satiric Mirror’ in terms of the dynamics of the Blairite New Labour’s so-called ‘third way’. He considers Coe’s claim that the later novel serves as a ‘mirror image’ of The Rotters’ Club, and its reconfiguring of the ideological landscape of that novel, largely through the political career of neoliberal supporter, Paul Trotter, younger brother of Benjamin, whom he has eclipsed. Jenner considers how that despite ‘Coe’s distaste of the New Labour project, the absence of an alternative left from which to challenge the new status quo, in contrast to the dialectic configured in The Rotters’ Club, destabilizes the potential for satiric collusion’ (127). He outlines the novel’s ideological and historic contexts, particularly its rejection of a once prevailing xenophobia, and the disenfranchisement of most of the characters (apart from Paul). Apathy, for Jenner, prevails, which he argues is the underlying target of Coe’s satire, ‘and of the very impotence, in a post-millennial context, of the language  of satire itself ’ (129). Drawing on Coe’s doctoral thesis, his comments on the form and its prevalence in postmodern culture, Jenner situates this approach within the dynamics and critical reception of the satirical form, its difficulties and normalization. Jenner contextualizes and explores why ‘Coe’s landscape



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captures a snapshot in which the left appears ravaged by its own failures, offering little alternative and rendering itself redundant’ (131–2). Finally the grotesque relationship between Paul and Benjamin foregrounds ‘the clash between farce and satire at the heart of the post-millennial period’ (133) and is a prism by which readers understand the complex mirroring between this novel and its predecessor, the former a farcical parody of the latter, where trauma and disaster are media staples, denuded of impact and empathic possibility. Although ‘Coe’s paradoxical intention to satirize the ineffectuality of satire is unmistakably an act of self-gratification, euphemistically appeasing a growing concern about the threat of his favoured language of political critique’ (138) this is curiously mediated by Benjamin’s failures, a self-mirroring of an apathy that Coe satirizes in others and himself. Francesco Di Bernardo considers both the unequal relation of the individual and the rise of global capitalism in ‘A Terrible Precariousness: Financialization of Society and the Precariat in Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim’, and explores the rise and legacy of Thatcherism. He situates the narrative with a detailed account of economic changes in terms of ‘The transition from modern Fordist industrialization to the post-industrial era, [which] in fact, coincided in Britain with fundamental political turnarounds: the rupture with post-war consensus, the end of the welfare state conceived after the Second World War’ (142). Arguing that a sensibility informed by economic outcomes informs Coe’s fiction, this chapter suggests that The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim epitomizes ‘two phenomena which characterize our times: financialization and the casualization of labour, both resulting in widespread precarity’ (142) and reflects on a bleak post-industrial landscape. Featuring a text-within-a-text, memoirs written by Sim’s father, Harold, the narrative reworks the Faustian myth. Harold’s narrative outlines his obsessive relationship with financier, Roger Anthrusther, a malevolent figure. Their stockbroker Crispin Lambert, Di Bernardo argues, is a Mephistophelean figure, whereby ‘Coe represents the masochistic relationship between society and finance and the short-termism of the money-economy specifically through a rewriting of the Faustian myth’ (146). The chapter sets out the economic consequences and the plight of the lives overwhelmed in Coe’s narrative, subject to precarity, including protagonist whose toothbrush seller’s career implodes with his company’s liquidation, and Di Bernardo explores the cultural and ideological determination of such unhappiness, instability and suffering in a deregulated culture. Ironically, by the end the narrator reveals to Sim his fictional status, thereby denying any individuality or autonomy, and as a pawn of the writer himself, the latter ends the narrative abruptly without

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conclusion – echoing B. S. Johnson’s ambivalent relationship with his protagonist in Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973). In ‘Jonathan Coe’s Rewriting of Popular Genres in Expo 58’ José Ramón Prado Pérez highlights the difficulty for fiction as a form to incorporate the flux or chaos that is reality. He argues the novel exists ‘on the borderline between the fictive and non-fictive, articulating a historical moment where categories are in transition, thus, precarious and uncertain’ (155). The chapter explores the illusion of protagonist, Thomas Foley’s illusion of freedom of choice, offset by the explicit foregrounding of the authorial ‘superior consciousness’ (156). Seeing such ambivalence or dichotomy as central to satire allows Coe to avoid the mythopoeic tendencies of fiction, with the Expo 58 exhibition itself becoming an event beyond the everyday, for Thomas ‘a breach outside temporality which can be experienced as some sort of permanent present, that is, between his past history and his future’ (157). This is intensified given that the characters also inhabit ‘the fantasy world of spy stories’ (157). In these contexts Prado Pérez details and analyses Coe’s selfreflexive and intertextual techniques, explaining that Expo 58 engages explicitly with narrativity and storytelling, both the ‘master’ and marginal or borderline narratives. In such a space of fantasy, the unhappily married Foley is doubly alienated, his sexual encounter with Anneke an aberration, something he cannot fully acknowledge or articulate, his momentary satisfaction refuted by its narrative as threat and potential blackmail. Narrative self-denial negates both the reader’s and Thomas’s expectations, the latter forced back into an unsatisfactory life of domesticity, the vicarious pleasures of espionage denied him. Despite his apparent mirroring of a Bond archetype, finally it is ‘the clash of conflicting narratives that dominate Foley’s life’ (160) and spatially riven in his in-between liminality, drawn back toward the quotidian, Thomas is denied both narrative possibilities in an environment and culture itself defined by the pathological. Prado Pérez defines the causes of his denial of heroic status, the causes for the diminution of his adventure, and argues that in this novel for Coe creates ‘the brink between realism and fictionality, a space where he might articulate his own aesthetics of tension and in-betweenness’ (167). The final two chapters of this volume consider Coe’s eleventh novel (the latest to date in July 2017), the first being Vanessa Guignery’s ‘Gothic Horror and Haunting Processes in Jonathan Coe’s Number 11’, which sets out the elements from his other fiction that are incorporated, including separate stories, drawing upon popular forms, including Gothic horror films, the detective novel and reality TV shows, and satirical reflection on current political events, including the death of Dr David Kelly in July 2003. As Guignery indicates, this



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is synthesized with nostalgia, metafictional features and comic effects, multiple filmic references, and not only the remaining Winshaws, but also Norman Sparks from Expo 58 and Terry Worth from The House of Sleep. She also suggests that ‘Spectrality and haunting have become major tropes of contemporary culture, and Coe’s reliance on a number of comic-Gothic-horror movies in Number 11 not only confirms his attachment to popular culture, but also obliquely reflects upon the terrifying, horrific and haunted times in which we live’ (170). The Gothic in particular conveys the haunting of the contemporary by the legacies of the political past, made more poignant by the power of the super-rich and a novel which ‘faithfully abides by the rules of the genre and playfully subverts them through the means of an exaggerated pastiche’ (172). As Guingery argues with close analysis, Kelly’s death and the body of a sleeping immigrant worker permeates and haunts the text, signs of political and economic corruption. She also explores a variety of originary filmic sources, including ‘The archetypal British portmanteau horror film is Dead of Night (1945), an assemblage of five embedded stories’ (176). The second chapter concerned with the novel is Philip Tew’s ‘Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity in Jonathan Coe’s Satire, Number 11’ which charts the apparently oppositional elements of the utterly mundane and the Gothic, exploring specifically the differential lives of ordinary people and that of the mega-rich, whose very existence is set apart. Tew explores ‘the sociopolitical manipulation of attitudes and promotion of certain explicit agendas on the part of the media [which] includes the banalization of any public debate concerning more economic equality and outright attacks on the lower classes’ (186). The chapter explores and analyses the nature of Coe’s Gothic narrative, its strategies, and the novel’s underlying and paradoxical realist impulses, identifying the targets of the satiric dimension as including the super-rich and the narrative of celebrity. In doing so, Tew focuses first on the vilification of Val, the mother of one of the central character’s, Rachel, while and after appearing on a reality television show, and second the demonization of Rachel’s friend, Alison, who inadvertently continues to claim benefits having sold a painting, ironically tricked into doing so by Josephine Winshaw, a journalist. A third element is the monstrous creature meting out revenge to the rich from beneath a basement development on Turngreet Road where Rachel’s wealthy employers live, an embodiment of the Gothic monstrous. As Tew concludes, ‘In Number 11 Coe’s warning about the real world that he critiques concerns not only the rampant individualistic greed that has already punished so many in the twentyfirst century, but the naturalization of the privileged existence of a ruling class and avowal of its interests (with economic or political sway)’ (198). The chapter

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is followed by an interview undertaken by Jonathan Coe on the novel entitled ‘Afterword: An Interview with Philip Tew on Number 11’. Finally, allow me to return to my task of reconsidering What a Carve Up!, a key text central to Coe’s aesthetic project, noting that toward the end of the novel there is a retributive phase, included as a conclusion perhaps with a certain layered irony, in which the passive Michael becomes complicit so that as Hutchinson specifies ‘Owen, although angry, is destined to play a passive spectator’s role as both Tabitha and Mortimer Winshaw decide to redress the wrongs committed by their own family by despatching them in ways that […] match their nefarious deeds’ (52). Ironically, at the end of the novel one discovers that Owen is the offspring of Godfrey’s surviving co-pilot, also Lawrence’s mystery attacker and the following morning Tabitha pilots Hilary Winshaw’s seaplane, but rather than returning Michael to his home, deliberately destroys the plane, killing them both, in effect undertaking through madness a vicarious, pointless and posthumous revenge on Owen’s deceased father who had failed to kill her brother when commissioned to do so. Such a bizarre and shocking ending serves to return the reader to a contradiction inherent in the sacrificial, an irresolution that Flahault describes as ‘the vicious circle of ritual violence, creative and protective in nature’ (154), which is why Mortimer concludes, as he kills himself (offering a phrase echoed by the narrator toward the very end), ‘And there comes a point where the willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it, and even to assist it, become a sort of madness too. […] The madness is never going to end’ (485). Compared to other novels curiously What a Carve Up! is periodically more whimsical, generally lighter in comic tone and detail until the final killing phase, but still remains far more pessimistic as regards outcomes, significantly ending not on 22 November 1990 when ‘the Tory party leadership crisis came to a head and Mrs Thatcher was forced to resign’ (328), but does so on 17 January 1991 with George Bush’s speech as the invasion of Iraq begins, from which Coe selects key passages to integrate into his text. Our operations are designed to protect the lives of all the coalition forces by targeting Saddam’s vast military arsenal. We have no argument with the people of Iraq. Indeed for the innocents caught in the conflict, I pray for their safety. Would the madness never come to an end? (490–1)

Now deceased, Thatcher might have long departed the political stage, but her legacy (as Raluca Iliou’s chapter emphasizes), like that of her son, remains, producing ongoing conflicts and a lack of empathy in public life, especially for those subject to loss, poverty and suffering.



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Notes 1 One would surmise his name offers a deliberately less than subtle evocation of Thatcher’s own son. 2 In 2004 Sir Mark Thatcher was implicated in the Equatorial Guinea coup d’état attempt in early March, also labelled the Wonga coup, which failed to oust President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. Thatcher was arrested in South Africa, but initially denied financing the attempt. However, later he pleaded guilty, for which he received a four-year suspended sentence and a fine of about US$560,000. Despite later denials, Jack Straw, then Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, and Chris Mullin, Minister for Africa, had prior knowledge of the plot on Friday 30 January 2004. According to Ken Livingstone in early-day motion 827 raised in the House of Commons and later referred to in You Can’t Say That: Memoirs, earlier Mark Thatcher also participated in an Iraqi arms deal with Chile, breaking UN sanctions, whose investigation by Jonathan Moyle, a British reporter, into Dr Carlos Cardoen, the Chilean associate of Thatcher, led to the murder of Moyle in March 1990 in his Santiago hotel room (332). Coe’s victim gets away more lightly at the hands of a Winshaw, as Parker identifies in her chapter: ‘Graham is severely beaten when discovered to be making a documentary about Mark’s arms deals with Iraq’ (75).

Works cited Christie, Agatha. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. London: William Collins and Sons, 1926. Coe, Jonathan. ‘1980s.’ The Guardian. 26 May 2007: N.Pag.; https://www. theguardian.com/theguardian/2007/may/26/weekend7.weekend4. ——. The Accidental Woman. London: Duckworth, 1987. ——.‘The Death of Margaret Thatcher’. In Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements: Nonfiction, 1990-2013. London: Penguin, 2013; e-publication. ——. Expo 58. London: Viking, 2013. ——. The House of Sleep. London: Viking, 1997. ——. Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness. London: Viking, 2015. ——. ‘Perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s Death will Bring us Clarity’. The Guardian. 12 April 2013: N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/margaret-thatcherdeath-jonathan-coe. ——. What a Carve Up! or The Winshaw Legacy. London: Viking, 1994. Feinstein, Andrew. ‘Through the Barrel of a Gun: Can information from the Global Arms Trade Contribute to Genocide Prevention?’ In Reconstructing Atrocity

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Prevention, edited by Sheri P. Rosenberg, Tibi Galis and Alex Zucker, 196–206. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Flahault, François. Malice. Translated by Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 2003 [1998]. Guignery, Vanessa. ‘“Colonel Mustard, in the Billiard Room, with the Revolver”: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! as a Postmodern Whodunit.’ Etudes anglaises 64 (4) 2011: 427–38. ——. ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation’. Études britanniques contemporaines 51, 2016: N.Pag.; http://ebc.revues.org/3371. Gutkowski, Emanuela. ‘An “Investigation in Pragmatics”: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.’ Clues 29 (1) Spring 2011: 51–60. Hutchinson, Colin. Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel. Houndsmill, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Livingstone, Ken. You Can’t Say That: Memoirs. London: Faber & Faber, 2011; e-book. Phythian, Mark. ‘“Batting for Britain”: British Arms Sales in the Thatcher Years’. Crime, Law and Social Change 26 (3) September 1996: 271–300. Tew, Philip. ‘Jonathan Coe.’ In Writers Talk, edited by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson. London: Continuum, 2008. Trimm, Ryan. ‘Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe.’ In Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture, edited by Louise Hadley and Elizabeth Ho Houndsll, 158–79. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

1

Jonathan Coe: The Early Novels Merritt Moseley

Like many of Jonathan Coe’s readers, if not a majority, I imagine, I became a Coe reader because of What a Carve Up!. In the middle 1990s my family and I were visiting England, staying with friends in Suffolk. Without a book to read, one friend, a former teaching colleague, suggested and gave me his copy of a then unfamiliar novel by a then unheard of author, What a Carve Up!, allowing me to take it with me so I might finish the book. It came as an exhilarating blast, with its combination of postmodern jouissance, political outrage and comedy, which made it like no other book I knew. From that time forward, I was hooked on every new Coe novel, as soon as it became available. His next, The House of Sleep, has often also attracted many readers and much critical esteem, as has The Rotters’ Club – all of them appeal to readers who appreciate a combination of intricate plotting, formal dexterity and bracing humour. However, for many people What a Carve Up! remains still the novel for which he is best known, despite the seven subsequent novels.1 When John Mullan’s ‘Book Club’ in the Guardian turned to Coe’s work in 2011, What a Carve Up! was the title chosen for four weekly instalments. In that feature the author himself said, It’s become a matter of honour for most reviewers in this country (and many readers) to remind me as often as possible that What a Carve Up! is my  best novel. No middle-aged novelist who is still trying to make a living from writing likes to be told that his last five books are not a patch on the one he wrote when he was in his early 30s, but I suppose I’m obliged to entertain the idea that there might be something in it.

What a Carve Up! won major prizes, including the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in the UK and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was published

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in the United States, by Alfred A. Knopf, one of the foremost American firms, though under a different title (What a Carve Up! does not work as an allusion in the United States, where the movie to which it pays homage was called No Place Like Homicide and the slang term ‘carve-up’ is unknown). It drew his earlier books back into print, in Penguin paperbacks. Investigate the Coe career on Wikipedia: What a Carve Up! is the first book mentioned there. It was not until I began to think systematically about his complete career that I really became aware of the three novels published earlier. Very likely I  belonged in the vast majority of readers in being ignorant of these books, which are The Accidental Woman (1987), A Touch of Love (1989) and The Dwarves of Death (1990). Coe has been frank about their relative lack of worldly success, their sales being negligible. He reports that the first two books sold only about 300 copies each in hardback and then the remaining copies were pulped. The Dwarves of Death had a different publisher and in it he used a more sensational thriller plot in an attempt to boost the sales figures, though the results were not impressive. They are, nevertheless, worthy of serious attention: not just as important background for the books that followed, including What a Carve Up! but also of value in their own right rather than as ‘prentice work leading up to the real mature fiction. If he had not written What a Carve Up!, most readers would probably remain unaware of these three books; but that would be unfortunate, because even if they had been the beginning and ending of his career they would deserve our attention for qualities they possess in themselves. What are the significant qualities that these novels include that readers will find in What a Carve Up! and in the novels that follow it? Three stand out: First is provincial or ‘non-metropolitan’ characters and settings. These are partly explicable by reference to Jonathan Coe’s biography; Coe lives in London but in his novels remains stubbornly faithful to the provinces, and in particular to Birmingham and its southern suburbs. Maria, of The Accidental Woman, is from the West Midlands-Rubery-Lickey area that provides an important setting for so many Jonathan Coe novels, as well as the setting in which he grew up; Robin Grant of A Touch of Love is a student at Warwick University in Coventry, where Coe earned a PhD; and though William, in The Dwarves of Death, is in London for most of the duration of that book, he is from Sheffield, having lived in Leeds before going to London, where he returns at the end, declaring ‘Anything beats London’ (211). Second is feminist consciousness in the form of a pronounced and demonstrative thematizing of the ways in which men mistreat women.



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Maria is victimized by what may seem to be accident or randomness, though she acknowledges her own responsibility for at least one decision: that of marrying the brutal, violent and faithless Martin. She is let down, almost as badly though admittedly without physical attack, by her long-time suitor Ronny and by other men in her life. Katherine, the apex of the triangular relationship in A Touch of Love, is an offstage presence, though the narrator does note that in a series of ‘long and violent arguments’ (13) over how to spend money Katherine inherited from one of her relatives, her husband Ted had got his way, and ‘Physical force had not been necessary, after all’ (13). And The Dwarves of Death includes a strand of ongoing domestic violence that leads to a suicide attempt. Of The Accidental Woman, Coe said in ‘A Touch of Love’ that ‘with its female protagonist’ as well as its ‘deliberately experimental approach, was written as a conscious reaction against’ his first two highly autobiographical – and therefore presumably masculine-centred, never-published – novels. Third is politics. Aside from gender politics, the most politically insistent of the three novels is A Touch of Love, including its interrogation of the racism responsible for Robin Grant’s friend Aparna’s alienation and unhappiness. Most important in causing the despairing mood of Robin in that novel, however, is the 1986 attack on Libya by American bombers flying from bases in England. Robin expands on the illegality of Reagan’s actions, their callous destruction of human life, their disproportion to the provocation, their hypocrisy, and particularly his fury that Margaret Thatcher had allowed the United States to use UK air bases to launch the attack. He concludes: ‘“[H]ave you ever wondered what’s the point of making decisions in the first place, when the world’s run by maniacs, and we’re all at the mercy of interests outside our control, and we never know when something terrible might happen, like a war or something?”’ (19). It is an oddly striking fact that one repeated topos in Jonathan Coe’s novels is American military adventurism in the Middle East, with British collusion, and the anger which this arouses in his characters. In A Touch of Love, Reagan’s long-range bombers rain death on Gaddafi’s Libya from Oxfordshire. In What a Carve Up! the conflict is the first Gulf War against Iraq, provoking a scene in which Michael Owen turns on the television to confront a terrifying face, mean, unintelligent, untrustworthy, loveless: a face which gave out a simple, dreadful message: abandon hope, all you who look upon this face. Give up every thought of redemption, every prospect of escape. Expect nothing from me.

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The political analysis is more subtle in What a Carve Up! than Robin’s earlier diagnosis; the war is not driven simply by maniacs in charge but consciously contrived to serve powerful interests – most visibly those of Mark Winshaw, an international arms dealer. One might question which is more insidious, or more vile: war resulting from malevolent maniacs or from the unintended (and unregretted) consequences of the sale of weapons. And in The Closed Circle, the second Gulf War provides an important plot element, first as tragedy, and second as farce. As the Libyan bombing results from a crazy American president, the first Gulf War from a sinister cabal of arms dealers and other malevolent forces, The Closed Circle shows one possibly synecdochic MP, Paul Trotter, voting to endorse military action against Iraq so that his brother-in-law, a journalist, will have to go to the front, leaving his flat once again available for adulterous assignations. It is customary in writing about What a Carve Up! to quote Michael Owen’s words from his book review: We stand badly in need of novels, after all, which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country, which can see its consequences in human terms and show that the appropriate response lies not merely in sorrow and anger but in mad, incredulous laughter. (277)

A Touch of Love also addresses that need. My aim in what follows is to examine these three early books in an effort to demonstrate what each of these novels contributes to the Jonathan Coe Gestalt. In other words, why we should read these early Coe books, and, if we have read them before, why they would repay rereading.

The Coe anti-hero The Dwarves of Death is a good place to begin thinking about the prototypical Jonathan Coe protagonist. There is an autobiographical element to the story of William, a young man who tries to make it as a musician in London. Jonathan Coe has said that his first two novels, never published, were highly autobiographical; unsatisfied with them, he then turned to The Accidental Woman. However, in The Dwarves of Death he returns to a substantial proportion of autobiography,



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having its basis in his own experience as a keyboardist and music composer in a band. For comic purposes he has undoubtedly exaggerated the incompetence of William’s band; whereas as he says in ‘The Dwarves of Death’ in his own band, The Peer Group, the lyrics, written by the group’s drummer, were ‘quirky, oblique’, William sums up the lyrics written by his drummer as combining ‘the philosophical complexity of “Bat Out of Hell” with the raw rock’n’roll energy of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation’ (69–70). But the music is not up to much either, as he explains: ‘Our hold on the pathetically simple music we used to play remained as fragile as ever. It still wasn’t unknown for us to lose time completely in the middle of a twelve-bar blues’ (70–1). This is autobiographical material, then, refracted through a distorting lens to increase the comic futility of William’s ambitions: something like the moment in The Rotters’ Club when, in the midst of the first rehearsal of Ben Trotter’s band Gandalf ’s Pikestaff, half the personnel rebel and turn his arch ‘rock symphony’ into a punk thrash. The Dwarves of Death is (among other things) a ‘young man from the provinces’ novel (i.e. a member of the group that includes, say, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), and the futility of The Alaska Factory helps to explain William’s return to Leeds. How well William plays his instrument is left rather vague. He is a good enough musician to recognize the deficiencies of his bandmates, at any rate. When he reappears in 9th and 13th it is clear that he is a capable professional musician and composer of film scores. More important is what kind of a man he is. The plot of The Dwarves of Death gives us many examples of William’s indecisiveness and lack of agency. He is unable to impose himself on the musical career he desires. Romantically he is a failure, as well. Having left behind a girlfriend in Leeds, he meets a new, more beautiful woman in London, the icy, remote, tantalizing Madeline. On his first date, he finds himself carried away as ‘a swirl of feelings, compounded of desire and incipient affection and a wish to apologize, swept over me and it was all I could do to refrain from leaning across the table and kissing her long and gently on the mouth’ (97). As the evening ends he does kiss her but remembers ruefully, much later, ‘Perhaps I would have been less happy if I had known than on this first date, Madeline and I had come as physically close as we would ever come; that we would never surpass that kiss – wouldn’t even equal it, more often than not’ (97). As he later sums up his feelings: ‘In her absence, a simple longing; as soon as we were together again, irritation, petulance, angry devotion’ (120). In a scene ending with her shoving him down into his seat and denouncing him for stupidity, he concludes that the perfect symbol of their relationship is a

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plastic carton containing a half-eaten cheeseburger. But true to his feebleness, his indecisiveness, maybe even some degree of masochism, he pursues her to an even more conclusive humiliation. The other area of William’s wetness has to do with his flat-mate, a woman called Tina who (despite an arrangement whereby they seldom meet and communicate only through notes) William knows to be in danger from an abusive lover named Pedro. Typically he does nothing; here, too, ‘circumstances were sweeping me away, carrying me beyond the realm where decisions could be made and free will exercised’ (178), to Tina’s suicide attempt. I have said nothing about the more sensational part of the plot, the one in which two sinister dwarves in hoodies murder a recording engineer, in which a mysterious woman named Karla blows Pedro away with a shotgun, spraying William with body tissue, and William finds himself plunging down through an unsuspected opening in the recording studio into the ‘ink-black ice-cold waters of the Thames’ (209). Jonathan Coe’s comment in ‘The Dwarves of Death’ on these features is that he is ‘less happy with the murder-mystery plot which I grafted onto’ the musical background, and suggests that this decision was made for commercial reasons but ‘the plot doesn’t really work’. This is true; but what does work in The Dwarves of Death is the inauguration of a certain kind of protagonist. Later, discussing Michael Owen of What a Carve Up! Coe muses in the Guardian’s ‘Book Club’ on whether he can carry the weight of a long novel: ‘He is a very passive figure, certainly. In fact, thinking about it, seven out of my nine novels feature or are narrated by passive, slightly depressed men – often failed writers or composers or both – who show a rather uncommitted sexuality and tend to fixate on past romantic disappointments’. Michael also lacks the strength to force a moment to its crisis, sexually; Michael also fails to save a woman, his neighbour Fiona; he also balks at commitment and reaches quite a lucid self-assessment: ‘I had the sense (the sense which had never been far away, ever since my birthday visit to the cinema in Weston-super-Mare) that it was my destiny to act the part of a shy, awkward, vulnerable little man caught up in a sequence of nightmarish events over which he had absolutely no control’ (302). Michael Owen, to be sure, confronts more powerful forces than an indifferent girlfriend or even a gang of frightening dwarves, in the shape of the Winshaw family; in his world the best all lack conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The most extreme later avatar of the ineffectual William type is clearly Maxwell Sim; he is just as indecisive, just as unable to read clues or to act on them with any forcefulness if he should interpret them, as William; just as hesitant to



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act on clear invitations, he is dim and uninformed as well and lacks the artistic ambitions, unfulfilled or frustrated though they may be, of William, or Michael Owen, or Ben Trotter. And of course in these later non-heroes, what in the Guardian’s ‘Book Club’ Coe calls ‘a rather uncommitted sexuality’ moves beyond being a hesitant or fraught heterosexuality unable to impose itself, undercut and paralysed by selfdoubt, to become the late-recognized homosexuality of Maxwell Sim or the confusion and gender reassignment of Robert in The House of Sleep. Perhaps these adjustments explain the early hesitancy of Maxwell and Robert, their inability to function with women; perhaps they are just particularly acute instances of uncommitted sexuality.

A continuous dialogue with form Robin Grant, of A Touch of Love, might seem the same sort of man as William, or Michael Owen. He is certainly sexually inert, and he is unsuccessful in his professional work – postgraduate study in English. There is a sometimes bleak comedy in this novel, most of it about the condition of postgraduate students, and Coe writes on his web page for A Touch of Love that in this book he ‘returned to the autobiographical mode. The main character, Robin, is identifiably a version of myself, and several of the other characters are also based on friends and acquaintances from my time at Warwick University’. Robin develops a fantasy of what it will be like to be interviewed when he is forty-six and a famous writer. One of the imagined questions invites him to compare the ‘Coventry group’ to the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s and 1930s, ‘but whereas JeanPaul Sartre and friends had cafes like The Dome to meet at, we tended to drink our coffee out of paper cups in the local Burger King’ (133). Asked to identify ‘the main characteristics of the group’ he offers ‘Pallor, depression, extreme social gracelessness, malnutrition and sexual inexperience’ (134). Robin goes on to discuss his own writings, which fall into two categories: his creative writing, which has never been published – further divided into two subcategories, that which has been read and rejected and that which has never been read – and his critical writing (i.e. his thesis), which has never been written. Much of this is a commentary on the obscurity and poverty and apparent pointlessness of the postgraduate student’s life. However, Robin is more than a typically alienated postgraduate, more than just a vulnerable little man, as his desperate love for another man’s wife, his political anguish and his despairing

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suicide testify. He is more than ‘slightly depressed’, Coe’s description of him in the Guardian’s ‘Book Club’; he is so in extremis. These characteristics distinguish him from the schlemiel category occupied by William, or Maxwell Sim, or some others in Coe’s fiction. What is most distinctive and valuable about A Touch of Love, however, is its innovation in form. Robin Grant is a postgraduate doing a thesis in English literature – or rather not doing one – but he is also a writer of fiction. In the course of the novel, four of his short stories appear, interpolated into the master narrative. They are read, with varying degrees of sympathy or comprehension, by a fellow postgraduate, Hugh; by his so-called old friend Ted; and by his solicitor Emma, supposed to be defending him on a charge of public indecency. There are two ways to account for these stories and their role in the novel. The author in ‘A Touch of Love’ has given the very practical explanation that he thought the short stories might qualify for separate publication independent of the novel. Another explanation that occurs to me, at any rate, is Coe’s thesis work on Henry Fielding, in whose novels are multiple examples of interpolated or inserted stories – ‘Leonora, or the Unfortunate Flirt’ in Joseph Andrews, or ‘The Man of the Hill’s Tale’ in Tom Jones. Whatever explanation Fielding himself would offer for his practice, it is known that Dickens, another regular interpolator, included heterogeneous inset tales in his early novels because he had some short stories on hand and, by assigning a character to narrate them, was able to use them to fill out his monthly instalments of The Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby. In A Touch of Love the stories serve a more important purpose and are more relevant, thematically. Robin Grant’s four stories provide a perspective that a reader can use, though cautiously, to understand his predicament. The fictional readers within the text – Hugh, Ted, Emma – are all more or less indifferent to, and unenlightened by, their reading. Ted is both bored and baffled by the first of them, ‘The Meeting of Minds,’ and Hugh sums up the last one, ‘The Unlucky Man,’ with ‘He was just playing around. This is the least relevant of the stories to anything that Robin really thought’ (222). The most sympathetic reader, solicitor Emma, permits herself to be persuaded that Robin’s second story, ‘The Lucky Man,’ ‘accepts a perverse sexuality as being normal’ – as the attorney prosecuting him for indecency claims, ‘and even goes so far as to celebrate the confusion and unpleasantness which it brings about’ (122), providing a model of obtuse reading, mistaking teller for tale, fiction for confession. The stories, then, provide a metafictional dimension to the novel in at least two ways. Fictions within a fiction, they rehearse different versions of Robin’s own



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situation, through fabulation (at a very granular level, each contains a relationship between an ‘R’ and a ‘K’ that refers to Robin’s unrequited love for Katherine). Likewise they include observations which the reader is invited to ponder for their relevance to A Touch of Love: for instance, ‘The Lucky Man’ contains philosophizing by a fictional Lawrence to the effect that ‘“everything we do is merely determined by chance; or as I call it, luck”’ (99). (We remember that two of the stories are ‘The Lucky Man’ and ‘The Unlucky Man’.) Or, ‘There are no explanations beyond those which consist of chains of cause and effect much too large and complicated ever to be traced’ (100). How does this theory apply to A Touch of Love? Without doubt Coe shows Robin’s current loveless state as arising partly from unluckiness at Cambridge (exacerbated by shyness), and the charge of public indecency results from the bad luck of getting caught up with Ted, filling his bladder with too much tea, and being in the shrubbery when a child’s football rolls into his retreat. The interpolated tales provide a metafictional dimension in another way: by being read, in ways that ramify outward to how we read the novel in our hands, the novel in which they are inset. Such fictional readings are all misreadings, perhaps inevitably. Emma’s initially sympathetic but easily distracted one, giving in to what she knows is a naïve and reductive autobiographical misreading, is not the worst, nor is Ted’s – Ted is a self-satisfied and brutal philistine whose response is a ‘cavernous yawn’ and ‘“This explains nothing”’ (50). Hugh, despite his PhD in English, is the least curious, dismissing ‘The Unlucky Man’ as without relevance to what Robin was actually thinking, though it (like ‘The Lucky Man’) dramatizes suicidal intentionality, which, at least when read afterwards, in the light of Robin’s suicide, might be considered relevant to his own thinking. With one exception, Coe’s later novels do not exploit the possibilities of interpolation in such a systematic way, but they often intersperse a main narrative with inset narratives that serve some of the same multifarious function, including thematic contrasts. Examples would include Terry Worth’s ‘Fragments from a Life in Movies,’ in The House of Sleep, cuttings from The Bill Board in The Rotters’ Club, and the profusion of diverse texts in What a Carve Up!, including Henry Winshaw’s diary, Hilary Winshaw’s journalism, newspaper reports and Michael Owen’s juvenile fiction or book reviews, as well as the chapters of The Winshaw Legacy that alternate with Michael’s homodiegetic recounting of his own story. Rarely does one of Jonathan Coe’s novels show the unity of tone and texture that would result from one narrator telling one story in more or less one register from beginning to end. He has usually employed bricolage, using one text to comment on another, to change the perspective, to provide a different quality of information and to manipulate ironies.

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The later novel to which the structure of A Touch of Love demands close comparison is The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. There a master narrative, Maxwell’s homodiegetic narrative of an eventful few months in an otherwise nearly uneventful life, is penetrated by four interpolated stories. More or less by accident – but then all of Coe’s novels explore the role of accident in human affairs, not just the ones that foreground it explicitly – Max comes across four texts: a letter about Donald Crowhurst, a short story written about him by his ex-wife, a college essay written by an old family friend and an autobiographical confession by his father. Introduced into his life and consciousness fortuitously, or at least in what in A Touch of Love is described as a result of a long chain of ‘“cause and effect much too large and complicated ever to be traced”’ (100), each of these documents serves to enlighten Maxwell about some part of himself and his background, eventually leading to his recognition of his real nature. These two novels, early and late, A Touch of Love and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, share the fourfold interpolative scheme, and in the later book Coe has thematized it by relating it to Eliot’s Four Quartets and to earth, air, fire and water. Ontologically they differ in that in A Touch of Love the main character is himself the author of the stories placed within a larger narrative with an extradiegetic narrator, while other characters are offered the chance to read them, possibly to learn something from them. In The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim the clueless narrator comes across texts that make him – slowly – less clueless. In that novel the enlightenment runs in one direction, from texts written by more aware authors toward Max, providing a gradual éclaircissement. In A Touch of Love they are mutually reinforcing, though for us, the ‘external’ readers rather than any of the fictional readers.

Tone Robin Grant is a depressed man, numb with erotic failure and academic futility and feeling (accurately) that ‘Forces would seem to be conspiring against me’ (71). In Robin’s short stories, though, there is a different voice, more decisive, ironic, inventive. In his first story, ‘The Meeting of Minds,’ the narrator comments: I dislike this mode of writing. You pretend to be transcribing your characters’ thoughts (by what special gift of insight?) when in fact they are merely your own, thinly disguised. The device is feeble, transparent, and leads to all sorts of grammatical clumsiness. So I shall try to confine myself, in future, to honest (honest!) narrative. (34)



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This is the sort of metafictional comment that ramifies outward, putting Coe’s novel, the narrative in which it fictionally exists, under the same sort of contestation; by what special gift does the narrator know that Robin has a ‘quiet suspicion that Ted is kidding himself ’ (67)? On the page following his expression of distaste for fictionalizing, he refers to ‘nuanced shades of ambivalence and contrariety that it would frankly bore the backside off the pair of us if I were to try describing them’ (35). This meta-commentary finds its way briefly into the main narrator’s discourse, which at one point mentions Katherine – who is not, in case you were wondering, going to be allowed a voice in this story, because it is the story of Robin and Ted, who have both, in their different ways, resolved to keep her out of it. Which is a pity, in a way, because I think you would have preferred Katherine to either of them, had you been allowed to meet her. (63–4)

The tone in Robin’s stories, knowing, sceptical, sardonic, quick to raise epistemological questions about fiction, has something in common with Fielding, something in common with Beckett, but more with B. S. Johnson, the other novelist whom Jonathan Coe has acknowledged as a major influence at the time he was writing his early novels. The comment that questions the ‘honesty’ of fiction is a particularly Johnsonian trope, as are some of the frame-breaking, jokey observations about sympathetic characters or readers’ tolerance for boredom in B. S. Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry: ‘Headlam paused to provide a paragraph break for resting the reader’s eye in what might otherwise have been a daunting mass of type’ (100). Eventually the Johnsonian narrator, in direct address to the fictional character Christie Malry, declares ‘it does not seem to me possible to take this novel much further’ (165). More vehemently, in a statement, Coe quotes in Like a Fiery Elephant (17). The narrator of Albert Angelo cries, ‘fuck all this lying look what im trying to write about is writing […] telling stories is telling lies’ (167). Like a Fiery Elephant, Coe’s Samuel Johnson Prize-winning biography of B. S. Johnson, gives a good account of the aporia into which Johnson led himself by insisting on writing novels while furiously denouncing fiction as lying. Coe has not followed him all the way down that hole, fortunately, but in his first novel, The Accidental Woman, his narrative voice is insistent on at least reminding the reader of the fictiveness of his own, and presumably all, fiction. This is the novel in which the Johnsonian tendency in Coe finds fullest expression, including various self-conscious and ironic instructions and reminders from the narrator to the reader, such as the following:

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Here you are to imagine a short scene of family jubilation, I’m buggered if I can describe one (14). Now: irony coming up. (73) Besides, first of all, we must describe these colleagues, attempt a little bit of characterization for a change. (108) It is customary, of course, when it comes to stories like this, to believe whatever the author tells you, and yet I can imagine that for some of you there might be a problem in taking at face value my assertion in the first sentence of this chapter. (86)

And consider another about his protagonist Maria and her sex life: Why describe all the gropings, the senseless fumbles and thrusts which this poor misguided couple executed upon each other on warm spring afternoons and clammy evenings? Why enumerate, in the hope of enlightening or perhaps even arousing the reader, the various gasps, kisses, groans, caresses, stains and clasps which characterize this ludicrous pantomime? Far better to forget, as Maria tried often and vainly to forget, the hours she had spent with this man in the flagging pursuit of a hazy gratification. (48–9)

Other narratorial comments in An Accidental Woman satirize not the concept of fiction tout court but the type of fiction to which A Touch of Love sometimes seems to be straining to belong, the romantic Bildungsroman or student-focused campus novel. Winifred was all that Maria wasn’t, and more. She was an open, happy, confident and trusting person, who believed in the benevolence of God, the sanctity of marriage, and the innate goodness of human nature. She was moronic in other ways, too. (58)

Or the scene in which a happier girl, Charlotte, resolves to teach Maria ‘the little feminine wiles and ways’ (70) that will help her with men: Little gestures, Maria, and little actions, which render men helpless, which turn them to putty in our hands. These had turned out to be, in ascending order of effectiveness, the fluttering of the eyelashes, the crossing of the legs, and the sucking of the penis. (70–1)

I have quoted extensively because this voice is so bracing, so funny, so exhilarating, in its sarcasm about Maria, about love and about fiction. However, paradoxically, despite the narrator’s ostentatious lack of evinced sympathy for his heroine, despite much effort to teach the reader that a novel is in the words of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-two-Birds ‘a self-evident sham to which the



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reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity’ (19), despite apparently heartless scoffing at his Maria, despite finding her thoughts finally as opaque as those of a bird, there is a perverse engagement, even a feeling for Maria. Despite the deadpan delivery of the fact that it was ‘rare’ for Maria’s husband ‘actually to kick her in the face’ (89) during sexual intercourse, it is impossible for a sensitive reader not to care, even about the self-evident and elaborately announced figment that is the invented Maria. In an account of her love for music, the narrator relates that all that she had ever asked was to be afforded a faint sense of wonder in the face of inaccessible beauty, a loveliness far in the future or far in the past, far off anyway, on which her attention would really be fixed while she stared, halfseeing, at the unwinking red light shining like a tiny beacon in the dark. (55)

Such plangency coexists with the narrator’s irreverent, even mocking tone elsewhere, but it leaves its mark on the final page, in which a lark took another look at her, saw her dwindle, spiralled, saw her move, saw her smaller and smaller still, climbed, looked again, saw her little figure on the hillside, climbed higher, and higher again, and then saw only the hillside, where we must leave her, leave her to her last calm, Maria, a speck in the unseen, homeward bound, alone, and indifferent, indifferent even in the face of death which who knows may be the next thing chance has in store for her. (165)

A striking continuity among these first three books is that each of them, at some point, insists on the meaninglessness of human events, claiming that everything happens through luck or accident (The Accidental Woman asserts this in its title); all three investigate, at least, the contingency or purposelessness of what happens to people. At the same time the form of the fiction illustrates the opposite, a designed, constructed, carefully shaped formal artifice in which nothing seems accidental. Accidental reality filtered through, or represented as, carefully patterned art. After these first three books, we still stand in need of the kind of novel Michael Owen called for in What a Carve Up!, and of course, in that novel we get it: painstakingly developed, brilliantly observed, furiously revelatory, darkly hilarious. Yet first there was a longer than usual preparation period. After three novels in four years, What a Carve Up! did not appear for five more years; and clearly it was more ambitious – longer (only a bit shorter than the combined length of these three early texts), deeper, more provocative. It reminds us of what went before, especially the aspects Coe highlights in the Guardian’s

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‘Book Club’, describing its hero as ‘passive, slightly depressed,’ with ‘a rather uncommitted sexuality’; as well as its formal ingenuity and originality; its ready political outrage; its advancement in Coe’s continuing dialogue with form; its epistemological scepticism and metafictional critique; its exploration of causality and contingency. And the precursors of these elements, which contribute to the undoubted greatness of the novel, are to be found in The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love and The Dwarves of Death.

Note 1 The critical reception of his 2015 novel, Number 11, is further proof that reviewers see What a Carve Up! as a touchstone (references to the Winshaw family, of course, invite the comparison).

Works cited Coe, Jonathan. The Accidental Woman. London: Penguin, 2000 [1987]. ——.‘Book Club: What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe.’ The Guardian. 16 April 2011; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/16/jonathan-coe-carve-book-club. ——. The Dwarves of Death. London: Penguin, 2001 [1990]. ——. ‘The Dwarves of Death.’ Jonathan Coe website. www.jonathancoewriter.com/books/ dwarvesOfDeath.html. ——. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. New York: Continuum, 2005. ——. ‘A Touch of Love.’ Jonathan Coe website. www.jonathancoewriter.com/books/ aTouchofLove.html. ——. A Touch of Love. London: Penguin, 2000 [1989]. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Penguin, 1995 [1994]. Johnson, B. S. Albert Angelo. London: Constable, 1964. ——. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. New York: New Directions, 1985 [1973]. O’Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two Birds. Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.

2

Jonathan Coe’s Stories of Sadness Joseph Brooker

Jonathan Coe is a comic writer. He can be subtle, but he also glories in sheer silliness and punchlines – like the story in What a Carve Up! (1994) of the born-again Christian who left the church while creating a family and whose three children are thus called Faith, Hope and Brenda (151). This is the writer who can have a character in Expo 58 (2013) exclaim ‘The barmaid? Surely not!’, and have it taken as a reference to her name: ‘Yes – Shirley Knott. Precisely’ (242). With gags like that we are in the verbal airspace of Airplane, mingled with Morecambe and Wise or post-war British radio comedy. And somewhat more seriously, we know Coe for pointed political and social satire. All of these co-exist in his fiction. Yet his work is characterized just as much by other feelings. This chapter seeks to identify an aspect that is consistently present across the novels, yet less often remarked on than the elements mentioned above. Put simply, Coe’s fiction, though so often comic, is also much preoccupied with sadness. Other cognate, but distinct, words would include melancholy, depression, unhappiness and grief. The subsequent analysis seeks to work through some inflections of this element across a number of Coe’s novels. I shall show that several of Coe’s works contain an unhappy undertow alongside the joy of comedy. This chapter explores the following questions. How many kinds of unhappiness are involved? How does Coe articulate sadness? What are we sad about? First, I will consider the determined refusal of pathos in Coe’s first novel; second, his frequent presentation of damaged or thwarted characters, often in connection with missed opportunities; third, the pathos of the mundane in Coe’s writing; and fourth, a short consideration of Coe’s least comic novel in the light of these themes.

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What little fun Coe’s first novel, The Accidental Woman (1987), presents a peculiar case in this context. The reader witnesses its protagonist Maria from her attainment of a place at Oxford to what seems her willingness to die a decade or so later, via her years at university, an ill-judged marriage, poor relationships with friends and much time spent alone. Part of the novel’s theme is chance, a neo-existentialist sense of the world as contingent and reflecting no significant causality or usefully plannable outcome. ‘All her life’, she reflects, ‘she had, it was starting to seem, been at the mercy of forces beyond her control’ (105). On the first page Coe amusingly announces Maria’s presence with the parenthesis ‘(for it is she, as chance would have it)’ (1), and the last line declares her ‘indifferent even in the face of death which who knows may be the next thing chance has in store for her’ (165). Intervening events have a peculiarly blank quality, yielding little pleasure for the protagonist; and all this is narrated by a sardonic, highly interventionist voice which highlights Maria’s detachment and lack of joy. Thus a glimpse of beauty in Oxford in summer: ‘A tremor of gladness, that’s all, hardly noticed, and hardly to be trusted, for she had only her own word for it, alone’ (31). Here the character’s solipsism appears to undercut the certainty that what she has experienced was pleasure at all. Later, once she moves to Chester, the narrator presents an overview of her life: ‘Which did Maria enjoy less, the weekdays, or the weekends? Difficult to answer’ (146). The mood of the book is not primarily one of suffering – though Maria’s marriage, taking up one chapter, is unhappy and abusive – but it is one in which time often seems merely to pass and events must simply be endured. Coe’s debut seeks to present a kind of self that finds little value in one thing rather than another, and that often responds to ordinary questions or suggestions with incomprehension. The narrative is thus relatively bleached of value or feeling, save that the ostentatious narrative voice, heavily indebted to the early Samuel Beckett, has its own moods, and is frequently more expressive than the protagonist: ‘Let’s be honest, I begin to weary of Maria, and her story, just as Maria begins to weary of Maria, and her story. What little fun there ever was in her, and in it, seems to have quite gone away’ (148). The novel is thus distinctly low on happiness. Yet it does have things to say about that feeling. One lengthy disquisition expounds on its elusiveness, informing us that when Maria looked back on a period and thought of ‘how happy she had been then, slightly exaggerating of course’, ‘she would feel a small shudder take place inside her, not unrelated to fear’. For



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There is nothing more miserable than the memory of happiness. […] By the same token, or do I mean the opposite token, there is nothing more pleasurable than the anticipation of happiness. […] For happiness itself, it seemed to Maria, had very little meaning in relation to the time spent either looking forward to it or remembering it. Furthermore the actual experience of it seemed entirely unconnected with the experience of anticipating or recollecting it. […] The truth is that Maria was only really happy when she was thinking of happiness to come, and she was not I think alone in this absurd outlook. (33–4)

The argument is part of the novel’s remorseless character. Without sentiment, it pares away at what it indicates are the illusions of human well-being, suggesting how limited the margins of happiness in life actually are. The effect is not so much a dark or despairing worldview, more a cold-eyed lack of illusion, in keeping with the anti-novelistic, nouveau-romanesque mood in which human projects are not to be overestimated against the blunt contingency of the world. All this suggests that, in a curious combination, The Accidental Woman depicts unhappiness, but lacks pathos. The events are sometimes brutal in their unpleasantness, as when we hear of Maria’s treatment by her husband: ‘Violence came to play an important part. Nothing nasty, just the occasional stranglehold or bite, it was rare for him actually to kick her in the face at such moments’ (89). Yet even such behaviour is not granted much moral significance by the narrator: as the above quotation shows, the tendency is to remain blithe even about brutality. The entire sixth chapter shows such relentlessly callous behaviour, but with a cheerful flatness, which largely precludes any moral judgement save what readers might arrive at themselves. The Accidental Woman is noticeably a young man’s book, with both qualities pertinent to its sardonic tone: the youthful experiment with the avoidance of sentiment is also arguably a masculine performance. In all this, the novel presents a contrast with the tone that, I propose, eventually becomes crucial to Coe. Yet perhaps the book is not altogether bereft of pathos. Much of the material it shows is continuous with later novels: the suburban bus terminal (5), the family home with its well-meaning but unappreciated and unfocused parents (14–16), the solitary lunch hour feeding birds (104), and the strained English friendships. Presenting all this with nihilistic detachment, the novel seems to drain it of the feelings associated with it. Yet the pathos of the material arguably lingers despite the novel’s denial of it; perhaps even because of that denial, as the refusal of feeling itself provokes an emotional reaction. Maria’s haplessness and, much of the time, her indifference to it are poignant, even as the narrator refuses to entertain poignancy. The novel’s refusal to take sadness

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seriously compounds the sadness. Coe’s later work will take a different tone and allow more space for such feeling in its own right. The penultimate page of The Accidental Woman, as Maria walks in a park remembered from childhood, offers a model of both these tendencies in Coe’s writing, juxtaposed in quick succession: ‘She felt suddenly and savagely sad to have seen her parents looking so old. But even this moment passed, and in its wake Maria felt, now, a curious lack of emotion’ (164).

Lost opportunities Taken at face value, Maria’s flatness of response to many of the people she meets is unusual, to the point of unrealism. It might even be read as a literary representation of a kind of autistic condition that is (thanks in part to fictions like Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time [2003]) a much more familiar token in cultural conversation now than when Coe wrote his first book. One need not pursue this particular anachronism, but one can note that other characters in Coe’s fiction also display unusual conditions which place them at odds with normative codes of behaviour. Robin Grant, a central character in Coe’s second novel A Touch of Love (1989), is increasingly isolated from the rest of society, even from the university at which he is supposed to be writing a doctoral thesis. Visited by his old college acquaintance, Ted, Robin describes his state of mind: ‘“I think I must need some rest. I feel as though I need to talk. I need to see someone. I need to get away. I need to be alone. I feel frightened. […] I don’t know what I’ve been doing, these last few days. I don’t know where I’ve been. […] I feel exhausted. I feel cold and hungry”’ (12). Talking to an imaginary interviewer, Robin later states: ‘I have absolutely no sense of self […] I feel quite hollow’ (134); ‘I look inside myself and I see this emptiness at the centre […] It scares me almost to death’ (143). Indeed Robin does commit suicide (180), as it seems that Maria does at the end of the previous novel. It is plain that the early Coe’s jovial modes of narration co-exist with the depiction of despair. Other such serious conditions of maladjustment recur through Coe’s fiction. In The Rotters’ Club (2001), Lois Trotter is traumatized by a pub bombing, and one chapter takes the form entirely of her brother Benjamin’s solicitous monologue to her as he takes her for a walk. Eventually he breaks into his chatter of news to beseech her: ‘“Oh Lois, I wish you’d say something, just something, I know you’re listening to me and I know you understand everything I say and I know you like it when I give you all this stupid news about school but if only you could



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just say something again […] You are going to be all right again. You have to be”’ (171). Here Coe comes close to the interest in traumatized states shown by many writers of the period, as Roger Luckhurst records in The Trauma Question (2008). Yet usually his characters are damaged for less violently immediate reasons. At the beginning of What a Carve Up! the novel’s protagonist, Michael Owen, has barely spoken to anyone in over two years (54). He is unsure whether his telephone is connected, unable to focus on what his neighbour, Fiona, says, and unconsciously tries to turn her off like the video recorder and TV that dominate his life (58). He is in part warped by his youthful experience of the film What a Carve Up! (1961), in which he identifies with the actor Kenneth Connor in his encounter with Shirley Eaton. After the viewing is abruptly halted by his concerned mother, the experience leaves Michael transfixed, knowing he ‘can never forget about it’ (42–3): thirty years later he is still sexually fixated on the same scene (47–9). He also cites the break-up of his marriage in ensuring that ‘the 1980s weren’t a good time for me, on the whole’ (102); but his isolation from society proves to result from his break with his mother, following her revelation that the man who brought him up was not his biological father (418–19). When Michael reconciles with his mother, Coe elaborates: ‘He now believed that his two or three years’ subsequent withdrawal from the world could be seen as a period of sustained mourning – a theory supported, if support were needed, by Freud’s essay on the subject, “Mourning and Melancholia”’ (427). Inserted into the flow of revelation and family drama, the superfluous scholarship of this is one of Coe’s finest jokes. However, we can also take it somewhat at face value: Coe really is suggesting that Michael corresponds roughly to Freud’s category of the melancholic, who, rather than working through the mourning process in an efficient and proportionate way, becomes fixated on his loss and unable to progress in life. With hindsight, something similar may be said of Michael’s analogously paralysed precursor Robin Grant. Michael’s melancholia is apparently caused by his mother’s sudden revelation. Yet Coe’s characters also often feel afflicted not merely by outward events but by their own actions, or still more often their inaction. An abiding theme is the inability to seize the moment or be bold; the missed connection. Thus Robin in A Touch of Love reflects: ‘Do you ever feel […] that you’ve gone through your whole life making the wrong decisions? Or worse still, that you’ve never really made any decisions? You can see that there were times when you might have been able to – help someone, for instance, but you never had the courage to do it?’ (19)

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He goes on to qualify this suggestion in a way that makes it still more negative: ‘Or even worse than that, have you ever wondered what’s the point of making decisions in the first place, when the world’s run by maniacs, and we’re all at the mercy of interests outside our control, and we never know when something terrible might happen, like a war or something?’ (19)

Here Coe’s exploration of emotion connects with another dimension of his fiction: the political. Coe is frequently interested in the political contexts that affect people’s lives, yet he also frequently suggests that, just as Maria remains metaphysically ‘at the mercy of forces beyond her control’ (105), many ordinary people lack significant influence over those historical forces that define them. Political power remains a ‘closed circle’. In this, Robin is a precursor to Michael Owen in What a Carve Up!, who also feels that the distant Gulf War, ‘something that was happening thousands of miles away’, is ‘one of the forces conspiring against’ him and Fiona (411) – though Michael, unlike Robin, does manage briefly to penetrate to the precincts of the powerful and observe their demise. Robin is even more unable to affect the political world than he is to produce his own writing. In response to Ronald Reagan’s invocation of ‘free people’, he comments: ‘Well, I’m sorry, I don’t feel free any more. I feel powerless, and frightened, and angry’ (141). Robin is greatly affected by political news, but his regrets are primarily romantic. Thus the visit of Ted, who is married to their old college friend Katharine, prompts Robin’s memory of his failure to tell her of his feelings: [It] would have been quite obvious to most people that Katharine had always suspected, and it was only because she had despaired, in the end, of his ever making his intentions clear, that Ted’s blunt, straightforward proposal had come like a break in the clouds. And so if Robin had only been a little more dynamic, a little more decisive, then who knows, she might have married him, in the fullness of time, and they would all have lived happily ever after. (63)

A self-critical insight arrives as follows: ‘Like many people, I like carrying around a sense of lost opportunity with me, it gives my life some sort of aesthetic aspect, and it is a good excuse for feeling unhappy when things are not going well’ (142). Robin’s self-analysis here suggests that the ‘lost opportunity’ is something of a facade. Yet this does not prevent such a condition repeatedly affecting Coe’s characters. Thus Maria in The Accidental Woman misses, narrowly and for utterly contingent reasons, communicating with the potential boyfriend who might have changed her life. If that novel has a turning point, this is it, and it is



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one that Maria repeatedly reverts to. Michael in What a Carve Up! contemplates his friend Joan in bed. When she suddenly awakes and invites him to join her, he flees. He later reflects: How different my life might have been, how very different, if I had stepped into her room instead of slipping back into the darkness as quickly and as silently as a dream slips from the waking mind. (304)

Maxwell Sim in the novel bearing his name visits an old friend, Alison, in Edinburgh. He spends a very short chapter describing, in a compelling surprise for the reader, how they overcome inhibitions and get together at last: then flatly tells us that none of it happened, and lets the narrative return to his life of disappointment and awkwardness. Or again, in Expo 58, the protagonist Thomas Foley finally overcomes his own inhibitions and spends the night with a Belgian woman, Anneke. Back in England, his mother tells him to forget the stupidity of leaving his wife; he writes to Anneke to renounce any further contact. Coe writes: ‘Even when it was finished, he was not happy with the result. How could he be?’ (233). Many years later, he wonders why he finally prized his unhappy marriage above all else: As he grew older, it seemed to him more and more likely that he had done a cruel thing, not by marrying her, but by staying married to her. That was the real pity of it: he had condemned her, through vacillation, to a lifetime of unrest. (250)

The following and final chapter leaps briskly through time, recording events from 1958 to 2009, when Thomas Foley meets up with an old friend and hears what has happened to Anneke in the intervening fifty years. There is poignancy in this chronological projection. The news that Anneke married an Italian, had children and worked hard in a shop seems banal, next to the preceding drama in the novel – yet reality is apt to be banal in that way. The long passing of time; the registration of how mundane people’s lives have turned out to be; the seemingly inescapable regret for the life you never led: here Coe strikes some of the keynotes of his art. One precursor for certain tones in Coe’s writing might be found in Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Afternoons’ (1959). In this portrait of suburban disappointment, Summer is fading: The leaves fall in ones and twos From trees bordering The new recreation ground.

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The mothers confront an ‘estateful of washing’ as their lives pass, unfulfilled in ways that they leave unvoiced. Larkin concludes with a piercing insight into the sacrifices that have come with time’s passage for these women: Something is pushing them To the side of their own lives. (115)

The lines foresee the condition experienced by several of Coe’s characters. Michael Owen feels marginalized by the plot of his own life, and must come to discover how he has somehow been central to it all along. In much less complex and active ways, other novels also show people who feel peripheral to their own lives, or would do if they stopped to confront and articulate their situation. The accidental woman Maria’s fate is shaped by chance, and agency is lacking in different degrees for Benjamin Trotter, Maxwell Sim and Thomas Foley. Such a lack of control over one’s own destiny can lead to quietly bewildered regret. Something similar is true of a fictional character who stands as one of Coe’s literary models: Jock McLeish, narrator of Alasdair Gray’s 1982 Janine (1984). As an isolated onanist, McLeish is a direct precursor of Coe’s Michael Owen. But he is also embittered, sado-masochistic, obscene, self-loathing and furious. His monologue is unhappy, but rancorous in a way quite unlike the stifled regrets experienced by Coe’s figures. (It is relevant that he is Scottish, and sees Scotland as conniving in its subjugation just as he has done himself.) The contrast may help us to see Coe’s characters more clearly. Unlike McLeish, they rarely utter cries of desperation and fury. They might think of doing so – then find that either no one is listening, or that an embarrassing social situation has developed. They shuffle back into conformity, keeping up appearances. And here again is sadness, resulting from embarrassment, obedience and the inability to express fury and despair. Sadness is something that Coe’s modest, shy, English characters experience, or generate without fully knowing it, in the absence of fury and despair.

Rich tea The regret of the road not taken has been one of Coe’s great themes, though when his characters do the opposite and act boldly and decisively, that can equally lead to a regrettable outcome. But the sadness that characterizes Coe’s novels is not always so determinately tied to a particular decision. It can also, like that conveyed by Larkin’s poem, be more diffuse: a mood, a reflection of life



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which seems almost inescapable. One passage represents this theme particularly well, and merits close consideration. It typifies the way that at his best, Coe can generate not merely laughter but also emotional delicacy. Three quarters through What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen recalls the heart attack and illness that his father experienced a few years earlier, dying after two or three weeks at the age of sixty-one. I’d come up from London as soon as I heard the news and for the first time in many years I was staying under my parents’ roof. It was a peculiar experience, to be back in that newly unfamiliar house, in that suburb which was half-town and half-country, and many mornings were spent sitting at the desk in my old bedroom, looking out at the view which had once marked the full extent of my experience and aspiration, while my mother remained downstairs, trying to find housework to occupy herself or solemnly filling in one of the numerous magazine or newspaper crosswords to which she was by then addicted. (325–6)

The image of the character returning to his childhood home carries a capacity for poignancy which Coe will play upon in the passage ahead. The difference between childhood innocence and adult experience; the regret that this difference may bring; and simply the sense of emotional exposure in a character confronted with the different horizons with which he grew up, are all pertinent. There is also poignancy in his mother’s ‘trying to find housework to occupy herself ’ – not least because this attempt arises primarily from her unstated wish to distract herself from her husband’s mortal illness. However, significantly, it is not the fatal condition itself that is poignant here: it is the mundane means the mother deploys to deflect from it. The poignancy of the mundane is central to this aspect of Coe’s writing. Michael proceeds to relate how he and his mother settled on a daily pattern of visits to his dying father, with two periods of visiting hours at the hospital: We would emerge from the hospital into the visitors’ car park and the bright afternoon sunshine, and my mother, who had completely lost the capacity (although it had never before deserted her in the last twenty-five years) to plan her shopping more than a few hours in advance, would drive us both to the local supermarket to buy some packets of frozen food for our evening meal. (326)

We start here to confront the difficulty of the scenario: people in the midst of life, faced with illness that will lead to death. Yet the difficulty is very gently handled by the author. Michael’s mother has lost the capacity to plan her shopping: clearly because of her distress and inner turmoil over her husband’s heart attack.

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Something dramatic and painful has happened to this woman’s inner, let alone outer life. However, Coe does not say so outright, or try to articulate the nature of her confusion and distress. He describes it only via its outward appearance, that which is visible to Michael (who does not, of course, and this is also part of the point, openly discuss with his mother how they are feeling about what is happening). There is an element of modesty inherent in the narrative: Michael cleaves mildly to what he can discern rather than projecting the contents of another consciousness. And modesty is very much to the point in the mood in question here. Coe strengthens the point inside a parenthesis: ‘(although it had never before deserted her in the last twenty-five years)’. The aside amplifies the strangeness of the mother’s loss of control, which is emphatically uncharacteristic. And it amplifies it in the quietest way: the tone remains quizzical rather than explicit. It also points to the fact that she had previously run the household without confusion for a long period: so the parenthesis makes a very brief murmur of tribute to her unheralded, undramatic domestic life. There follows a passage which takes the reader away from the focus on the impending loss: While she was making this purchase I would get out of the car and wander down the almost deserted High Street – indeed, the only real shopping street – puzzled to think that I had once been unable to conceive of a metropolis more teeming or animated. I looked into the branch of Woolworth’s where I used to spend my long-saved pocket money on budget-priced records; into the newsagent’s where it was possible to buy – although I’d had no inkling of it at the time – only a fraction of the titles available in London; and into the town’s only bookshop, laid out on one thinly stocked floor about thirty feet square, which for years had seemed to me to resemble nothing less than a modern library of Alexandria. It was here, towards the end of my teens, that I used to linger for hours. (326)

In a sense this material is a distraction from the real drama of the story: the death of Michael’s father. Yet it brings emotional content of its own. For one thing, it substantiates the world of Michael’s upbringing, still that of his parents: the existence his father is about to leave. To linger on the scene materializes what is being lost, and thus extends the meaning of that loss. One might suppose that the mood is one of nostalgia. The experience of buying one’s first records with pocket money is the realm of many contemporary memoirists or TV talking heads. Yet it is not clear that the passage is really nostalgic. Michael is remarking on the limits of this sphere. The High Street once



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thought a teeming metropolis is ‘almost deserted’ – and the suggestion is not that it has declined, that everyone has left (which of course he has) since he was a teen, but that it was always this way. The view from his teens was misleading. The return of the native to this Midlands market town acts as a corrective. Yet it cannot be said, either, that the primary burden of the passage is a negative one, pointing out the errors of the past and the poor quality of the narrator’s environment. Michael registers the truth about the past as small and straitened while conveying a sense that an existence there was relatively content. The point is, after all, that the teenager did not know how small his environment was. He now has a slight sense of wonder about this limitation. The note struck is neither nostalgia nor dismissal: it is a bewildered sense of change, from the small world to a greater one, from which he can see the smallness of what was left behind. Yet Michael has hardly found greater happiness in encountering a bigger scale. There is sadness in losing the ratios of the teenage town, but there is no way back to them now. The true climax of this passage is yet to come. Michael and his mother, in this brief period of his father’s hospitalization, have developed a personal ritual of driving home in between hospital visiting hours, to watch a television quiz which is not named but appears to be Channel Four’s Countdown. Michael’s mother has become addicted to its game of rearranging random letters into the longest possible word: her moments of success at this are, he recalls, ‘the only time during those weeks that I saw the lines of care wiped smooth from her face’ (327). The climax comes when the 9 letters presented are O, Y, R, L, T, T, I, M and A: presented with a once in a lifetime opportunity to achieve a maximum score, neither Michael nor his mother voices the available word ‘mortality’. Here is a touch of that timidity noted earlier, but in a different context: unreadiness, between two family members who spend each day together, to register the reality of death that they are living alongside. Or, even more specifically, an unwillingness to register it together in this unasked-for, frivolous context which has caught them off guard and would be no way to start talking about their imminent loss. What Michael surely feels – his mother’s emotions are unknown – is awkwardness. This obstructs or interferes with the sadness of the scenario, while ultimately being sad in itself. No wonder Anneke in Expo 58 writes to Thomas that for him, pain and embarrassment are probably one and the same thing (234). As with the mothers in Larkin’s ‘Afternoons’, the grief is not always fully grasped by Coe’s fictional characters themselves. It may just as often be a factor of their situation that the reader can see more clearly than they can – as

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Michael’s mother is seemingly unable to see ‘mortality’ in the letters before her. It is a feeling that rises into recognition as we come to understand a situation, a life, rather than simply and abruptly clouting us. It is not violent – a matter of ‘trauma’ – but gentle. Michael and his mother are so attached to the quiz that he describes them making ‘strenuous efforts to get back to the television every day at fourthirty, even sometimes, when our shopping expedition had taken longer than expected, driving at fifty or sixty miles an hour through the suburban streets’ (327). He describes their returning to the house to make ‘two cups of instant coffee’ and ‘lay out a plate of digestive or Rich Tea biscuits’ (327). Michael has a personal fascination with brands of chocolate bar, making characteristic his attention to detail with biscuits; but the descriptive precision also demonstrates Coe’s sense of the small things that comprise life’s routine, even when someone is dying. Rich tea, Countdown, Woolworths: to unite them with death is an act of bathos – the kind for which Alan Bennett has been famed. Yet bathos here is hard to separate from pathos. The former enriches, rather than detracting from, the latter. This episode exemplifies a wider mood of Coe’s fiction that is distinct from those previously considered. The mood is not glibly nihilistic, as in The Accidental Woman; the characters are not frozen out of normality by trauma or melancholia, like Robin in A Touch of Love or the half-glimpsed Lois in The Rotters’ Club. The mood is serious: it concerns mortality, no less. Still, Coe’s narrative registers the way that from day to day, people understandably evade that gravest of concerns, cleaving to routines that keep life going. That they do so in this modest place, with its deserted streets and sparsely populated Woolworths, its instant coffee and frozen meals, is no distraction from the air of sadness that Coe achieves; it is intimately part of it. Number 11 (2015) is an oblique sequel to What a Carve Up!, and reprises several of its features in new ways. The illness and eventual death of Rachel Wells’s grandfather echoes the experiences both of Fiona, in that we trace the slow decline of the character’s health a long way across the novel, and of Michael’s father, in rooting grief in a determinedly suburban setting. Perhaps the most telling demonstration of this is at the novel’s end when Rachel’s grandmother, talking to Alison, recollects her recently departed husband. She runs through the events of a typical day: ‘Always sitting there, he was, when I came down. He was waiting for the paper boy, you see. […] That was how the day used to start. […] I’d come down. Put the kettle on. Make the tea. […] Then the paper would come. He’d get it first. I’d



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make some breakfast, get him his cereal. Then we’d have it in the kitchen together. […] Middle of the morning, we’d have another cup of tea. Together. […] We had lunch in the kitchen. Just soup, normally. Tomato for me, mushroom for him. He’d put the radio on. Always wanted to hear the news at one o’clock.’ (346–7)

Coe evokes the reality of routine that is a sustaining coordinate of many elderly lives, and his character plausibly recites it in a ritual remembrance of her lost partner. Her verbal narration consists of what are almost literally the most mundane events imaginable, yet is also one of the novel’s emotional peaks, representing an act of tribute which, in bringing the dead husband back to thought, offers fragile, temporary consolation. It is telling that eleven novels into his career – that is to say, as a seasoned writer with a reflective understanding of his own capacities and concerns – Coe climaxes a book with this gesture. The novel deliberately achieves its greatest poignancy with reflection from the most humble and unassuming of characters, in a provincial suburban house, reciting the details of the daily life she has known and just lost.

Monochrome All Coe’s other fictions could be discussed further under the rubric suggested here. But one especially asks to be considered because of its distinctiveness. The Rain Before It Falls (2007) is Coe’s only novel to be entirely bereft of comedy. What, then, is its emotional temper? The novel opens with an omniscient third-person narrator before moving in to the first-person narrative of the elderly Rosamond, reciting to tape the memories that are provoked for her by a series of pictures. The third-person narrative deploys painterly effects, arguably more so than has previously been typical of Coe. Thus the first page brings ‘the little bonfire, from which bluegrey smoke was spiralling into a sky already beginning to darken’; ‘the crackle of burning leaves, the call of a wood pigeon, the murmur of distantly passing cars’ (1). The narrative evokes a particular sub-genre of the novel, in which finely etched observations of the natural world replace Coe’s more characteristic montage of textual effects. The novel offers a good deal more in this vein: ‘clusters of sycamore and conifer waved dark green and viridescent in the breeze’; ‘The brickwork was jumbled and irregular, like ecclesiastical crazy paving’; ‘The whole world was monochrome now […] Trees black and brittle against a grey sky, like charred bones; rough stone walls fuzzy with layers of grey moss; the

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fields, rising and falling in gentle undulations, English and undemonstrative, and grey as the snow-heavy sky itself ’ (2, 3, 24). Coe’s new attention to landscape and weather suggests a shift of emotional register. The ironies and games that partially populate the other novels are entirely dispensed with, replaced by a mode of writing that seeks to convey character and feeling without any complicating inhibitions of tone. To quote Larkin once more, he appears to be essaying ‘A hunger in himself to be more serious / And gravitating with it to this ground’ (59) – with the caveat that Coe’s comedy often does, of course, have its own serious intent. Rosamond’s monologue gradually discloses a past life – from the 1930s to the 1980s – which has many privations and limitations. Her narrative voice is very serious, but remains prim and precise rather than lachrymose with regrets. The story contains moments of explicit sadness, as when Beatrix wonders aloud about the mysterious departure of the family dog: ‘I sat on the bed beside her’, Rosamond recounts, ‘and clasped her icy hand, but nothing I said could console her, she began to cry, still without opening her eyes, a tear leaked out from beneath her eyelids and ran on to her cheek, and soon she was sobbing convulsively, uncontrollably’ (175). Beatrix is a figure of pathos, though also capable of great cruelty. Part of the central revelation is of a self-perpetuating lineage of parental abuse in which, to adapt Larkin once more, woman hands on misery to woman. Unlike several of Coe’s other novels, The Rain Before It Falls rarely turns on coincidences or missed opportunities regretted ever after. Indeed part of Beatrix’s problem is that, unlike Coe’s typical protagonists, she takes opportunities, rather than regretfully relinquishing them. The novel reveals the other side of that story of abstention: the crashes that can occur when roads are taken. The novel’s most explicit reflection on emotion comes when Rosamond recalls a trip to France with her lover Rebecca and Beatrix’s young daughter. Limning a blissful scene, Rosamond offers: There is nothing one can say, I suppose, about happiness that has no flaws, no blemishes, no fault lines: none, that is, except the certain knowledge that it will have to come to an end. (160–1)

It soon does. Within moments Rebecca is looking ‘sad’, and she shortly dismisses the relationship as unreal. After this, the two women are estranged for ever. The sudden break is barely explained. The passage certainly demonstrates that happiness can be fragile. But it makes a striking comparison to the equivalent passage in The Accidental Woman, twenty years earlier. In that debut’s harsh



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estimation, happiness could only exist in anticipation or memory, and there was ‘nothing more miserable than the memory of happiness’ (33). Rosamond’s account is hardly excessively sanguine: its emphasis is that happiness does not endure. Yet she does not endorse the earlier novel’s dim view of ‘the memory of happiness’. As she dies, she is still cleaving to that holiday scene (258). Curiously, in this most muted of Coe’s novels, unhappiness does not conquer all. Rosamond experiences a sustaining lesbian relationship. Beatrix and Imogen, in their different ways, both die happy and fulfilled in Canada. And Gill, whose inquiries started the story, is finally distracted from the family saga by the more local disturbance of her young daughter’s latest break-up. Catherine, the daughter, may have been ‘crying her eyes out’ (276–7), but for the reader the sense is that this episode belongs to a manageably mundane contemporary world, distinct from the complex realm of the past that Rosamond has just disclosed. I have suggested that Coe is strongly concerned with sadness. Yet in writing his only novel without laughter, and deploying different forms of genre and narration to explore new emotional tones, Coe does not wallow in unhappiness. The rain does not always fall. Jonathan Coe is justly praised for his humour, his narrative intricacy and his acute social observation. Yet he has also ventured consistently into different emotional areas. Coe has written of various kinds of unhappiness, including versions that can seem extreme and somewhat pathological. Among these versions, he has also persistently struck a quieter note, describing an emotional world of modest pathos and the pathos of modesty. In writing of post-war or contemporary Britain, this has been an unglamorous option, and is not often celebrated by critics. Yet these reservoirs of lifelong regret and mundane poignancy are as fundamental to Coe’s work as his satirical swipes, narrative twists and verbal gags. His untiring registration of the tides of ordinary sadness is one way in which Coe has honoured his vocation as a novelist.

Works cited Coe, Jonathan. The Accidental Woman. London: Penguin, 2000 [1987]. ——. Expo 58. London: Viking, 2013. ——. Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness. London: Viking, 2015. ——. The Rain Before it Falls. London: Penguin, 2008 [2007]. ——. The Rotters’ Club. London: Viking, 2001. ——. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Viking, 2010.

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——. A Touch of Love. London: Penguin, 2008 [1989]. ——. What a Carve Up! Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1994]. Gray, Alasdair. 1982 Janine. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 2003. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Sexing Britannia: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! or the Re/de-Sexualization of Thatcherite Britain Raluca Iliou

On 8 April 2013 Margaret Thatcher died. Four days later, in the Guardian Jonathan Coe published a response to this event, entitled ‘Perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s Death Will Bring Us Clarity’, in which he observed: The day after her death I took the Eurostar to Paris and picked up a copy of Libération at my hotel. The paper led with a front page that brought the concepts of death and Thatcherism into stark union: a monochrome photograph, with a three-word caption: La grande faucheuse – the Grim Reaper. Morbid and pitiless, but clever. Now she’s gone, the debate is bound not just to continue but to deepen, and perhaps evolve into something more than a mosaic of polarised opinions. I hope so. Death itself is not a news story, after all; death is not surprising. The only surprising thing about it, as I’ve learned this year, is the clarity it can bring.

Coe’s reaction to Thatcher’s death well indicates the polarity of the public’s feelings toward the late political figure: for some, satisfaction at witnessing the end of an era and anger while reliving the memories of what it brought about, for others, celebration of a great figure. Her death also offered, perhaps for the last time, an opportunity for both the British and the world at large to realize that the former prime minister had neither been forgotten nor forgiven by very many that remembered and disapproved of her domestic policies in particular. On the day of her funeral, the Gallery Different in Central London opened an exhibition displaying various artistic representations and interpretations of both Margaret Thatcher’s person and projected political legacy. As James Lyons reported in The Mirror, it was planned that the paintings should be displayed on the underground, but the representations of Thatcher as Virgin Mary (by Ben

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Moore) or Queen Victoria (by Peter Kennard) ignited such intense controversy that they were banned on the grounds of breaching ‘Transport for London guidelines’. As James Lyons comments further, such representations explore and re-evaluate Thatcher’s gender, or, as Heather Nunn puts it in Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy (2002) interrogate ‘the role certain forms of femininity and masculinity play in securing or negotiating imaginary constructions of political leadership and national identity’ (13). For Coe, in the article quoted above, Thatcher’s death offered a moment of reflection and recollection triggered by his father’s passing a few months previously, an event that made Coe reminisce about the legacy and effects of Thatcherism on modern-day Britain. Ironically given Coe’s renowned antiThatcher stance, expressed in What a Carve Up! (1994), the author came from a deeply conservative background, (as he himself confesses in the same article), with a father whom he describes as ‘a great admirer of Thatcher […]. An instinctive and lifelong Conservative, he was full of praise (as much as such a quiet man can be) for the Iron Lady and all those who surrounded her’. Coe admits being ready as a youngster to have voted for her himself, had he been old enough, while remaining hopeful of a sedimentation of the popular passion that is yet to come. Two of his most acclaimed novels, What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club (2001), both draw upon an era that the author himself described in the aforementioned article, as infused with a ‘pervasive sense of unease and betrayal’ dominated, as Coe confesses, by a mix of drama and grotesque, perfectly rendered by the popular shows of the time Beyond the Fringe, Yes Minister and Spitting Image. Of the two novels, What a Carve Up! is considered, as Nick Cohen explores in ‘A Reader’s Guide to Thatcherism’, to be one of the greatest satires of our times, whose narrative manages to closely capture the mix of tragedy and insanity that dominated the Thatcherite era, and as Cohen comments, an ‘accurate approximation’ of a political class whose enduring legacy continues to shape the current British society. As Jonathan Coe himself notes in ‘Author, Author: Aiming at a Beast Called “Thatcherism”’, many readers have chosen to read his novel as an anti-Thatcher polemic, an approach he deemed inaccurate and limited and which also generated heated reactions toward the author himself: The novel was never meant to be a personal attack on Mrs. Thatcher (who is barely mentioned in it), although a lot of people seem to read it that way. On a recent visit to Moscow, for instance, I was berated on this account by a succession of women journalists, who all assumed that my dislike of someone whom they



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saw as an icon of liberty and feminism was motivated by chauvinistic insecurity. I couldn’t think of much to reply except that Mrs. Thatcher had done very little to advance the cause of feminism in the UK, and that political leaders often look more admirable at a few thousand miles’ distance.

The incident Coe describes serves to emphasize the mystique that always surrounded Thatcher, almost an aura, and which might perhaps explain her electoral successes, winning three consecutive general elections. It also brings to the fore her divisive image, her impact projected on admirers and opponents alike, remaining, as Charles Moore, her official biographer, claims in Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume One, ‘someone about whom it is almost impossible to be neutral’ (xvii). Another aspect foregrounded by Coe’s encounter in Russia is that of Thatcher’s positive valuation in countries under totalitarian regimes that were not permissive of women’s evolution and emancipation and whose female population appear to have regarded the Iron Lady’s strength and determination as a model to follow. Women from states such as Russia and Romania, countries Thatcher visited repeatedly, have positively received the British leader’s persona even if their perception had always been filtered, as Coe points out, by the mystification allowed by distance and carefully manoeuvred political adjustments to reality. It appears that Thatcher’s projected mix of femininity and power was appealing to these women as it was a narrative of hope and success to which they aspired. As Nunn observes, Thatcher was capable of provoking ‘powerful identifications that were often conveyed and played out to full advantage in media coverage of her’ (15). At the same time, Jonathan Coe’s experience emphasizes the dynamics that characterized Thatcher’s entire political career: that she was divisive and polarizing; as Ros Brunt concludes in ‘Thatcher Uses Her Woman’s Touch’ published in Marxism Today, ‘everything about her politics is related to gender, is inseparable from images of femininity existing in competition and conflict with versions of masculinity’ (23). Thus, the aim of this chapter is to analyse Thatcher’s gender construct by referring to one of the most iconic literary works about the Thatcherite period, Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!. The following analysis will attempt to demonstrate how Thatcher’s gender projection was created by employing a strategy similar to certain dynamics described by Judith Butler in her gender fluidity theory, while, at the same time, bringing to the fore the fact that in Thatcher’s case, such fluidity was perceived as gender confusion, rendered in

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literary responses as gender sterility. I intend to apply such theories in a detailed reading of Coe’s novel, emphasizing the author’s engendering of characters during the Thatcherite era.

Margaret Thatcher and gender fluidity When discussing Thatcher’s gender fluidity, I will draw chiefly on the concept of gender performativity put forward by Butler, a term which refers to the ability of social performances and roles to build and construct one’s gender.1 In Thatcher’s case, the gender-conditioned image she projected was the result of, on the one hand, a carefully groomed narrative meant to support her political views and on the other, of the cumulative effect of the reactions proponents and opponents alike had toward her persona. In other words, in Thatcher’s case, gender fluidity should be approached as being more like what Nunn considers to be gender performativity (14), seen many times as gender ambiguity (19) and aberrant femininity (18). Fluidity, considered by Butler to be the main attribute that differentiates sex from gender (sex as biological, fixed, given characteristics, gender as social construct) is a concept that gives gender the capacity of permeability, flexibility and interpretability: ‘As a consequence, gender cannot be understood as a role which either expresses or disguises an interior “self,” whether that “self ” is conceived as sexed or not. As performance which is performative, gender is an “act,” broadly construed, which constructs the social fiction of its own psychological interiority’ (528). In Thatcher’s case, gender fluidity was neither sanctioned nor appreciated. She was seen as inconsistent with her sex, as confusing and deliberately playing both the key of seduction and that of unapologetic power. As Ross Brunt comments, ‘Thatcher’s success in the realm of patriarchal politics is precisely to do with her effectiveness as a woman and the way she inhabits particular feminine roles while appearing to disavow femininity’ (23). Her sexuality was regarded as either too overtly expressed or too volatile to remain feminine.2 Thatcher’s gender fluidity was read as an offensive, ill-interpreted role-play that was turning the woman into a sterile abomination. The virulent reactions against her – she still remains the most divisive ex-PM – have often been imbued with a sense of frustration against her gender and take on femininity, the evocative ‘Milk Snatcher’ 1972 incident being a testimony to that.3 As  Thatcher herself later recalled in her autobiography, The Path to Power (182), the incident ‘had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit’,



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since, as Hugo Young comments in his book One of Us, ‘lurking somewhere in this mix, both in her projection of herself and in the bitterly derisive responses she was capable of arousing, was the fact of her gender’ (73). As Nunn states (17), Thatcher ‘had reached the “summit of political power”’, while embodying ‘the excesses of phallic mastery that had been located, in much feminist thought, as a patriarchal system of authority’. From this perspective, Thatcher’s image and persona are a vivid embodiment of Butler’s constructed/constructing gender, as gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts. Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (519)

This fluidity of her gender projection would influence Thatcher’s literary representations, which produced depictions including exaggerated versions of failed domestic femininity, exemplified in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club and What a Carve Up!, and Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist and The Fifth Child, and savage, power-hunger masculinity, as in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!. As already mentioned, the public’s inability to grasp Thatcher’s combined femininity and power would lead to the manifestation of sterility in all her literary and artistic projections.

Margaret Thatcher: The woman, the sexuality Analysing the engendering of Thatcher’s representations, Nunn considers that, ‘Thatcher’s gender was (and is) crucial: it informed the construction of her persona, was drawn on to vitalise her political discourse and was frequently disavowed’ (13). Nunn’s analysis also provides an insightful overview of the issues considered in the present analysis, which include concepts such as ‘aberrant’ femininity (18) or gender fragmentariness and ambiguity (19). The over-sexualization found in the majority of depictions of her – as already mentioned, she is often represented as a fragmented collage of hair, lips and eyes – is summarized by McEwan in ‘Margaret Thatcher: We Disliked Her and We Loved It’, who considers that ‘there was always an element of the erotic in the national obsession with her’.

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Thatcher’s sexuality was confusing. As Michael Dobbs explains in ‘It’s Only Now that I Understand Margaret Thatcher’ of his experience of both the woman herself and his experience of the day the House paid her its tribute: I’d been a colleague, her chief of staff, the first person on election night in 1979 to tell her she had become prime minister, yet still I was missing something about her. She was a woman, and perhaps that has always been my confusion. I treated her with a natural respect, on occasions deference, and that was my mistake. Because the more I think about it, the secret of Margaret Thatcher lies in an understanding of her sex.

Her artistic representations abound in sexual, more specifically phallic representations, drawing upon her fascination for Winston Churchill, the contemptuous manner in which colleagues, opponents, media and citizens alike have always addressed her as Maggie, the irate attacks she faced gaining her even more gender-conditioned nicknames: The Great She-Elephant, Attila the Hen and almost always, through clenched teeth, That Bloody Woman. All of which emphasized a reality that Thatcher’s political sins were always to be seen through prism of gender prejudice. Such an over-eroticization was present throughout the artistic and oppo­ sitional manifestations of Thatcher. The 1980s saw effervescent sexual liberation, defiance and buoyant anti-establishmentarianism, very much stimulated by two contrasting factors: the political doctrine on one side and Thatcher’s confusing eroticism on the other. Thatcher exerted a sort of perverse fascination on those who despised her policies but felt drawn by her assumed femininity. From her hair colour, to her perfume, choice of jewellery and clothes, the Iron Lady was a difficult social construct to grasp. Feminist critic and writer Germaine Greer, in ‘The Making of Maggie’, deploys a compelling critique of Thatcher’s political and ideological shortcomings – many of which feature in Coe’s anti-Thatcher novels – correlating them with an interpretation of her sex. Like Coe, Greer exposes many of the failures of the Thatcherite doctrine, which Greer considers nothing but a cosmeticized version of existing and failed Conservative doctrine. Abounding in epithets with high journalistic impact – ‘glamourpuss’, ‘housewife superstar’ – Greer’s article uncovers the same misunderstanding of Thatcher’s sex: A few months later, the TV producer Gordon Reece began the long process by which the millionaire’s decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made



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over into the no-nonsense grocer’s daughter who in 1975 would become leader of the Conservative party. On Reece’s advice, Thatcher changed her hairstyle, gave up low necklines, eschewed hats, wore pastel shades, kept her hands out of sight, and struggled to lower her voice. In return she was more than happy to keep him primed with expensive champagne and cigars at the party’s expense. Never before had a British party leader been so packaged. The British electorate bought the package. Margaret Thatcher, housewife superstar, became prime minister on 4 May 1979. Reece would be there whenever she needed him, which in those early days was often.

Greer’s response exemplifies the type of generalization and demonization that generated a highly inspirational and inspiring Margaret Thatcher persona, covered in mysticism and, as Ian McEwan confessed, as recorded by D. J. Taylor in ‘“La Divine Thatcher”: How Novelists Responded to Maggie’, ‘a lot of writers monstered her’ imaginatively in their artistic output. Willingly ignoring relevant and revealing parts of Thatcher’s biography, offering contrasting views on the ‘housewife’ construct, Greer brings Thatcher in the area of the spectacle, since, as Guy Debord expresses, ‘the oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle’ (23). Greer’s essay renders the impression that Thatcher’s gender was very early on mystified, contributing to the heavy critiques that portrayed Thatcher as a feminine abomination, always displaying too much power and determination to be feminine.

What a Carve Up! and the glorification of the sterile As Jonathan Coe confesses in ‘Author, Author: Aiming at a Beast Called Thatcherism’, he started writing What a Carve Up! ‘at the fag end of the Thatcher years’, when he was ‘29 years old and flushed with political and literary certainties’, the most poignant being his ‘anti-Thatcherism’. The novel is constructed as a saga of the Winshaw family, as seen through the eyes of their official biographer, Michael Owen. The characters, Tabitha, Hilary, Henry, Roddy, Dorothy, Thomas, Mark, Mortimer and even Michael himself, represent facets of a society faced with its worst demons: greed, individualism, stark monetarism and mercantilism. Coe deliberately constructed linear, flat characters, each embodying one attribute of the era and ideological doctrine he critiques and questions. Their rise and fall, just like Thatcher’s, are bold renditions of a gothic

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narrative: they are both helped and annihilated by one of their own (much as Thatcher was to be politically assassinated by her own Cabinet). In the novel, the Thatcherite gender construct is an amalgamated mix of both masculine and feminine features. Tabitha Winshaw is the mentally unstable, vindictive, sterile sister, but it is Thomas Winshaw, the young, successful MP, who displays the ambition and mercantilism, regarding nuclear bombs simply as a source of profit without any moral dimension concerning their potential use (14–15). Hilary sees manipulation and political machinations as the key to success and regards her own child as a hurdle to her ambitions. The character closest to an embodiment of Thatcher is Henry Winshaw, a man (his gender another hint toward her gender sterility), who is an Oxford science graduate as Thatcher was. Henry can never listen to a full question during an interview without firing back his own rhetoric (125), much like Thatcher, who entered politics in 1955 (the year Thatcher decided not to run, having young children at home), after a brief career in the industry. Rather like Thatcher and her husband, Dennis, Henry is more interested in the after meetings drinks (127) than in the current political affairs and, when informed that ‘with Margaret as leader, the party is unelectable’ he declares without hesitation: ‘Dump the bitch.’ I said. ‘And fast.’ Nothing must be allowed to stop us. (141)

Finally, as Coe indicates, those controlling the economic, social and geopolitical agendas for their own gain are even prepared to sacrifice Thatcher herself, the supposed high priestess and icon of their ideology. Thus, the sexualization connected to and derived from Thatcher’s image and projections is characterized by an odd sense of sterility. Thatcher was never just a woman, being rather represented as the woman who could not (but was trying to) become a man, with many artistic depictions resembling the struggle of a hermaphroditical being to find its place (as in Spitting Image where she is depicted relieving herself at a male urinal in Parliament). Thatcher’s sexual identity pervaded depictions of her, but they seem oddly unsatisfying and frustrating because of her gender fluidity, and as Bruce Anderson comments in ‘Sex and Margaret Thatcher’, ‘My last column discussed Lady Thatcher and drink. It is now time to move on to sex. But there is little to say. Hard as it may be for moderns to contemplate, she was uxorious’. Anderson deliberately deploys a gender-conditioned adjective, again underlying Thatcher’s gender-fluid image. For both the Winshaws and Michael, sex becomes a mechanical act meant to validate and sustain a reality lacking any positive visceral substance. On



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the one hand, Hilary obsessively attempts to conceive a child she later abhors; Ronnie beds Phoebe as a way of symbolizing his superior position; Dorothy avoids intercourse with her husband whom she considered inferior; and, equally, Michael seems incapable of detaching himself from the sterility of the imaginary world that he inhabits. Michael’s refusal to embrace physicality is a form of withdrawal from a world that the novel makes evident had become a social construct of the Winshaws. His rejection of Fiona’s genuine affection is a manifestation of the effects the Winshaws’ influence on the common spirit: a cancerous tumour that affected not only the bodies of the consumers of the enhanced frozen foods sold by Dorothy (as in Fiona’s case), but also of their souls, a social sterility. Sterility affects both the Winshaw family and the others involved in its fate. Michael lives alone, finding communication and conviviality difficult and deriving pleasure only from watching an erotic scene from his favourite movie. He leads an artificial existence, trapped into a fantasy that prevents him from noticing his friend and the woman who harboured feelings for him get sick with cancer and be failed by an even sicker system. While waiting in the hospital for Fiona finally to be diagnosed Michael makes the ridiculous remark about Fiona’s chest: Fiona and I exchanged glances. She smiled bravely. ‘Oh, well’, she said. ‘At least he didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with my chest.’ ‘I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with your chest’, I said. Don’t ask me why: I know people are supposed to make stupid jokes at moments of crisis, but surely not that stupid. (364)

The scene is indicative of his incapacity to acknowledge Fiona’s sexuality. He feels and acts much as people do in the populist, comic movies that constitute much of his existence and not even the tragic state of the medical system or its recurrent fatal mistakes, which affect both Fiona and Michael’s father, are enough to rescue him from his state of inertia. Fiona’s confirmation of her diagnosis, lymphoma, was delayed by a professional error. Hence she is not prescribed the course of antibiotics in time to save her, and so, finally and ironically, a treatable condition claims her life. Coe implies that such acts are an embodiment of the acute sickness that society experienced in the 1980s, a malaise brought about by senseless political decisions implemented by people like Mark and Dorothy Mortimer for mercantile gain, evoking the privatizations that typified the Thatcher era and beyond.

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Similarly, although the Winshaws’ sexuality is rampant and often vile, it is yet oddly unfruitful. Hilary does get pregnant and does have Josephine (maybe a tongue-in-cheek reference to Napoleon’s first wife and his first guarantee to the continuation of a dynasty), but the paternity of the child is purposefully left unclear since Hilary was having an affair. The reader becomes aware of the couple’s sustained efforts to get an heir: ‘they’ve waited a long time for their first child’ (79). She slams members of the Labour opposition as ‘lesbian’ (83), while she engages in illicit and immoral affairs without the blink of an eye. And it is Henry Winshaw’s gushingly expressed sexual obsession that is recorded in his diary on 12 November 1946 for another student at Oxford, his first love: ‘The President of the Association is a girl from Somerville called Margaret Hilda Roberts and I have to say she is an absolute pip! An utterly gorgeous head of nut-brown hair – I just wanted to bury myself in it’ (122). Henry is enthralled, his description suggesting an erotic fragmentation that characterizes the entire novel: he sees ‘That hair! Those eyes! That voice!’ (128) like a collaged caricature. The Winshaw’s sterility is, as Judith Butler puts such contexts in Bodies that Matter quoting Luce Irigaray, a construct, derived from their inability to engage into normal interaction (43). The epitome of such sterility is Dorothy Winshaw, married to the benign and emotional George Brunwin who drowned his dissatisfaction and desperation in alcohol: Looking back on those days now, through his alcoholic fog, he found it absurd, laughable, that he should ever have expected the marriage to be consummated. Sexual union between them would have been as impossible as it had recently become for the misshapen turkeys which his wife was now obliged to propagate through artificial insemination: their meat-yielding breasts so horribly enlarged through years of chemical injections and selective breeding that their sex organs could not even make contact. (242)

Dorothy is an embodiment of Thatcherism: she makes mercantilism her life’s philosophy, being solely interested in financial gain and allowing herself no expression of emotion. Her marriage is sexless and childless and she perceives her husband’s dedication to the animals as a deviation. She was one of the many faceless promoters of ‘intensive methods’ (244) that endorsed the government’s promotion of alternative methods of producing cheap, fast food, at any cost: hormone and antibiotic therapies, body mutilations, suffocation of unproductive chicks, etc. The methods applied to Dorothy’s livestock mirror the mutilating grotesque projected by the Winshaws, to which they become victims at the novel’s end.



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The most representative moment in the novel as regards an endemic instrumentalism and egoism concerns Roddy Winshaw and the young aspiring artist Phoebe in what one might suppose ought to have been a passionate or erotic encounter: He rolled off and took something from a drawer in the bedside table. Phoebe could hear the sound of a packet being opened and rubber being unfurled. […] Phoebe returned to bed, tried to get Roddy to move, failed, and then had little option other than to lie against his back. For a while, she tried putting her arm across his shoulder: but she might as well have been hugging a block of marble. (206)

Their brief, mechanical and protected sexual encounter is imbued with the ultimate manifestation of the contempt Thatcherism had for art and the artistic milieu. Phoebe is defined by her naïve aspiration for aesthetic development: ‘I live and breathe art,’ said Phoebe. ‘What other people refer to as “the real world” has always seemed pale and insipid by comparison.’ ‘Well, that’s as may be. Personally I find that sort of attitude rather affected.’ ‘Yes, but I didn’t say it: you did. Observer magazine, April 1987.’ (185)

Given his glib hypocrisy, her worldview stands in stark contrast to Roddy’s cold, mercantile view of life and emphasizes his capacity to exploit those he regards as inferior (not being one of the moneyed and influential classes). He pays for the affair by buying one of Phoebe’s works which he was going to use ‘to cover that damp patch’ (211), and the encounter pushes her to abandon her artistic aspiration and become Mortimer Winshaw’s private nurse. In the putrid Winshaw world, genuine humanity and affection are mistaken for deviant behaviour, as in the case of Dorothy Winshaw’s husband, the gentle and benign farmer George, who is too kind to abuse his animals for profit. Drawn in particular to a veal calf called Herbert, his affection is dismissed as zoophiliac by Dorothy. She is incapable of normal physical contact because of her grotesquely deformed spirit, being dominated by her ruthless mercantilism that makes her push for inhuman measures to increase her profit, interbreeding her animals with no concern for health or morality. Nevertheless, ‘she kept a small herd of free-range porkers in an enclosure at the back of the farmhouse for her personal use. Like Hilary (who never watched her TV programmes), Dorothy had no intention of ever consuming the products which she was happy to foist upon an uncomplaining public’ (253). Aware of the catastrophic effects

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that eating such food would have on her health, she chooses instead to impose it on consumers, avoiding its consumption herself. And, just as in Fiona’s case, whose sickness and imminent death were caused by the corrupt and putrid society she lived in, Dorothy’s plans were not only pecuniary, but also result in reducing the population to a mass of obedient, mentally inept consumers, for as Henry explains to her: ‘The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower’. Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’ (254–5)

Henry’s views, like his sister’s agribusiness, are permeated with values that are in effect a summary of Coe’s reasons to reject and abhor Thatcherism: financial and social polarization, mental and physical manipulation, demoralization and dehumanization, all wrapped up as the ‘fantasy’ sold together with the packages of frozen food from Dorothy’s company. The shocking end of this part of the narrative, with George committing suicide – after finding his pet animal hanging head down and left to bleed to death – was mocked in the newspapers as a marker of and caused by his deviant sexuality. Michael Owen’s existence is in stark contrast to that of the Winshaws. He allows them to draw him into their world, one that he secretly detests, but which exerts an inexplicable fascination for him: the Winshaw world, with its greed, immorality, ruthlessness, and mercantilism facilitates Michael in abandoning his passive existence and become actively involved in reality. His sexuality is diluted between auto-eroticism fed by his fascination for Shirley Eaton and the more mundane, yet platonic relationship with Fiona. Michael married young, divorced and continued his uneventful life with a constant feeling of failure: ‘“I just look on it as my misspent youth: genuinely misspent – not taking drugs and sleeping with lots of different people, which would probably have been good fun, but this … perverse drive towards conformity”’ (147). If the Winshaws stand for the worst kind of Thatcherite upper-class Conservative stereotype, envisaged by Coe to constitute the source of all evil, Michael Owen is the British everyman, placed in a trance, living through images provided by the cultural industry. As if to emphasize his detachment from the mundane, Michael chooses to spend his days watching TV incessantly and



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refuses human contact, his life epitomizing a set of relations described by Guy Debord: The alienation of the spectator to the profit of the contemplated object (which is the result of his own unconscious activity) is expressed in the following way: the  more he contemplates the less he lives, the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. (30)

Michael’s life seems largely empty, and, as Tabitha Winshaw concludes of his book that she had commissioned, something is lacking (477). The ending of the novel remains faithful to its premise: a grotesque, cheap narrative of horror, a thrilling finale for the Winshaws and a dramatic, yet questionable exit for Michael. Mortimer Winshaw, tired of his family’s evil deeds, stages his own death and kills his relatives one-by-one in a manner significant of the way they lived their lives. There are tongue-in-cheek references to Margaret Thatcher when Henry Winshaw is found stabbed in the back and his sister Hilary comments: ‘Stabbed in the back. How appropriate. Does this mean that Mrs Thatcher is in the house?’ (446) There are also graphic dismemberments and mutilations of the corpses, and Michael’s own death, in the same manner that his childhood hero Yuri Gagarin died. All of these elements bring my analysis back to Butler’s fluidity concept. Both society’s leaders and Michael, an everyman, face the same total corporeal annihilation, seemingly the only way to cleanse their culture because: ‘The world could wait no longer’ (493). The extermination of both the Winshaws and that of their biographer echoes the hope shared by a vast majority of the population after Margaret Thatcher’s resignation: that of change brought about by what many saw as the end of an era. Nevertheless, as Jonathan Coe notes in ‘1980s,’ ‘The end of an era? We thought so at the time: but all it meant, in retrospect, was that one especially vivid and swaggering personality was leaving the stage. The Age of Self has barely started, and successive governments will continue to pour “the milk of monetarism” down our throats’.

Notes 1 The concept of gender fluidity as such was first brought to the fore by Butler in her 1988 essay ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. According to Butler, ‘the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities, a complicated

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process of appropriation which any phenomenological theory of embodiment needs to describe’ (520–1). On the other hand, for Butler, gender performativity has been one of the biggest challenges when discussing gender construction mainly due to the complexity of the concept (xiv). According to Butler, ‘In the first instance, […] the performativity of gender revolves around this metalepsis, the way in which the anticipation of a gendered essence produces that which it posits outside itself. Secondly, performativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which achieves it effect through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration’ (xiv–xv). 2 One of the less known pieces, ‘On Sex and Politics and the Charms of Mrs. Thatcher’, written by Anthony Burgess perfectly sums up the attitude: ‘The glamour of Margaret Thatcher is not a holy luminosity emanating from good works. Being a politician, she has to be feared and respected more than loved. If the innocent expected that Britain’s first woman prime minister would exhibit the softness and maternal humanity associated with her sex, they soon learned their mistake’. 3 In December 1970, Margaret Thatcher, at the time Minister of Education, passed the controversial law regarding the withdrawal of free milk for 8- to 12-year-old schoolchildren, which, as Nunn indicates, brought her the infamous nickname ‘Thatcher the Milk Snatcher’ (97). The measure, although allegedly meant to increase the funds spent on improving schools, as Thatcher herself admitted in her autobiography The Path to Power, ‘incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit’ (182).

Works cited Aitken, Jonathan. Margaret Thatcher: Power and Personality. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2013. Anderson, Bruce. ‘Sex and Margaret Thatcher’. The Spectator. 27 April 2013: N.Pag.; https://www.spectator.co.uk/2013/04/the-innocence-of-the-iron-lady/ (accessed 1 June 2017). Brunt, Ros. ‘Thatcher Uses Her Woman’s Touch’. Marxism Today. 1987: N.Pag.; http:// banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/pdf/87_06_22.pdf (accessed 1 June 2017). Burgess, Anthony. ‘On Sex and Politics and the Charms of Mrs. Thatcher’. Vanity Fair. May 1985: N.Pag.; http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1985/05/margaretthatcher-198505 (accessed 1 June 2017). Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 2011. ——. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 2006. ——. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.



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Clarke, Ken. Kind of Blue: A Political Memoir. London: MacMillan, 2016. Coe, Jonathan. ‘1980s.’ The Guardian. 26 May 2007: N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian. com/theguardian/2007/may/26/weekend7.weekend4. ——. ‘Author, Author: Aiming at a Beast called “Thatcherism”’. The Observer. 11 April 2009: N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/11/jonathancoe-fiction (accessed 1 June 2017). ——. ‘Perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s Death Will Bring Us Clarity’. The Guardian. 12 April 2013: N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/12/margaret-thatcherdeath-jonathan-coe (accessed 1 June 2017). ——. The Rotters’ Club. London: Penguin Books, 2014. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Penguin Books, 2008. Cohen, Nick. ‘A Reader’s Guide to Thatcherism’. Standpoint. January/February 2010: N. Pag.; http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/2515/full (accessed 1 June 2017). Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. London: Rebel Press, 1992 Dobbs, Michael. ‘It’s Only Now that I Understand Margaret Thatcher’. The Telegraph. 12 April 2013: N.Pag.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaretthatcher/9990231/Michael-Dobbs-Its-only-now-that-I-understand-MargaretThatcher.html (accessed 1 June 2017). Greer, Germaine. ‘The Making of Maggie’. The Guardian. 11 April 2009: N.Pag.; https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/apr/11/germaine-greer-margaret-thatcheranniversary (accessed 1 June 2017). Harris, Robin. Not for Turning: The Life of Margaret Thatcher. London: Bantam Press, 2013. Kulze, Liz. ‘That Time Margaret Thatcher Spanked Christopher Hitchens’. The Atlantic. 8 April 2013: N. Pag.; https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/that-timemargaret-thatcher-spanked-christopher-hitchens/274779/ (accessed 1 June 2017). Lessing, Doris. The Fifth Child. London: Jonathan Cape, 1988. ——. The Good Terrorist. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. Lyons, James. ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Posters Depicting Her as Virgin Mary and Queen Victoria Banned From Tube Station’. The Mirror. 23 April 2013 : N.Pag.; http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/margaret-thatcher-posters-bannedwestminster-1849839 (accessed 1 June 2017). McEwan, Ian. The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. ——. ‘Margaret Thatcher: We Disliked Her and We Loved It’. The Guardian. 9 April 2013: N. Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/09/margaretthatcher-ian-mcewan (accessed 1 June 2017). Moore, Charles. ‘François Mitterrand: A Womanising President who Shaped Europe.’ The Telegraph. 19 January 2014: N. Pag.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ bookreviews/10583092/Francois-Mitterand-A-womanising-president-who-shapedEurope.html (accessed 1 June 2017). ——. Margaret Thatcher. The Authorized Biography: Vol. One. London: Penguin Books, 2014 ——. Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, Volume Two: Everything She Wants. London: Allen Lane, 2015

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Nunn, Heather. Thatcher, Politics and Fantasy: The Political Culture of Gender and Nation. London: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 2003 Taylor, D. J. ‘“La Divine Thatcher”: How Novelists Responded to Maggie’. The Guardian. 19 June 2015: N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ jun/19/margaret-thatcher-1980s-how-novelists-responsed (accessed 1 June 2017). Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Fiction. 2nd edn. London: Continuum, 2007. Thatcher, Margaret. The Downing Street Years. London: HarperPress, 2012. ——. The Path to Power. London: Harper Collins, 1995.

4

A Comedy of Horrors: Thatcherism in What a Carve Up! Emma Parker

According to MP John Whittingdale, Margaret Thatcher was ‘not naturally a joketeller’ and frequently required persuasion that jokes scripted for her were indeed funny (223). One anecdote, penned for the prime minister by John O’Sullivan, mocked the Liberal Democrats’ new party symbol (a bird) through allusion to Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch. Whittingdale explains that, despite being ‘one of the most famous comedy sketches ever written’ (224), the joke made no sense to Thatcher, who had never heard of Monty Python. Reading through the speech, each time she reached the part about the parrot, Thatcher would pause to ask, ‘Are you sure this is funny?’ (224). She even watched the original television sketch hoping it would offer illumination, but remained mystified. In the days running up to the speech, Thatcher sought ‘constant reassurance’ that the joke would prompt laughter and, just as she was about to step onto the stage, turned to Whittingdale and asked: ‘John, Monty Python – are you sure that he is one of us?’ (228). Sensing that it was pointless to try to explain that Monty Python was not a man but the title of a comedy show, Whittingdale simply responded, ‘Absolutely, Prime Minister. He is a very good supporter’ (228). Thatcher’s renowned humourlessness implicitly positioned comedy as oppositional to the Conservatives in the 1980s. As she told the Party conference in 1990, ‘politics is a serious business’ (N.Pag.). The Tory campaign against ‘video nasties’ (films distributed on VHS that were condemned for violence or obscenity by religious groups and moral crusaders such as Mary Whitehouse) likewise points to the potential of horror to contest the Party that presented itself as the defender of decency. It is fitting, then, that in What a Carve Up! (1994) Jonathan Coe employs both comedy and horror to critique the social and economic policies introduced by Thatcher in the 1980s. Less a ‘comedy of

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manners’, as Joseph Brooker proposes (35), than a ‘comedy of horrors’, Coe’s fourth novel follows in the tradition of playwright Joe Orton, who blends the farcical absurdities of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors with Madame Tussaud’s macabre ‘Chamber of Horrors’. As John Lahr notes, Orton considered The Comedy of Horrors as a title for his play Funeral Games (1968), though it is a fitting term for his unique style of farce, which persistently lampoons the avarice and materialism associated with the post-war Age of Affluence (113). Like Orton, Coe satirizes the greed and corruption of his day. Though Orton hovers in the background of the novel (Findlay Onyx cites him as a friend), an even stronger influence is Jonathan Swift, who employs satire to ‘mend the World’ and make ‘Mankind better’ (93, 94). As Coe recognizes in his 2007 essay on Gulliver’s Travels, in Swift ‘physical horror is inseparable from satirical indignation’ (N.Pag.). What a Carve Up! is widely acclaimed as a comic tour-de-force; this essay urges the importance of considering the novel in terms of horror as well as comedy, arguing that it engages the subversive possibilities of both genres whilst also expressing anxieties about comedy’s potential to challenge the dominant order. It further proposes that the novel recognizes but nonetheless reproduces the limitations of laughter that Coe later outlined in a series of essays on satire. In the 1980s, satire was widely employed as a weapon with which to attack Thatcherism, as in the cartoons of Steve Bell and television shows such as Spitting Image. As Gavin Schaffer notes, the rise of alternative comedy and emergence of politicized humourists such as Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton meant that comedy came to be seen as an ‘agent of change, challenge and rebellion’ (375). Satire also became the hallmark of leftist literary fiction in and about the decade, illustrated by Martin Amis’s Money (1984), Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine (1984), Ellen Galford’s Queendom Come (1990), and Will Self ’s Dorian (2002). In What a Carve Up! Thatcherism is embodied by the unscrupulous Winshaw family, ‘the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled the face of the earth’ (209). Having ‘carved up the whole bloody country between them’ (107), each Winshaw profits from the control of one area of British life (88): the media (Hilary); politics (Henry); the arts (Roddy); the food industry (Dorothy); finance (Thomas); and defence (Mark). Michael Owen, the protagonist, lists the lamentable impact of the Winshaw empire on ordinary people: ‘“Our businesses failing, our jobs disappearing, our countryside choking, our hospitals crumbling, our homes being repossessed, our bodies being poisoned, our minds shutting down the whole bloody spirit of the country crushed and fighting for breath”’ (413). Michael’s list exposes the lie in Henry’s claim that Thatcherism means ‘freedom’, ‘competition’ and ‘choice’ (139). Moreover, members of the



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Winshaw family are presented as utterly absurd, as when Hilary and her lover chase each other, naked, across the croquet lawn wielding mallets in the middle of the night or when Roddy contemptuously dismisses as ‘affected’ a remark that Phoebe points out was originally his own (185). Such moments point to satire’s ability to deflate power and undermine authority. Coe’s oppositional stance is reflected in form as well as content. In Rabelais and His World (1965), Mikhail Bakhtin celebrates the radical potential of carnival as a folk festival at odds with official culture and the ruling class. By destabilizing hierarchies, undermining institutions and resisting authority, carnival’s ‘folk humour’ celebrates freedom and creates a utopian space of transformation (3). What a Carve Up! features a carnivalesque blend of popular and literary forms and genres. It mixes ‘third-rate’ horror film with avant-garde French documentary (452), historical chronicle, family tree, short story, poetry, diaries, letters, memoir, newspaper and magazine articles, a list of ingredients, and a cinema poster. Vanessa Guignery argues that this generic polyphony echoes ‘the confusion and chaos of the political era depicted’ (71). Another possible reading is that, like the switch between first and third-person narrator, the diversity of voices introduces multiple perspectives, implicitly defying Thatcher’s dogmatic insistence that ‘There is no alternative’. As Ryan Trimm asserts, the novel offers a ‘formal refutation of the homogeneity stressed by Thatcher’ (160). In Bakhtinian terms, What a Carve Up! emphasizes heteroglossia and polyphony to call dominant discourse into question. Thus, like Bakhtin, who sought in carnival laughter a means to undermine the oppressive authority of Stalinism, Coe employs comedy to contest Thatcherism. Just as alternative comedy was considered subversive in the 1980s, so too was horror. As Linnie Blake explains, from the early part of the decade onwards, the horror film was recognized as proffering ‘a dangerous challenge to establishment ideology’ (161). The popularity of horror peaked in the 1980s with films such as The Evil Dead (1981), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Hellraiser (1987). Both Robin Wood and Jon Towlson interpret horror specifically as a critique of capitalism. Although Wood acknowledges that mainstream horror can be ‘reactionary’ (134), particularly in terms of its gender politics, he argues that its tendency toward apocalypse envisages the end of a world that represents the ‘bourgeois, capitalist, patriarchal Establishment’ (128). This ‘offers the possibility of radical change and rebuilding’ (123). For Towlson, horror offers ‘satirical political and social commentary’ (1). He sees it as ‘a form of protest against the more oppressive forces of capitalism and in particular its structures of power and authority’ (6).

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By employing horror to highlight the impact of Thatcherism, What a Carve Up! echoes Karl Marx’s Capital (1867), which likens capitalism to a vampire and a werewolf, and argues that capital commits ‘monstrous outrages’ that leave it ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (356; 926). Lenin, likewise, argued that capitalist society ‘is and always has been horror without end’ (81), and in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1984), Fredric Jameson asserts that ‘throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death and horror’ (57). More recently, the association of capitalism with horror is underlined in books such as Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (2010), David McNally’s Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011), and Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2015). The relationship between horror and capitalism was even (jokingly) endorsed by Thatcher herself. Delivering a speech at the party election rally in Plymouth in 2001, Thatcher quipped: ‘I was told beforehand my arrival was unscheduled, but on the way here I passed a local cinema and it turns out you were expecting me after all. The billboard read “The Mummy Returns”’ (N.Pag.). In its portrayal of the Winshaws, What a Carve Up! also presents Thatcherism as monstrous, endorsing Towlson’s point that in horror the boundary between the normal and the monstrous is often subverted so that ‘normality becomes monstrous’ (13). Mortimer Winshaw may insist that his family are ‘not monsters’ (9) but this claim is undermined by harrowing descriptions of Dorothy’s brutal intensive farming methods and the torture of Iraqis by Saddam Hussein’s regime using weapons sold by Mark and purchased with the financial support of the bank run by Thomas. While Part One of What a Carve Up! alternates between comedy and horror, Part Two blends the two genres, drawing on Pat Jackson’s 1961 film What a Carve Up! starring Carry On actors Kenneth Connor and Sid James. When Michael is taken to see Jackson’s comic horror spoof on his ninth birthday, he recognizes a ‘certain jokiness’ though the film fills him with ‘foreboding’ and leaves him feeling ‘scared’ (36). As the ‘Author’s Note’ makes clear, Coe also draws on Frank King’s The Ghoul (1928), the novel on which Jackson’s What a Carve Up! is loosely based. References to The Ghoul are scattered throughout Part Two, and the first paragraph of ‘Where There’s a Will’ is taken, bar one word, from the first chapter of King’s goofy gothic novel. Mirroring the plot of Jackson’s film, in Coe’s novel the Winshaws gather at their ancestral home, ‘“the house of horrors”’ (192), only to find themselves ‘the victims of a practical joke’ (38). After learning that they will not receive any money from Mortimer’s will, they are murdered in turn by the brother believed to be dead, who kills each sibling in a manner that



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reflects their misconduct or corruption: Henry, an MP who betrays Thatcher, is stabbed in the back; arms dealer Mark has his arms chopped off; Thomas, a voyeur, has his eyes gouged out; the journalist Hilary is ‘crushed by the weight of her own opinion’ when a bundle of newspapers to which she has contributed falls on her (465); Roddy, the art dealer, is ‘“Painted to death”’ (479); and Dorothy is bled to death, like the veal calves that she farms. The phrase ‘what a carve up’ thus simultaneously alludes to the division of money that is expected to arise from the reading of the will and the bloodshed that follows the family reunion. If comedy is signalled by the chapter titles in Part Two, mostly drawn from postwar British comedies such as Don’t Panic, Chaps! and A Lady Mislaid, then horror is signalled by the section title, ‘An Organisation of Deaths’, which anticipates both bloodshed and the theme of poetic justice. The quotation is taken from the essay that Michael reads about Georges Franju’s graphic documentary about a Parisian slaughterhouse, Le Sang des Bêtes, images from which ‘twitch horribly’ in his memory (252). The documentary, which has ‘hardened connoisseurs of the horror film’ screaming ‘with revulsion’ and rushing ‘for the exits’ (251), offers ‘a reminder that what is inevitable may also be spiritually unendurable, that what is justifiable may be atrocious … that, like our Mad Mother Nature, our Mad Father Society is an organization of deaths as well as of our lives …’ (252). Since Thatcher’s brutal social and economic policies were often justified as an inevitable response to a changing order, the novel implicitly likens Thatcherism to a slaughterhouse. In Part One, Dorothy literally slaughters the animals on her farm, Thomas and Mark are complicit in the slaughter of Iraqis by Saddam Hussein, Hilary cuts jobs and Henry slashes the NHS budget. In Part Two, poetic justice is meted out when the slaughterers become the slaughtered. However, in Part Two horror’s subversive potential is diluted by humour. The ‘horrific murders’ at Winshaw Towers are described not in the manner of Franju’s disturbing documentary but in the vein of classic post-war British comedies that lend their titles to all but the final chapter (498). Though the deaths are gruesome, they are presented as a ‘macabre joke’ (450), and the cartoonish, slapstick tone discourages sympathy for the selfish Winshaws and even permits pleasure to be taken in their demise. Yet comedy horror also has a conservative effect in these chapters by conveying that the defeat of Thatcherism is more a fun fantasy than a realistic political goal. This reactionary effect could be attributed to Hortensia Tonks. Her Preface to Michael’s unfinished history of the Winshaws, which appears at the end of the novel, suggests that she has sabotaged the subversive intent of his book. In the hands of Tonks, whose upperclass name aligns her with the Winshaws in terms of social status, Michael’s

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exposé of the ‘wretched, lying, thieving, self-advancing Winshaws’ (90) becomes a flattering and sympathetic portrait of a family ‘whose very name – once a by-word for all that was prestigious and influential in British life – has now become synonymous with tragedy’ (498). The fate of Michael’s book points to the pervasiveness of Thatcherism and the difficulty of resistance. Indeed, despite the murders, missing dates of death for Dorothy, Thomas, Henry, Mark, Roddy and Hilary in the family tree at the start of the novel suggest that the Thatcherite values they embody live on. The continuation of all that the Winshaws represent is underlined by the title of Michael’s book: The Winshaw Legacy. Furthermore, in contrast to the conclusion of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic horror story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839), the survival of Hilary’s children makes clear that at the end of What a Carve Up! the House of Winshaw still stands. The novel further expresses anxiety about laughter’s tendency to distract from political injustice through Michael’s disempowering relationship with comedy horror. As the emblem of his nostalgia, the film What a Carve Up! induces political apathy and inertia in Michael. The name of Coe’s protagonist stresses the importance of opposition: ‘Michael’ was the archangel who led the fight against Satan and ‘Owen’ means ‘young fighter’. Yet, at the start of the novel, Michael suffers from a lethargy that renders his name deeply ironic. After discovering that the man who brought him up is not his biological father, Michael sits at home obsessively re-watching Jackson’s What a Carve Up!, an attempt to recover his childhood, a time before loss. He is withdrawn and socially disengaged, rarely leaves his flat and fails to recognize Saddam Hussein on television. However, after meeting socially conscious Fiona, who undertakes a sponsored bike-ride to raise money for her local hospital, Michael starts to re-enter the world. Fiona inspires Michael to resume his abandoned role as the Winshaws’ official historian, which leads him to realize the numerous ways in which his life has been directly impacted by the Winshaw family. Although he thinks of himself as a ‘detached’ (338), ‘disinterested observer’ (303), Michael discovers that his biological father, John Farringdon, was Godfrey Winshaw’s co-pilot in the war and was murdered by Lawrence Winshaw. In addition, Ted, the man who raises Michael, dies of a heart attack at age sixty-one, brought on partly by Dororthy’s unhealthy ready meals and partly by the stress of losing his pension to the tycoon that takes over and asset-strips the company where he works, with financial assistance from Thomas. In Part One, Michael’s growing realization that he is not just writing the story of the Winshaws but is ‘“part of it”’ is reflected in structure and narrative perspective (87; 472). Initially, chapters that relate Michael’s story from a first person point of view are interspersed with



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chapters that relate the story of the Winshaws through a third-person narrator, suggesting a division between the personal and political or private and public realms. Michael’s increasing awareness of his entanglement with a family that once seemed separate and remote is conveyed when his voice begins to interrupt the narrative about Dorothy and Thomas (246; 324). The film What a Carve Up! also renders Michael passive by engendering a powerful sense of destiny. When he first views the film, Michael identifies so strongly with the central character, a mild-mannered man who flees the sexually alluring Shirley Eaton, that he imaginatively inserts himself into Kenneth Connor’s role: ‘it was me that I saw on the screen […] in that shabby  little cinema, in my bedroom that night and in my dreams forever afterwards. It was me’ (40). Trapped in his obsessive viewing of the film, Michael feels that he has ‘absolutely no control’ over his own life (302), which seems fated to follow a pre-established script. In particular, the fear of sex that he absorbs from Kenneth Connor’s character shapes his failed or passionless relationships with women: Verity, Susan, Joan and Fiona. At one point he admits that ‘Not only had I been divorced for eight years, but I hadn’t made love to a woman for more than nine’ (262), and this sexual failure mirrors his political impotence. Michael’s belief in chance also means that he never questions his ‘accidental’ meeting with publishing assistant Alice Hastings (87), which is actually engineered by Tabitha, who has ‘chosen’ him to be the Winshaw’s official historian (341). However, when Fiona dies, Michael is forced to abandon his belief in chance that absolves him of ‘the need to take events into my own hands’ (263). Witnessing Fiona’s death from medical neglect, the result of a chronically underfunded NHS being systematically dismantled by Henry and a lack of beds due to the impending Gulf War supported by Mark (90), Michael angrily declares, ‘“I don’t believe in accidents anymore”’ (412). Having rejected chance, Michael learns to resist what appears to be destiny. Called to Winshaw Towers for the reading of the will in Part Two, he re-enacts once again the scene between Kenneth Connor and Shirley Eaton that obsesses him, one that he has previously played out with every woman he desires. Yet this time, facing Phoebe, who resembles Shirley Eaton (288), Michael does not run away and the pair end up blissfully entangled in bed. Formerly a ‘man of imagination rather than action’ (263), Michael finally learns to take control of his life, suggesting that the lives of ordinary people need not be scripted (that is, dictated) by those in power. Despite his developing sense of agency, Michael fails to defeat the Winshaws due to his complicity with their values. According to Noël Carroll, although comedy and horror seem like opposites, they are actually ‘two sides of the same

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coin’ and there is a ‘strong correlation’ between the genres (145). Likewise, although Michael regards the Winshaws as part of ‘a different genre of existence altogether’ (235), he resembles them in various ways. Several characters endorse Thatcherite values: Phoebe commodifies her body when she agrees to sex with Roddy on the basis that he will exhibit her work and she ends up employed as Mortimer’s nurse, effectively helping to sustain the life of a Winshaw. Graham, a radical Film Studies student and ‘subversive visionary’, sets up a company with ‘one of Mrs Thatcher’s Enterprise Allowance schemes’ (371). Though Patrick, Michael’s publisher, complains that ‘“the only kind of … values anybody seems to care about are the ones that can be added up on a balance sheet”’ (102), he is bitter about missing out on the chance to publish a book written by a celebrity that is full of ‘“Cheap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written by a computer”’ because he knows ‘“it’s going to be the hit of the spring season”’ (103). Like the voyeur Thomas (a name that means ‘twin’), Michael is a ‘spectator’ who watches Joan asleep in bed and seeks ‘to screen himself off from the world’ (309). Both Michael and Roddy admire Yuri Gagarin and both repeat the same line from What a Carve Up! on arrival at Winshaw Towers ‘“Not exactly a holiday camp, is it?”’ (186; 430). Michael also sets aside his career as a novelist and accepts the commission to write the Winshaw history because he is offered ‘“the most absurd amount of money”’ (270), suggesting greed and a lack of intellectual integrity. Like Thatcher herself, Michael is ‘a Midlander by birth and a Southerner by adoption’ (273). Awareness of Michael’s similarity to the Winshaws prompts a reassessment of Pamela Thurschwell’s interpretation of his death at the end of the novel. Affirming Mortimer’s conviction that death offers the only means of escape from the Winshaws, Thurschwell presents Michael’s fate as a form of salvation. Yet, like the other murders in Part Two, his death could also be interpreted as a punishment. Throughout the novel, Michael assumes the role of detective, implying his innocence in contrast to Winshaw villainy, but the manner of his death (Tabitha hijacks the plane carrying Michael home and flies toward the ground, ensuring a fatal crash) reflects the nature of his crime: passive participation. In other words, Michael is a passenger punished for his ‘“willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it”’ (485). In this sense, Coe’s comedy of horrors critiques not just the monstrous Winshaws but also genial Michael and the left-liberal middle class he represents, a group that absorbed and profited from Thatcherism. The unhappy fate of the characters who resist the Winshaws suggests that opposition to Thatcherism needs to be not only active but also collective. Mildred, wife of loveable, left-leaning Godfrey – who is delighted by the



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Beveridge Report’s promise to deliver a better standard of living for ‘everyone’ (120) – escapes her awful in-laws by moving to America, where she begins a new and happy life, and Sid James ejects Thomas from the film set where he spies on Shirley Eaton. However, every other character who resists the Winshaws alone winds up defeated or dead. In a debate about the NHS with Dr Jane Gillam, Henry employs evasion and aggression, bombarding his opponent with incomprehensible statistics, to emerge ‘victorious’ (139). The BBC executive Alan Beamish, who believes that television ‘“collapses class distinctions”’ (68), is ousted by Hilary. Dorothy’s animal-loving husband commits suicide. Fiona dies of cancer in the underfunded hospital she has raised money to support. Graham is severely beaten when discovered to be making a documentary about Mark’s arms deals with Iraq. Finally, although she recruits Michael to write a family chronicle that will expose Winshaw corruption, after being confined by her family to an insane asylum for decades (an attempt to discredit her claims that Lawrence betrayed their brother Godfrey to the Nazis during the Second World War), Tabitha really does go mad. Reflecting the ineffectiveness of the Labour Party throughout the 1980s, at the end of the novel Michael’s friends, Phoebe (an artist), Joan (a social worker) and Graham (an activist) remain politically committed but become ‘fatally dispersed and fragmented’ after leaving the house they share in Sheffield, ‘“the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire”’ (273). Thus Coe implicitly calls for political engagement and collective action. Without it, the triumph of the Winshaws is, as their name suggests, a certainty: they win for sure. In What a Carve Up!, comedy affirms the value of collectivism. According to Coe, in his essay ‘The Paradox of Satire’ (2010), ‘laughter draws people together’. It is ‘something shared’ and forges ‘bonds of sympathy’ (N.Pag.). Yet, the novel also exhibits an awareness that, despite its subversive potential, laughter can uphold Thatcherism, a problem exemplified by alternative comedy in the 1980s. According to Schaffer, alternative comedy was characterized by a tension between challenging and collaborating with the dominant order. Schaffer argues that while alternative comedy was associated with anti-Thatcherite radicalism, it became ‘uncomfortably aligned with the Thatcherite environment and vulnerable to incorporation within it’ by being grounded in individualism and enterprise culture (396). He also questions the efficacy of alternative comedy as a mode of opposition, noting that satires such as Spitting Image were loved by those they attacked (385). What a Carve Up! questions the effectiveness of comedy as a subversive tool through the ‘choking’ laughter generated by the typo in Michael’s review of a new novel by a writer known for his left-wing politics, ‘playful irony’

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and ‘satirical lightness of touch’ (299, 277). Graham’s response to the discovery that the word ‘brio’ has been misprinted as ‘biro’ results in incapacitating laughter. His ‘smile became a chuckle, the chuckle became a laugh, and the laugh became a helpless, deafening, maniacal roar’ (299). Uncertainty about laughter’s radical potential is also suggested by the dénouement of the novel. Unlike his counterpart in Jackson’s charming comedy horror film, Michael does not survive his visit to Winshaw Towers. In the final scene, laughter inspired by horror is presented as appalling. Tabitha makes a joke – ‘“Flying, Michael, is never dangerous. […] It’s crashing that’s dangerous”’ – and issues howls of ‘the endless hideous laughter of the irredeemably insane’ (492), while Michael ‘stiffens’ and feels ‘sick’ as he realizes that he is about to die (491; 492). Horror becomes increasingly pointed as passages from George Bush’s speech announcing the US invasion of Iraq are woven into the description of Michael’s imminent death. What a Carve Up! closes with the accent on horror, not humour. More than fifteen years after the publication of What a Carve Up!, Coe wrote a series of essays in which he expresses his disillusionment with satire as a means of subversion. In ‘The Paradox of Satire’, he argues that in What a Carve Up! his attempt to use ‘laughter as an agent for change had failed completely’ (N.Pag.). While satire aims to ‘disrupt the established order’, anger is often discharged through ‘comfortable laughter’ that leaves the status quo in place. He expanded on this view in a discussion about What a Carve Up! in the Guardian’s ‘Book Club’ (2011), arguing that satire ‘suppresses political anger rather than stoking it up’ (N.Pag.). He concludes: ‘Political energies which might otherwise be translated into action are instead channelled into comedy and released – dissipated – in the form of laughter’ (N.Pag.). Similarly, in ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’ (2013), Coe proposes that ‘laughter is not just an ineffectual form of protest’ but ‘actually replaces protest’ (N.Pag.). Several scenes in What a Carve Up! exemplify these points as humour unwittingly obfuscates injustice or defuses anger. Michael’s amusing attempt to switch Fiona off using the television remote control belies the lack of control he exerts over his own life. Similarly, Patrick’s fury about Thatcherism is undercut by a joke about disaster capitalism. When Patrick delivers news of the publication of Hilary Winshaw’s novel, his biting irony makes clear his rage: ‘“Here’s something that’ll make you laugh. This’ll really crease you up, this will”’ (102). Yet Patrick’s anger is eclipsed by the comic treatment of his hypocrisy. Patrick ‘shudders’ at the thought of war, but explains to Michael that the cause of his fear is not worsening relations with the Middle East, the break-up of the United Nations and ‘“the possibility of a limited nuclear war?”’, but not getting ‘“a biography of Saddam Hussein



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into the shops in the next three or four months”’ and therefore being ‘“crapped on by every publisher in town”’ (104). Perhaps even more troublingly, Michael’s hilariously hapless attempt to describe Phoebe and Roderick having sex conceals the danger in the scene. Phoebe’s breasts are: like two cherries like two maraschino cherries like two glacé cherries like two Fox’s Glacier Mints like two peas in a pod like three coins in a fountain like Victoria plums like Victoria Falls like a sore thumb. (334)

The humour here contrasts the previous description of the scene in which Roderick coerces Phoebe into sex: ‘He drew her nightshirt further open and brushed his hand across her breast. Phoebe felt herself being pushed back on to the pillows’ (205–6). This brief description of an experience akin to rape is eclipsed by Michael’s long (four page) and funny attempt to write a sex scene. This comic interlude overshadows the alarming reality of Phoebe’s situation. In conclusion, the bleakness of Coe’s vision of Thatcherism is offset or diluted by the pleasure of laughter generated throughout What a Carve Up!. Though Coe affirms his ‘allegiance’ to comedy in his essay ‘“Comic” Novels’ (2013), his sequel to What a Carve Up! reflects his changed attitude to satire. As he explains in an interview with Silvia Dumitrache, discussing Number 11 (2016): ‘As life goes on, it becomes harder to make jokes about political injustice’ (N.Pag.). In Number 11, awareness of satire’s inability to effectively challenge Conservatism informs a portrait of Thatcher’s legacy in twenty-first-century Britain that privileges Gothic horror over comfortable laughter.

Works cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984 [1965]. Blake, Linnie. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Brooker, Joseph. Literature of the 1980s: After the Watershed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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Carroll, Noël. ‘Humour and Horror’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Spring 57 (2) 1999: 145–60. Coe, Jonathan. ‘Book Club: What a Carve Up!’ Guardian. 16 April 2011; https://www. theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/16/jonathan-coe-carve-book-club. ——. ‘“Comic” Novels’ (2013). In Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements: Non-Fiction, 1990–2013. London: Penguin, 2013. E-book. ——. ‘Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels’ (2007). In Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements: Non-Fiction, 1990–2013. London: Penguin, 2013. E-book. ——. Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness. London: Viking, 2015. ——. ‘The Paradox of Satire’ (2010). In Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements: NonFiction, 1990-2013. London: Penguin, 2013. E-book. ——. ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’. London Review of Books. 18 July 2013; http://www. lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking-giggling-into-the-sea. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Viking, 1994. Dumitrache, Silvia. ‘“It Becomes Harder To Make Jokes About Political Injustice”. Interview with Jonathan Coe’. Bookaholic.ro. 26 August 2013; http://ww.bookaholic. ro/it-becomes-harder-to-make-jokes-about-political-injustice-interview-withjonathan-coe.html. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1984. King, Frank. The Ghoul. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1929. Lahr, John (ed.). The Orton Diaries. London: Methuen, 1986. Lenin, V. I. Collected Works. Volume 23. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964. Le Sang des Bêtes. [Film] Dir. Georges Franju. Paris: Forces et Voix de la France, 1949. Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowles. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976, 1990 [1867]. ——. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 2008 [1852]. Schaffer, Gavin. ‘Fighting Thatcher with Comedy: What To Do When There Is No Alternative’. Journal of British Studies 55, April 2016: 374–397. Swift, Jonathan. The Intelligencer, III. In The Works of Jonathan Swift. Volume 9. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable & Co, 1824. Thatcher, Margaret. ‘Speech to Conservative Election Rally in Plymouth’ (‘The Mummy Returns’). 22 May 2001; http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/108389. ——. ‘Speech to the Conservative Party Conference’. 12 October 1990; http://www. margaretthatcher.org/document/108217. Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe.’ In British Fiction Today, edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham, 28–39. London: Continuum, 2006. Towlson, Jon. Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages from Frankenstein to the Present. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014.



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Trimm, Ryan. ‘Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe.’ In Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture, edited by Elizabeth Ho and Louisa Hadley, 158–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. What a Carve Up! [Film] Dir. Pat Jackson. London: New World Films, 1961. Whittingdale, John. ‘No Title’. In Margaret Thatcher: A Tribute in Words and Pictures, edited by Iain Dale, 223–8. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005. Wood, Robin. ‘An Introduction to the American Horror Film.’ In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 107–41. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

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‘These are my books’: What a Carve Up! and Video Aesthetics James Riley

One of the pivotal exchanges in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994) occurs between the radical filmmaker Graham Packard and the perceived ‘literary type’ (280) Michael Owen. In June 1982 Owen, the newly published author of Accidents Will Happen and would-be literary critic, arrives in Sheffield from London in order to visit the home of his childhood friend Joan. Packard is one of her student lodgers ‘from the polytechnic rather than the university’ who is on ‘some sort of film-making course’ (274). Occupying polarized positions at each end of a cultural and geographic spectrum, experiencing mutual territorial distrust due to their different relationships with Joan and presented at the start of what will become strangely intertwined careers, Coe colours their conversations with an inevitable and barely concealed passive aggression. When asked to watch Packard’s ‘“end-of-year assignment”’, a ‘film’ or rather video-essay called ‘Mrs Thatcher’s War’, Owen comments ‘spitefully’ that when he was a student ‘“we used to spend our money on books”’ (280). Graham’s response is a potted defence of video’s practical and heuristic advantages: ‘Don’t give me that.’ Graham gestured at the rows of tapes which lined his dresser and window-sill. ‘These are my books. This is the medium of the future, as far as film-making’s concerned. Nearly all our work at college is done on video now. Three hours of tape, there is, on one of these little beauties. ‘Do you know how much three hours' worth of sixteen mill would cost you?’ (280)

Although What a Carve Up! is, in part, a novel about personal stasis, truncated human trajectories and the weight of the past, it is equally a novel about the desire to materially upgrade and to be technologically up to date. Packard’s enthusiasm for what he, in 1982, extols as the ‘medium of the future’ mirrors – and is systemically imbricated in – a series of macro-economic shifts associated

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with the business interests of the novel’s dominant antagonists, the Winshaw family. Occupying and monopolizing the upper echelons of Britain’s social hierarchies, the family includes an arms dealer (Mark Winshaw), a battery farmer (Dorothy Winshaw) and a merchant banker (Thomas Winshaw). In charting their professional lives Coe plots out the acceleration of parallel developments in military hardware, industrial processes and consumer durables. Particularly in the case of the scopophillic Thomas Winshaw – whose chapter in the novel follows that featuring Packard and Owen’s encounter – Coe describes the decision of his bank to invest ‘heavily in the burgeoning [video] industry’ (307) from the autumn of 1978, the period in which both JVC and Sony introduced competing domestic video formats, VHS and Betamax. As the novel moves into its third decade, one might ask whether it is as up to date as its characters and their interests. That is to say, now that it has come of age, to what extent can What a Carve Up! be considered a contemporary novel? Contemporaneity is of course conceptually fluid rather than specifically period based, but the reader of 2016 might wish to turn to Coe’s recent Number 11 (2015), a novel set between 2003 and 2011 and which alludes to aspects of What a Carve Up!, as a current example of contemporary literature. Historical recession is obviously going to negate any text’s contemporality because – depending on one’s radius – the sphere of composition, publication and consumption can only be co-habited for so long.1 Further to this, a more specific critical question would relate to the matter of contemporary relevance. To what extent and in what way does this latetwentieth-century novel now speak to (if at all) the second decade of the twentyfirst? Writing in the London Review of Books at the time of its publication, in ‘Theydunnit’ Terry Eagleton gave What a Carve Up! a glowing review, calling it ‘a  carve-up of contemporary Britain’ (12). Perhaps one should accept the evaluation but re-cast this cover-emblazoning quotation in terms of documentary rather than contemporary value: the novel presents a carve-up of 1990s Britain. Re-contextualization is an inevitability of literary consumption. Literary value, by contrast, is frequently conferred via a de-contextualization; a negation of historical specificity that consciously or not relies upon a trope of timelessness. Consider, for example, the way in which William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) is often seen not as a novel of the 1980s but as a prescient outline of ‘our’ cyberspatial techno-culture.2 The reading I offer in this chapter consists of an argument for the contemporary relevance of What a Carve Up! rather than its historical value. In short, I do not regard it as a relic of the 1990s, despite its own seductive invitations to the



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comforts of nostalgia. However, this claim is made on the basis of recognizing and amplifying the precision of its contextual detail. Whereas in Neuromancer Gibson’s representation of information technology was sufficiently speculative so as to exceed its productive context, the ostensible realism deployed by Coe in What a Carve Up! is charged with the matter of the specific period under consideration.3 Although his novel often points to the ambiguity of memory, as the reader is taken from 1961 to 1991, the tools, technology and material reality of the decades are accurately rendered. In addition to drawing a range of textual sources into the narrative such as letters, diary entries, transcripts and tabloid columns, Coe also places specific emphasis on the atmosphere of Westonsuper-Mare’s Central Cinema and its programme for the week beginning 17 September 1961. When describing Owen’s viewing habits in 1990 he details the monochrome to colour transition that occurs when a black and white videotape is turned off and a television news report begins. Later in the novel reference is also made to the sonic abuse that takes place in Baghdad’s ‘Department of Public Security’ during the same period using the ‘[tape] recorded screams of torture victims’ (386). My claim is that out of this range of media references, it is Coe’s handling of video, the technology that Graham celebrates in 1982, that forms the basis of the novel’s twenty-first-century significance. This might be considered odd because video, and particularly the VHS format, is currently regarded as dead media. Like its one-time competitor Betamax, it is no longer commercially produced.4 One could say further that it is actually laughably ironic to think about video in terms of value. Anyone who has have recently tried to sell or even donate a box of tapes would know that VHS is a format that literally cannot be given away.5 That said, the focus here is oriented less toward the prioritization of a given context than toward Coe’s contextualization of video: the manner in which he absorbs the technology and its operational possibilities into the fabric, or texture of his novel. Here ‘context’ is understood in its original sense of the ‘connected structure of a writing or composition; a continuous text or composition with parts duly connected.’ In this sense, ‘context’ designates the result of the ‘weaving together of words and sentences’. It describes the architectonics of a literary composition, the structure of a connected passage and its relationship to ‘the parts which immediately precede or follow’ it and ‘determine its meaning’.6 As such, one could argue that ‘to context’ and ‘to contextualize’ mean to engage in this process of weaving and construction. Notions of social context, cultural context and so forth represent a metaphorical and figurative extension of this initial connotation. It is easy to see the connection but it is worth keeping

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this etymological specificity in mind when considering a text in relation to a proximate set of trends, events and/or media. That is to say, it is important to think not only about the extent to which a given text mimetically reflects or reproduces surrounding issues but also how literature achieves such a connection. It is important to think about the way in which a particular act of writing is simultaneously bound up with and how a particular use of language becomes creatively intertwined with its surroundings. This inscription is evident at two levels in What a Carve Up!: a diachronic and a synchronic narrative level. Video is narrated as one format within a wider continuum of technological change while in relation to Owen, it is connected to a single, particular mode of usage. The former is the more directly mappable of the two modes. It is connected to the novel’s most dominant structural and historical narrative: a thirty-year arc in the life of Michael Owen from his ninth birthday in 1961 to a crucial six-month period between August 1990 and January 1991. This shift is book-ended by two very different iterations of the film from where Coe takes his title, Pat Jackson’s What a Carve Up! (1961) produced by Monty Berman with a screenplay by Ray Cooney and Tony Hilton. Owen describes his first (incomplete) birthday viewing of the film at the Central shortly after its production. One later learns the making of the film involved the on-set presence of Thomas Winshaw. In August 1990 in his flat an older Owen views the film on video where he ‘press[es] the pause button’ and ‘the rewind button’ (49) in order to ‘obsess’ (151) over his recalled point of interruption, the scene in the film in which Shirley Eaton undresses. As with Packard, blank and pre-recorded videotapes ‘piled both horizontally and vertically’ (57) are seen to have largely replaced books in Owen’s flat just as the amount of time he spends watching them has eclipsed his work as an author. When outlining Thomas Winshaw’s narrative, Coe provides details of the market forces that informed this shift from cinematographic film to videocassette. The format’s rise to market dominance began with the emergence of the Phillips VCR in 1972, the JVC VHS and the Sony Betamax in 1978. The cultivation of a buoyant rental market between 1981 and 1983 allowed expensive VCRs to be hired for ‘“Ten quid a month […] down at Rumblelows”’ (280) and shadowed a growth in domestic ownership from 0.8 per cent in 1979 to 35.74 per cent in 1984 (the year, incidentally, of the Video Recordings Act).7 According to the novel’s internal chronology, Owen purchases his ‘first’ (304) VCR in 1982, which means that by 1990 he is a veteran of the format. His narrative voice thus comes into play at the peak of video production and consumption in the UK and the point at which Thomas Winshaw’s investment in the industry is reaping its highest rewards.



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These lines of usage, investment and spectatorship that connect Winshaw, Packard and Owen describe a familiar narrative in media history. Developments in audio-visual technologies of storage and communication are frequently presented as cycles of innovation and obsolescence. One format replaces another by responding to the (previously unapparent) operational flaws of the earlier technology. Home video offered a combination of theoretically higher sound and picture quality than previous domestic formats such as cine film as well as the invitation of choice, accessibility and repeated viewings. This was a functional difference that was marketed as a qualitative advantage over the schedule-based viewing practices of both cinema and television. Obviously formats co-exist and video did not destroy the cinema. However, as the closure of repertory cinemas such as the Scala in London’s King’s Cross (closed in 1993) evidence, the ability to, in the novel’s terms, rent, buy or tape ‘from the television’ (331) challenged the ubiquity of going to a specific cinema to see a specific film or gathering in front of the television to see a specific programme at a specific time.8 Hence, the growth of the commercial and domestic ‘video library’, a phrase exemplified by Packard and Owen’s shelves: between the 1980s and 1990s, the video tape usurping the book’s place in the sitting room as the primary marker of accumulated leisure time. As with the market shift from vinyl to cassette tape, this commercial ideology was based upon an evaluative discourse of fidelity as well as the user-focused functionality of a recordable medium. Formats gain commercial and cultural traction when they allow consumers to simultaneously act as producers. Coe highlights this in Owen’s fascination with the pause button. Freeze frame, as Packard describes this mode, is the ‘main selling point’ of the VCR, a function that gives ‘control over cinematic time’ to the audience rather than the filmmaker. As the novel shows, this ‘democratization of the viewing process’ (282) gives rise to both political and libidinal pursuits. What is noteworthy about this description is that Coe places emphasis upon the appearance of the paused video image. He notes the ‘lines across the screen’ and the ‘jittery stillness’ of the figure on Packard’s television (282). Whilst Packard assures Owen that ‘the technology’ll improve’ (282) it does not and it did not: eight years later Owen is still pausing his copy of What a Carve Up! at the key moment which results in similar jittery images of Eaton that move and shudder in ‘jerky stages’ (49). Thomas Winshaw is similarly ‘enraptured’ by freeze frame, ‘the very raison d’etre of video’ but he is an enthusiastic user of the Phillips videodisc which provides ‘sharp picture quality and perfect still frames’ (308). This is not the advanced form of VHS that Packard looks forward to but a parallel, prestige

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medium that came onto the market in May 1982.9 By contrast the ‘jitter’ of Packard and Owen’s VCRs is not so much a flaw in their equipment but an inherent aspect of the VHS format and its operational specificity. Unlike digital formats such as videodisc and DVD, VHS produced a still image by halting the movement of the tape and ‘continuously reading the requested frame’. This was done until the pause button was released meaning that the ‘still’ image was far from motionless. It was a single portion of the tape that repeatedly moved over the reading head, thus producing the ‘shaking effect’, a considerable amount of visual noise and, as in the case of Owen’s repeated pausing, tape damage.10 The point here is that Coe’s brief but precise emphasis on the aesthetic specificity of parallel formats (what their images actually looked like on screen and how each device allowed its user to engage with the image) offers a counterargument to the narrative of media obsolescence that structures the linear history of the novel’s primary narrative. Attention to this type of detail is a methodological principal of ‘media discourse analysis’, an area of media history that is associated with Friedrich Kittler, author of Gramophone Film Typewriter (1986). Kittler’s basic argument is that shifts between media communicate a criterion of difference rather than improvement. Each successive media form encodes the information it carries in accordance with a particular semiotic system that is closely linked to its operational procedure. One application of this thinking outside of the devices that Kittler discusses would be to challenge the point that cine film ‘lacks’ the fidelity of high definition video. Both Super-8 and HD create representations of ‘reality’ based on vastly different operational principles, one analogue and photochemical, the other digital and pixelated. It is only from a commercial and promotional perspective that these technologies form part of a teleological audio-visual history. HD’s current market dominance does not erase the manner in which both representational economies generate a symbolic if not metonymic dimension. That’s to say, the ‘Kodak cromatic’ appearance of cine film has come to signify the late 1950s and 1960s in the same way that the overexposure of HD will no doubt be read as an appropriate visual register for the high-velocity information culture of the twenty-first century.11 Coe’s representation of VHS proceeds in this archaeological fashion. By freezing and unfreezing the scene between Kenneth Connor and Shirley Eaton, Owen’s use of video allows him to repeat what he can ‘never forget about’ (42–3), the ‘trauma’ of his first, incomplete viewing of What a Carve Up!. This is the opposite of home video’s theoretical relationship to cinema, that which stands in for the incomplete or otherwise inaccessible screening. In The House of Sleep (1997), Coe gives us the cinephile Terry Worth who in his pursuit of the



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‘lost’ film Latrine Duty between 1983 and 1984 hypothesizes that such cultural absences constitute ‘beautiful’ (127) and perpetually deferred dreams. The rise of video from 1982 onwards arguably did much to ossify this ‘dream-aura’ by unearthing and materializing a whole catalogue of previously lost films. This included T. Hayes Hunter’s The Ghoul (1933) with Boris Karloff, the inspiration for Jackson’s What a Carve Up!.12 Owen’s fetishization of the film through video seems to amplify this oneiric, if not hypnagogic status rather than dissolve it. Whereas Worth attempts to locate Latrine Duty from a single still, Owen uses video to render What a Carve Up! as a series of jittering stills. This elongation of the film’s temporal and spatial basis gives the sense that Owen is using video to explore what Walter Benjamin would term its ‘optical unconscious’ (176) as a means of understanding the sensation that he has been ‘“inhabiting it”’ (152).13 Certainly if we recall the Scotch advert from 1985 which offered tapes that would ‘re-record not fade away’, this notion of videotape as prosthetic memory is adjusted in Owen’s repeated usage.14 The videotape does not relinquish him from the need to remember a film from 1961, but intensifies the psychic investment he confers upon that memory. To use language that might have appeared in Worth’s dissertation on lost films, Owen’s video does not make good the lack of What a Carve Up! but instead increases the desire he expresses toward it. This cathexis is somewhat different to the representation of video in other novels of the period such as Chris Petit’s Robinson and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, both published in 1993. In Robinson the narrator Christo begins as a film executive before becoming involved in a Derek Raymond-style world of shot-on-video pornography. The first signs of the novel’s movement into this field come with the morally ambivalent title character starting ‘to carry round a tiny video camera, small enough to fit in one hand’. Robinson gathers this material ‘unobtrusively’, alternating ‘between rapid bursts of taping […] in the Angel and long takes in cafes with the camera left on the table to record at random’ (106). In Trainspotting’s opening section, ‘The Skag Boys, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Mother Superior’, the emphasis is less upon the act of video production than video consumption. As his friend Sick Boy goes into heroin withdrawal Renton attempts to ignore him by focusing his attention ‘oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video’ (3), a pre-recorded tape rented from Ritz Video.15 His narration indicates a certain familiarity with the actor’s oeuvre: As happens in such movies, they started off wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot together. Any minute now though, auld Jean-Claude’s ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin. (3)

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Robinson’s diaristic footage contains none of this plot-based familiarity. It is a large, amorphous film that lacks any discernible narrative. Hence the challenge he issues to Christo as his de facto editor. He presents him with ‘a large box full of video cassettes’, asks him to transfer them to VHS and then ‘select the best bits’ (106). By contrast in Trainspotting, Welsh has Renton suffer the frustration of an incomplete narrative in a similar manner to Michael Owen. The anticipation of an imminent fight-scene suggested by Renton’s use of the present tense is curtailed when he accompanies Sick Boy to visit their dealer Mother Superior. As Renton puts matters, the likelihood that he will use heroin as well means that he will face ‘back charges fi the shoap oan a video ah hudnae even goat a deek at’ (4). Watching videos and making videos: these are the two polarities that Coe factors into his novel by way of Packard and Owen’s differing pursuits. In addition, Petit, Welsh and Coe collectively overlap in their handling of the practical and imaginative capacities of the medium. The ease with which Robinson accumulates ‘miles’ of footage mirrors Packard’s enthusiasm for the cost efficiency of video over ‘sixteen mill’ (280). Similarly, Renton’s continued references to Van Damme as he travels back to Leith ‘gleefully anticipating the stomping’ (8) he will see in the film, reflects in microcosm Owen’s obsessional return to his VHS copy of What a Carve Up!. That said, in Petit and Welsh, the references to video carry a specific narratological function. They work largely as informants, narrative units that ground the texts in a particular place and time: the late 1980s and early 1990s. Petit’s camcorders are the 1990s equivalents of the cine cameras that populate Ballard’s Crash (1973) and both devices carry the same basic role: their operation marks out a zone for experimental group behaviour.16 In the case of Welsh, Renton’s anxiety regarding a potential fine ‘ootay Ritz’ (4) is, according to Sick Boy, a ‘petty, trivial’ (4) concern in comparison with the impending effects of heroin withdrawal. It represents an adherence to the type of routine that seems anomalous within the cycle of extreme behaviour that characterizes drug addiction. In this sense, Welsh’s emphasis on video rental works as an analogue to Alexander Trocchi’s retention of quotidian detail in his heroin novel Cain’s Book (1960), whose narrator, Joe Necchi, is equally explicit about his drug use as he is about the minutiae of his job as a scow captain on New York’s Hudson River. In short, the handling of video in Robinson and Trainspotting can be read partly as a contextualizing device and partly as an attempt at reiterating if not updating key tropes from prior novels that constitute points of influence. They do not, to reference Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), what Fredric Jameson terms ‘tap into’ the ‘reproductive networks’ (36) that characterize the technologies they represent.



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What is visible in Coe is not a novel which works ‘like’ a video but one which, by contrast, outlines a mode of engagement with video that exceeds the format’s practical and economic efficacy. This point of difference from Petit and Welsh is where the contemporary relevance of the novel can be situated. Having been officially discontinued in 2008, video is a commercially redundant format. However, this status as dead media says little about the way in which video and its thirty-year history has, as with vinyl before it, been recently embraced as both a collector’s format and an artistic, retro-cultural resource. From the Brad Miska-produced horror film franchise V/H/S (2012–14) to the visual art of Andy Denzler and Viktor Vauthier, one can note an increasing tendency on the part of contemporary artists to draw upon video’s form and visual aesthetics. Denzler uses multiple layers of oil paint to create images which are at once photorealistic but also, due to the inclusion of a series of horizontal lines, heavily distorted.17 The appearance and positioning of the lines creates the sense that the point of reference is heavily mediated: a painting of a paused, jittery video tape. As a result, Denzler’s paintings appear as images extracted from longer, unlocatable video sequences or, alternatively, representations that fetishize the ability of video to distort and re-shape that which it purports to represent. The key point is that Denzler does not engage in abstraction per se, but specifically mimics in his paintings the manner in which video causes visual disturbances. In the sequence ‘Amy on VHS’ (2012), photographer Vauthier presents a portfolio of a young woman in the style of his photoshoots for the likes of I-D magazine. However rather than relying on 35mm film, as is his standard practice, the images are stills taken from a VHS tape, complete with the ‘PLAY’ motif in the top right-hand of one of the stills.18 Compared to other images in his portfolio, ‘Amy on VHS’ lacks definition. The viewer is presented with the pale, washedout colours characteristic of domestic video. It is difficult to pick-out the detail of what Amy is wearing and her own features lack definition. Despite this lack of fidelity, the visual effect pertains to a peculiar sense of familiarity. There is an uncanny quality to the images that combines a sense of anachronism with familiarity as well as the implication that the material has been ‘found’, that is to say re-purposed as a fashion shoot having been originally recorded for another reason and another audience. Intimacy and estrangement come together in equal measure. One artist who takes this dissonance further is Steelberg. He makes rental-style packaging and cover art that re-imagines current genre films – such as Star Wars: Rogue One (2016) – as video tapes from the 1980s.19 Using ‘period’ graphics and ‘distressed’ packaging, the appearance of the objects is indicative of either heavy rental usage or extensive archive storage. The overall effect though

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is that of nostalgia. Steelberg is attempting to evoke a very particular mode of film consumption which for his core audience is imbued with simulacral but nonetheless potent childhood memory.20 These are not the only examples of contemporary re-engagements with video media. As Thomas Hodges’s recent VHS: Video Cover Art (2015) and websites such as VivaVHS attest, the public interest in video remains strong despite (or more likely because of) its commercial demise.21 One could see this trend as evidence of what Simon Reynolds calls ‘retromania’ and the manner in which it produces a troubling historical velocity, or one could argue that the valorization of the analogue that lies of the heart of such works is a necessary riposte to the hegemony of digital formats. Either way, it is a cultural turn that is characterized by precisely the forms of engagement that are described in What a Carve Up!: video as the hardwiring of personal memory rather than its prosthesis; an appreciation of technical flaws as system signatures and a use of the format to recover the obscure rather than preserve that which is already known. In 2014, the Penguin Design Awards used What a Carve Up! as the basis of their competition brief. Graphic designers were invited to submit a potential cover design for a new edition of the novel. Videotape and video footage functioned as a consistent point of reference for a number of the entries submitted. In particular Paula Jankowska applied ‘broken VHS cassettestyle effects’ to an image of Margaret Thatcher; Lauren Wakefield used graphics that evoked a blank Scotch tape and Sophie Rowles used the ‘old limitations of VHS recordings’ to present a ghostly image of Shirley Eaton.22 These designs give an indication of the extent to which video as theme has come into proximity with video as style. In this regard Coe’s novel can be evaluated not as a carve-up of 1990s Britain but functions as a 2016 guidebook to the way in which contemporary culture seeks to carve-up the video culture of the 1990s.

Notes 1 For more on this framing of the contemporary and the notion contemporary literature, see Roger Luckhurst and John Marks, ‘Hurry Up Please, It’s Time: Introducing the Contemporary’. 2 In November 2014 Gibson appeared at the British Film Institute as part of their science fiction season Days of Fear and Wonder. Despite being there to ostensibly promote his novel The Peripheral (2014), much of the discussion focused on Neuromancer, its genesis and its relationship to that other iconic, seemingly prescient, thirty-year-old text, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982).



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 3 Neuromancer’s opening line provides an example of the author’s use of technological register as part of his metaphorical schema: ‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel’ (9).  4 Production of pre-recorded video tapes officially ceased in 2008. This does not account for the continued production of blank VHS tapes. DVD was introduced to the American market in 1997. By 2006 DVD consumption and ownership of DVD players had outstripped that of the VCR. Bespoke, limited edition video tapes can still be found for sale but VHS and tape-based media no longer occupy a dominant market position.  5 There is a buoyant collector’s market related to VHS tapes. However, this relates mainly to rare pre-certification (i.e. pre-1984) video tapes and titles from rare labels. For more on this field of interest see Dan Kinem and Levi Peretic’s documentary Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector (2014). By contrast, ‘The World Speed Project’ celebrates the overabundance of massproduced, pre-recorded tapes such as Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994). Project founder Ryan Beitz is attempting to collect every VHS copy of the film. The project works on the basis that the tapes – a thrift store staple – are largely worthless. See http:// theworldspeedproject.blogspot.co.uk/.  6 This is the definition according to the Oxford English Dictionary.  7 Despite the growth of the market throughout the 1980s video recorders for the most part remained high-value, luxury items. Typical retail prices of VCRs at Rumbelows in 1983 ranged from £349.99 to £649.99. The Video Recordings Act of 1984 determined that all videos offered for sale or rent in the UK were to carry an appropriate certification relative to the intended age of the audience. Having had the remit for the classification of films shown in cinemas since 1912, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) was appointed to classify videos in 1985.  8 In ‘Scala!!!, Autopsy of a Cinema’, her history of the cinema for the magazine Shock Xpress 2, Jane Giles notes:

More independent film distributors turned their hands to video, working hard through their back catalogues and releasing films on sell-through just months after their first run theatrical release. New labels started dealing in the core Scala material of cult movies, rare horror and gay films. Retailing at £15, economics tipped the balance in favour of seeing films on video. (34)  9 For details of this format see http://cultureandcommunication.org/deadmedia/ index.php/Laserdisc. 10 See David T. Ronan, Practical VCR Repair (77–80). 11 In Tony O Neil’s novel Sick City, a pornographic home movie recovered from the site of the Manson murders of August 1969 is sold to the film-collector Rupert Du

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Wald. Du Wald praises the tactility of film claiming that video carries no ‘romance’ (300). When describing the contents of the film which is said to feature Sharon Tate, O Neil describes the appearance of ‘a flickering image’, the dance of ‘indistinct figures’, a ‘psychedelic splash of colour’ and the gradual ‘fade-in’ of the sound (301). In other words, the film seems to materially embody the 1960s in a way that video or DVD cannot. 12 According to Daz Lawrence writing on the website Horrorpedia, The Ghoul was regarded as a ‘lost’ film until 1969 when a low-quality Czech print began to circulate. The discovery of a complete negative in the 1980s eventually led to an official release. See https://horrorpedia.com/2013/03/29/the-ghoul-1933/. 13 Walter Benjamin speaks of the ‘optical unconscious’ in his essay ‘A Small History of Photography’ (1931):

It is possible, for example, however roughly, to describe the way somebody walks, but it is impossible to say anything about that fraction of a second when a person starts to walk. Photography with its various aids (lenses, enlargements) can reveal this moment. Photography makes aware for the first time the optical unconscious, just as psychoanalysis discloses the instinctual unconscious. (176) 14 As with a considerable amount of other video-based material, the advert is currently viewable on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=oJzRpgXvM2I. 15 Ritz Video was a British video rental chain bought out by Blockbuster in 1989. 16 In Ballard's Crash Vaughan, the main motivator of the novel's staged car crashes is usually found with his cine camera in hand: ‘He peered through the view-finder of the camera, tracking across the entrance of the casualty department’ (89). 17 For examples and commentary see Ildegarda Scheidegger, ‘Andy Denzler: Distorted Moments’. 18 See http://viktorvautier.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/amy-on-vhs-new-serie-comingsoon.html. 19 Examples can be found on Steelberg’s Instagram site: https://www.instagram.com/ iamsteelberg/?hl=en. 20 This is the trajectory of Aaron Vehlinggo’s interview with the artist. 21 VivaVHS is a review and news blog linked to video collecting which also archives aspects of video culture such as video rental cards. http://www.vivavhs. co.uk/. 22 See https://www.behance.net/gallery/13398631/What-a-Carve-Up-The-PenguinDesign-Awards-2014; https://www.behance.net/gallery/16489023/What-ACarve-Up and https://www.behance.net/gallery/16489023/What-A-Carve-Up.



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Works cited Adjust Your Tracking: The Untold Story of the VHS Collector. [Film] Dir. Dan Kinem and Levi Peretic. USA: VHShitfest, 2014. Ballard, J. G. Crash. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Benjamin, Walter. ‘A Small History of Photography’. In One-way Street and Other Writings, translated by J. A. Underwood, 172–93. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2008. Coe, Jonathan. The House of Sleep. Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1998. ——. What a Carve Up! Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1994]. Eagleton, Terry. ‘Theydunnit’. London Review of Books 16 (8) April 1994: 12. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. London: Gollancz, 1984. ——. The Peripheral. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015. Giles, Jane. ‘Scala!!!, Autopsy of a Cinema’. In Shock Xpress 2, edited by Stefan Jarworzyn, 30–6. London: Titan, 1994. Hayes, Hunter T. The Ghoul. London: Gaumont British, 1933. Hodge, Thomas. VHS: Video Cover Art. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2015. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey WinthropJones and Michael Wurtz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lawrence, Daz [Mondozilla]. ‘The Ghoul’. Horrorpedia. March 2013: N.Pag.; https:// horrorpedia.com/2013/03/29/the-ghoul-1933/. Luckhurst, Roger, and John Marks. ‘Hurry up Please, it’s Time: Introducing the Contemporary’. In Literature and the Contemporary: Fictions and Theories of the Present, edited by Roger Luckhurst and John Marks, 1–13. London: Taylor and Francis, 1999. O Neill, Tony. Sick City. New York: Harper, 2010. Petit, Chris. Robinson. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber, 2012. Ronan, David T. Practical VCR Repair. New York: Delmar, 1995. Scheidegger, Ildegarda. ‘Andy Denzler: Distorted Moments’. Whitehot Magazine. November 2014: N.Pag.; http://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/andy-denzlerdistorted-moments/3081. Trocchi, Alexander. Cain’s Book. New York: Grove, 1960. Vauthier, Viktor. ‘Amy on VHS’. Viktor Vauthier. 2012: N.Pag; http://viktorvautier. blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/amy-on-vhs-new-serie-coming-soon.html. Vehlinggo, Aaron. ‘Meet Steelberg, The Guy Who Makes All Those Cool VHS Covers’. Vehlinggo. 30 July 2016: N.Pag.; https://vehlinggo.com/2016/07/30/steelberg-80svhs-tape-cover-artist-interview/.

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V/H/S. [Film] Prod. Brad Miska. Berlin and Los Angeles: Bloody Disgusting and The Collective, 2012–14. Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. London: Secker & Warburg, 1993. What a Carve Up! [Film] Dir. Pat Jackson. London: New World Films, 1961.

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What Became of the People We Used to Be?: The House of Sleep (1997) and the 1970s Sitcom, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–5) Nick Hubble

Jonathan Coe’s fifth novel, The House of Sleep (1997), was published between arguably the two best-known works in his oeuvre, What a Carve Up! (1994) and The Rotters’ Club (2001). While those two novels focus, respectively, on the 1980s and the 1970s, The House of Sleep switches between events in the 1980s and its contemporaneous late 1990s in order to focus not so much on how individuals simply change over time but rather to highlight how they embody the continued reverberations of their past in the present. While all three novels are centrally concerned with mapping the paradigmatic and traumatic changes to the condition of Britain at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, this chapter will argue that The House of Sleep is as important as the betterknown novels because of the way in which it creates a counter narrative to the more familiar story of how the social-democratic collectivity of post-war Britain was violently supplanted by Thatcherite individualism and the neoliberal agenda, as explored below. In particular, this chapter will focus on the hitherto underexplored relationship between The House of Sleep and the BBC television sitcom, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, which was written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the same team who later wrote the screenplay for the 2005 television adaptation of The Rotters’ Club. Coe is well known for his interest in, and passion for, 1970s television light entertainment and comedy, as demonstrated, for example, by his reference to Benjamin Trotter, the protagonist of The Rotters’ Club, watching The Morecambe and Wise Show (1968–77) special on Christmas Day in 1977:

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The sense of the nation as one, at the heart of the social-democratic understanding of post-war Britain, is here equated with the popularity of The Morecambe and Wise Show Christmas special. However, note that this effect, experienced by Benjamin and millions of other British people, is only felt ‘briefly’ and ‘fugitively’. In the context of a novel, which otherwise highlights the bombing of Birmingham pubs by the Irish Republican Army, acute industrial unrest, racism and the rise of punk rock attitudes supplanting more traditional deference, this BBC light entertainment show takes on an almost unique symbolic significance; standing not just for everything that will have been lost by the end of the decade with the coming to power of the divisive Thatcher government but also acknowledging the fact that any sense of a British common culture is already little more than an annual, albeit well-loved, pantomime. This passage also has a more specific significance within the text because the complete sentence, quoted in part above, setting out Benjamin’s ‘vision’ extends to nearly a page in length and thus foreshadows the celebrated thirty-five-page-long sentence that comes at the end of the novel. Immediately the sketch with Elton John ends, Benjamin’s experience of an ‘incredible sense of … oneness’ deflates into the realization that he is simply ‘an ordinary teenager in an ordinary family’ and the attendant loss of ‘the sense of blinding clarity’ leaves him facing the fact once more that ‘everything in his life seemed fraught, complex and uncertain’ (274–5). Likewise,



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the immense epiphanic sentence that all but concludes The Rotters’ Club closes with a similarly unreal sense of oneness in which Benjamin contemplates a future lifetime with Cicely in a Britain in which Margaret Thatcher does not win the 1979 general election. Readers know without Coe needing to inform them that neither of these predictions will come to pass. By the end of the novel, the only sense that things might have worked out differently for Britain remains in the nostalgic memories of those sitting in front of the television, each one among the millions laughing in unison at the reminder of simpler and more certain times. As time passes, it is important to record the details of the 1970s BBC shows which provided a common cultural context for Coe and millions of other viewers during a decade in which there were only three television channels in Britain. In 2017, only those British readers around the age of fifty and above are in a position to have experienced that culture and therefore respond to Coe’s fiction by, for example, remembering their own experience watching the 1977 Morecambe and Wise Show Christmas special. It might be questioned whether the cultural politics of 1970s television programmes are still important in general but their continued significance to Coe may be gauged from his tweet of 24 July 2017 concerning the BBC sitcom, The Good Life (1975–8): ‘The Good Life wouldn’t work today as comedy. Tom & Barbara would be Remainers, Margot & Jerry Leavers, and they wouldn’t talk to each other’ (https://twitter.com/jonathancoe/ status/889392197237440512). Before The Rotters’ Club, however, Coe had already made symbolic use of iconic 1970s British television in The House of Sleep, whose two main male protagonists, Robert and Terry, share names with the central characters from Clement and La Frenais’s well-known television sitcoms, The Likely Lads (1964–6) and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (1973–5). The 1970s incarnation of this show attracted weekly audiences of up to 16 million viewers and was even at the time drawn into national politics. For example, the need to polemicize against Britain’s absorption into the ‘Common Market’ in 1975 drew E. P. Thompson into the realms of populist debate: ‘The middle class thinks the Market is about Culture. Bob of the Likely Lads has long been taking Thelma earnestly to Fellini and Godard. The academic and television Bob and Thelmas, after their long and abject mid-Atlantic enchantment, have entered a no less abject enchantment with “Europe”’ (45). At the time this was written, BBC1 was in the middle of a repeat run of all 26 episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? and Thompson’s Sunday Times readership would have had little difficulty with the cultural reference. As Thompson’s thinly veiled contempt suggests, the series did not always signify the unity of the nation in the manner

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of The Morecambe and Wise Show. Indeed, the weekly screening of the show’s opening credits, which juxtaposed shots of a newly middle-class Bob standing next to his car and in front of his house with that of resolutely working-class Terry in the process of missing the bus, can be seen in retrospect as some of the most prescient imagery of the era; anticipating the widespread social division of the 1980s to come. The representation is a world away from the working-class solidarity of the original sitcom, The Likely Lads, which revolved much more around the workplace in contrast to the scenes set in Bob and his wife Thelma’s suburban living room, which dominated the 1970s show. Ironically, the abiding concern of the younger ‘lads’ in the 1960s series was that exactly such a suburban fate might befall them: ‘What have we got to look forward to. […] Married in one of those semis in the new estate and then your pension’ (qtd. Wickham 2008: 112). Here the context was the New Wave of British Cinema and the hostility of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) to exactly such a domestic fate. Notably, the northern actors who played Terry and Bob, James Bolam and Rodney Bewes, had both played the support roles in New Wave films alongside Tom Courtenay: respectively, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962) and Billy Liar (1963). The Likely Lads itself was a consequence of the BBC’s decision, following the 1962 Pilkington Report, to move from an elitist Reithian mission to educate the public toward a more inclusive engagement with the collective working-class values of social-democratic post-war Britain by reaching out to seek young, working-class audiences. The show was immediately popular not only because it connected in a naturalistic manner with majority working-class experience but also in part because it was not as straightforwardly easy going as the title suggests. As Phil Wickham (2008) explains, The press release that marked the first series in 1964 talked about the old hands at the factory saying there goes ‘a likely lad’. But it is a bitter phrase – the point is that ‘likely’ is ironic – the assumption is that, for all their youthful swagger, they will be brought low in the course of time like everyone else. In reality, they are not ‘likely’ at all; their dreams, their confidence are misplaced and illusory – very ‘unlikely’, in fact. (111)

The very first episode – complicating E. P. Thompson’s judgements of ten years later – begins with the lads, aged twenty-one, returning from a holiday on the Costa Brava, reflecting a level of working-class disposable income that was a product of the post-war boom years between 1955 and 1969, when average weekly earnings rose by 130 per cent. When the tea lady at the railway station



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asks them if they got their tan at the seaside, Terry replies: ‘The seaside! Who do you think we are, working class!?’ The effect of this punch line is a curious one because it both is and is not an affirmation of class identity. What it suggests is not a movement beyond or outside of class but a sense of that class being in transition even though it is unclear where this process will end up. What is unusual about the series, its 1970s successor, and the subsequent film version of The Likely Lads (1976), is that they tell a sequential story unfolding more or less in real time. For example, Terry is in the army during the gap between the series but when he returns to Newcastle, where the show is set, at the beginning of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, he finds that the factory at which he formerly worked has closed. There are no longer the jobs available to him that would allow him to sustain his working-class identity and he is economically excluded from entering the new consumer society. Meanwhile, Bob has progressed, made his way upward in the world, but as a consequence he finds that the resumption of his previous intimacy with Terry compromises the individuality of his new identity. As a result of this duality, the show could be viewed from both a suburban-middle- and working-class perspective and hence gained a large national audience even though its Britishness is expressed by opposed forces on the verge of pulling apart. Because the story is allowed to develop in line with concurrent social trends, the result is a surprisingly powerful narrative which shows an ever-widening gap developing between Bob and Terry. It was arguably a combination of the universal appeal of the protagonists, the contemporary social realism of the show and the genuine depth created by the lengthy gap between the series, which made Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? into such a central feature of British national life during the early to mid-1970s, a period of relatively unprecedented economic and political crisis in post-war Britain. As Wickham comments, the show had a genuine relationship with its audience because of the way it had been established over time: ‘When [Bob and Terry] talk about times past in the 60s, many [of the audience] remember the times they spent with them then too’ (117). In this context, it is worth noting that Coe does not just take his protagonists’ names from the show but he also employs a similar temporal structure in The House of Sleep, which creates a genuine layered sense of the past by alternating scenes of the characters in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. Although Coe’s readers cannot remember having read about the characters in the 1980s, those who are university educated can equate the experiences described then with their own student days and thus develop a more personal relationship to the novel in a way that echoes the relationship of 1970s television audiences to Whatever

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Happened to the Likely Lads? Certainly the relationship between the two in the student scenes of the novel catches something of the interactions of the television series: ‘And she’s been going round telling everyone that you’ve got a twin sister.’ There was an expectant silence. Terry turned and looked at him, facetious, challenging. ‘Well?’ ‘Well what?’ ‘You’re not going to try and tell us that that’s true, are you?’ Robert returned his stare. […] ‘As a matter of fact it is,’ he said. Terry was briefly – very briefly – dumbstruck. ‘You’ve known me for two years – we’ve been friends for two years – and you’ve never told me that you had a twin sister. And yet you meet some weird woman, and you get talking, and five minutes later you’ve poured out the whole story to her?’ (89–90)

By the time of the Likely Lads feature film, which is set after the end of the television series, the terraced back-to-backs in which the lads had been born have been demolished and Terry is now living in a high-rise block of flats in which the lifts do not work and cars on the forecourt are routinely vandalized by teenagers. Clearly, the limits of comedy had been reached and to carry the story further forward into the mass unemployment and drug-ridden 1980s would have been simply cruel. Initially, in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Terry gets most of the laughs as witnessed by his description of the new housing estate Bob is in the process of moving into: There’s something depressing about these estates. It’s the thought of you all getting up at the same time, all eating the same kind of breakfast cereal, all coming home at half past six, switching on the same programme at the same time and having it off the same two nights of the week. (qtd. Hunt 1998: 104)

However, as the series progresses, its cultural representations may be read as precursors to the Thatcherite assault on the organized working class and the welfare state, as the feckless and workshy Terry increasingly appears an impediment to Bob’s progress. In this respect, the series writers Clement and La Frenais have subsequently described Terry as ‘lazy’, ‘sad’ and ‘a hypocrite’ (Webber 1999: 91–2). The death in August 2015 of David Nobbs, the creator of the 1970s sitcom, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (1976–9), another favourite of Coe’s, prompted Jonathan Freedland to describe the series in the Guardian ‘as an emblem of the 1970s … as [they were] actually lived and looked, at least in Britain: the



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shabby commuter trains, the tired suits, the tablecloth and doilies at home. It depicted the quotidian tedium of white-collar life’. Freedland then proceeded to flesh this idea out into a political history of British sitcom: On the Buses (1969–73) and Love Thy Neighbour (1972–6) as the racism of British society up to the early 1970s; Minder (1979–94) and Only Fools and Horses (1981–2003) as 1980s Thatcherite ‘everyman capitalism’; Alan Partridge and Edina of Ab Fab are softened 1990s capitalism; while the noughties is The Office (2001–3). This leads nicely to Freedland’s conclusion: ‘And, of course, most share the defining trait of the postwar British sitcom protagonist, from Harold Steptoe onwards: the thwarted, deluded man, forever falling short of his own fantasies of greatness’ (N.Pag.). This prompted a letter to the paper from David Reed of Northampton: Nowhere is Jonathan Freedland’s observation that ‘TV comedy has an uncanny knack for capturing the spirit of its age’ more pertinent than in comedy’s attitudes to social aspiration. Tony Hancock aspired to be a cut above everybody else generally but his hopes of reaching the same philosophical level as ‘Bertie’ Russell foundered when he couldn’t understand his books […] . In Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Bob was torn between his wife’s aspirations to owner-occupier bettering oneself and his mate Terry’s refusal to drop a workingclass lifestyle of drinking and making the most of what came his way. This theme has since played itself out, as aspiring to ever more expensive owner-occupied houses has become the unquestioned norm.

Leaving aside the point that Bob aspires to bettering himself as much as Thelma, this is interesting because of the way it corresponds to the discussion of aspiration that followed the 2015 general election, when the Labour defeat was initially attributed by centrists such as Tony Blair to talking too much about the poor and not enough about the aspirations of ‘hard working people’ (Shirbon 2015). As this discussion and this letter demonstrate, the apparently straightforward evocation of ‘aspiration’ often functions in practice as the ideological legitimation of one set of desires as opposed to other desires, which are implicitly demonized. The subtext, as identified by the Guardian economics editor, Larry Elliott, in a January 2014 column discussing ‘Benefits Street and the real problems of breadline Britain’ is that ‘the poor [can] stop being poor if they [make] the right sort of lifestyle choices’ (N.Pag.) – in other words, we have returned to a Victorian narrative of the deserving and undeserving lower classes. Significantly, Elliott invokes Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? to ask how this retrograde step could have happened since the 1960s, when working-class people were generally portrayed as ‘ambitious, witty and self-reliant’ (N.Pag.). He argues that the experience of the 1970s when trade-union influence appeared to

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be offering working people the chance of a commensurate share of the growing economy alarmed the employers and the political right, who launched the Thatcherite counter revolution, the values of which were subsequently accepted by the Labour Party in the 1990s. This is a familiar narrative of the rise and fall of the post-war British welfare state but what is interesting is the way that this 40-year-old sitcom can be employed as shorthand for arguably the most significant political turning point in post-war British social and cultural history. As implied in Reed’s letter, it is as though the show captured a moment from the 1970s when there was a choice between different but equally valid lifestyles, which has subsequently receded into a more brutal division between winners and losers: those who went on to prosper financially from the 1980s onwards and those who were left behind, increasingly subject to welfare dependency and precarity. The idea of a paradigm-changing social and cultural shift occurring across the 1970s and 1980s is central to Coe’s most successful novels; as Pamela Thurschwell notes in her essay ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’ (2006), ‘Both What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club owe a debt to the story of the Fall; positing a prelapserian time when community and society were active forces, before individuals become atomized as the novels’ protagonists have’ (34). The House of Sleep provides an interesting contrast to its better-known counterparts in the way that, as Vanessa Guignery notes, it tends to ‘leave the historical and political context in the background’ while concentrating on ‘private emotional lives’ (90), much as one finds in The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, where most of the sociopolitical commentary is implicit and domestic rather than explicitly national. In this respect, the novel de-emphasizes that familiar grand narrative of post-war British decline to focus on changes taking place at a personal level in everyday life, as demonstrated through alternating chapters set in 1983–4, when the key protagonists – Robert, Terry and Sarah – are all university students, and others set twelve years later in 1996 when they might retrospectively reflect upon their previous existence. At the same time, though, this shift in focus to the everyday is self-reflexively marked by the novel as ideological in the way that Terry, who by the mid1990s has become a well-established postmodern film critic, first declares his distaste for ‘“continuous narratives”’ (146) and later expresses the then dominant conception that: ‘“Left and Right have become meaningless concepts. Capitalism has proved itself unassailable, and sooner or later, all human life will be governed only by the random fluctuations of the market”’ (175), to which Dr Gregory Dudden heartily agrees. Such a perspective suggests a rather heartless



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indifference to individual travails on Terry’s part, a determined attempt at seeming intellectual detachment, as opposed to the more sadistic, Thatcherite impulses of the obnoxious, self-regarding and unprincipled sleep specialist, Dr  Dudden, who later condemns his colleagues as mediocrities. ‘Dr Dudden sprang to his feet with a final cry of contempt and made for the door. When he turned to address his four colleagues, they were shocked to see his face was puce with rage, the veins on his neck and forehead standing out like knotted string’ (294). Such a parallel lack of empathy might be seen as indirect commentary by Coe on the evolution of the dominant social tenor of the times from the 1980s to the 1990s. The implication is that Terry’s archetypal postmodern sense of irony, while preferable perhaps to naked self-interest as a form of personal ideology, is nonetheless complicit with the forces of capitalism and, at the very least, no hindrance to self-advancement. However, as Coe ruthlessly demonstrates in the novel, such postmodern irony and indifference is one of the staple preconditions for producing effective comedy, especially of the type popular in British sitcoms, which depends on the audience being sufficiently able to distance themselves ironically from characters in order to laugh at their misfortunes. The comedy of The Likely Lads and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? often depends upon abrupt reversals of fate, often in contexts which in real life would be fundamentally traumatic rather than comic. For example, in one episode Bob scoffs at Terry for being handed a fine in court for fighting in a pub but then, through a series of misplaced good intentions, finds himself in the same dock for the same reason. There are two especially big reversals in the overall history of the show. The first takes place in ‘Goodbye to All That’ (1966), the last episode of The Likely Lads, in which Bob decides to join the army. After the excitement of Bob’s departure, Terry feels restless without his mate in the factory and decides to sign up for the army too. The episode ends with Terry arriving at the barracks to find Bob, who has been rejected for having flat feet, back on his way home, while he faces the prospect of three years’ service which he now cannot get out of. This cruel reversal of fate is mirrored at the end of the film version of The Likely Lads, when Terry decides to serve as a seaman on a Bulgarian freighter. Bob spends the last evening before sailing with Terry only to wake up the following morning in a lifeboat aboard the ship, which has already left harbour. Meanwhile, Terry, oblivious to Bob’s sleeping place, has changed his mind about the job and is safely ashore. While Coe does not engineer a reversal between his Robert and Terry, he does render each of his protagonists subject to particularly cruel and traumatic individual reversals of fate. The insomniac Terry ends The House of Sleep in a coma having

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been attacked by a homicidal maniac. While, as Guignery notes, ‘the novel ends on a bitter-sweet note as Robert changes gender to appeal to Sarah but is told that Sarah’s relationship with Veronica [in the 1980s portion of the novel] was probably just a phase, and that she is to be married to Anthony’ (97). Therefore, the respective fates of Robert and Terry from The House of Sleep seem to be similar to those undergone by the male protagonists of What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club, as described by Thurschwell: to become trapped within a history they cannot process, doomed to repeat the failures of their youth, and ‘chained to early erotic fantasies’ (37). Such a description could also obviously be applied equally to Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, which charts not just a nostalgia for a mid-1960s northern working-class confidence rooted in full employment and rising salaries, but also an existential unease with the shift from communal to individual values. As discussed, Bob and Terry represent the social dynamic of the 1970s in the comic tension between the former’s desire for suburban-middle-class status and the latter’s fiercely protested adherence to working-class values, despite being happy to live off unemployment benefit and spend all his spare time at bookmakers, pubs and the Temperance Billiards Hall. However, this relationship, itself, is revealed to be the product of arrested development and repetitive behaviour. Even in the original 1960s series it had always been Bob whose cultural pretensions – growing a beard, buying a moped, trying to move out of the factory workshop and into an office – were foiled by Terry and this pattern persists throughout the new series as demonstrated by the last ever regular episode, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ (1974). Here as so often, Bob’s pursuit of individualism and the consumer society renders him close to becoming just another unit of the production process with no sense of conscious agency: Bob: Suddenly the past is larger, my future’s shrinking and I haven’t got time for the present. Terry: You’ve cut yourself off from your past. You’re hiding from your past up on the Elm Lodge Housing Estate with your friends in the badminton club.

The exact nature of the past becomes a specific area for contestation as Terry’s Great Uncle Jacob dies triggering an extended examination of the nature of the ‘old’ working-class values. Terry’s mother criticizes Jacob as a ‘wrong ’un’ who spent his money on booze and horses and ruined the marriage and life of his socially aspirational best friend. This is confirmed by the friend, Joe Hargreaves:



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It wasn’t easy in those days to cut yourself adrift and get on but I managed it. Even married above me class. Then over the years he’d keep coming back, borrowing money, making trouble. It didn’t do my work any good you know or my marriage. It seemed everything I ever tried to do, he mucked up.

Hearing this leads to Bob gaining a sudden insight: ‘I’ve just seen the future! … He’s old uncle Jacob and old Joe Hargreaves that’s me … Jacob and Joe they’re Bob and Terry forty years on.’ However, this is only one of the reasons that Bob is caught in a temporal impasse. The truth of the matter is that he is often only too happy to be led astray by Terry whether the temptation lies in the form of pubs or women and, furthermore, often behaves worse than his friend in such situations. To use again Thurschwell’s words describing Coe’s male protagonists, Robert (Bob) and Terry are, despite their different outlooks, equally unable to ‘break free of their arrested adolescences’. In contrast, however, Thurschwell notes that ‘Coe’s women sometimes react differently’ (37), giving the example of Benjamin’s sister, Lois, who despite undergoing extreme trauma, remembers everything from her childhood and becomes, by virtue of relating her life to her daughter, the de facto narrator of The Rotters’ Club. Similarly, the women of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Thelma and Terry’s sister, Audrey, are somehow free from the compulsion to repeat childhood obsessions and not forced to choose between working-class identity and getting on. Leon Hunt has argued that ‘in sitcom, suburbia is often a way of talking about mobility, class and gender’ (104). A whole set of fixed markers – notably in the relation between genders and also in the expression of masculinity – are depicted throughout both the 1960s and 1970s series as being potentially fluid but constrained by a residual framework. Episodes like ‘Love and Marriage’ (1966) from The Likely Lads are savagely satirical concerning the limits of a working-class masculinity, especially in its attitude to marriage as a kind of prison, as recorded in Clement and La Frenais’ collected scripts: ‘When are you two going to get married?’ Archie [the barman] asked them. Bob gave Terry a coy nudge and murmured, ‘Well, he hasn’t asked me yet.’ Terry responded quickly by putting his arm around Bob’s shoulders … ‘We want to be sure. We don’t want to rush into anything. Do we, pet?’ ‘No,’ replied Bob. ‘We want a little house – up on the new estate.’ ‘With wall to wall floors.’ ‘And we want to have enough money for essentials.’ ‘Aye. A double bed and a telly.’

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‘We’re saving fifteen bob a week in the Building Society you know.’ ‘And we’ve decided not to have children for a few years so that she can keep her job on.’ Archie was unmoved by the performance. ‘All very satirical,’ he said drily. ‘Just you wait till it happens to you.’ (119)

Here the satire serves to just about hold at bay the ongoing transformation of identity and enables the series to maintain the comfort of stability and firmly set categories. A similar manoeuvre is completed by a storyline in the 1970s series, in which Thelma leaves Bob, in part because of his continued association with Terry, and Terry moves in to help him with the housework and cooking. However, after a few days, Terry is so upset by Bob’s expectations that he complains to Thelma and their consequent reconciliation paves the way to her reconciliation with Bob. The apparent uselessness of Robert’s gender reassignment as Cleo, apparently undertaken so that he might conceivably have a relationship with Sarah, appears to generate a similar reassertion of the status quo in The House of Sleep. However, as Merritt Moseley argues, this facet of the novel may also be read in a different way as having a ‘happy ending’, in which the eventual reunion between Sarah and Robert/Cleo is linked to Terry’s dream in which he envisions a woman dressed as a nurse standing in front of a sign saying ‘fermer’. He connects it to his interest in Italian cinema and thinks the sign may say ‘infermeria,’ but, since Cleo is a nurse and Sarah lives on Fermer Road, it is one more link that strengthens the ‘happy ending’ – not an explicit one, but happy enough in that it places Cleo at Sarah’s door, and Cleo thinking ‘she had been lying to herself; knew that she could not do without this woman at all. It wasn’t possible, and never had been’. (57)

Moseley implies that Robert is like Benjamin Trotter in The Rotters’ Club and Michael Owen in What a Carve Up! in that he is another of those protagonists who ‘long for love but are ineffectual in gaining it’ (57). Yet, if the ending to The House of Sleep is as potentially happy as he argues it is, then Robert’s fate has to be seen as different from that of those other protagonists. Even if we assume that his relationship as Cleo – or, rather that her relationship – with Sarah will be as a friend, that relationship might still be expected to move beyond being trapped by his earliest erotic fantasies. Robert as Cleo has the capacity to become an agent in history in a way that Robert as Robert does not. As Moseley notes, the convoluted manner in which Cleo is brought to Sarah’s



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door constitutes ‘an extraordinary exercise of fictional skills’ (57), but it is more than just a fictional  exercise in that Coe is trying to find a way of writing a counter narrative to the conventional story of the loss of the post-war British common culture to Thatcherite individualism. The House of Sleep does not end up as a work of nostalgia but instead closes on the open possibilities of a future that is as yet unknown. While there is no direct connection in terms of content between The House of Sleep and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the self-evident intertextual association created by Coe’s choice of names for his male protagonists, and the shared temporal structural of focusing on two different time periods with a lengthy gap between, suggests that the novel is concerned with finding an alternative way of working through what happened to post-war Britain. Rather as Benjamin Trotter’s epiphanic vision of the oneness of Britain while watching The Morecambe and Wise Show in The Rotters’ Club is connected with the novel’s closing focus on the possibility of a different future to Thatcherism, so Coe’s transgressive versions of likely lads, Bob and Terry suggest that there are, after all, other alternatives to the choice between living in precarity or getting on. In order to understand the nuances of Coe’s fictions, it is necessary to try and uncover the complex and layered relationship of his work to the cultural politics of the BBC comedy and light entertainment of the 1970s, which provided one of the key contexts of his formative years. While this relationship often looks like nostalgia – for example the nostalgia for the prelapserian unity of Britain which Thurschwell locates in What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club – The House of Sleep suggests that perhaps Coe is more concerned with his desire for this cultural period, which is real, than with the period itself, which, even if it did once exist as a reflection of national harmony, certainly is no longer real. This is the understanding that Robert tries to explain to Sarah in one of the key exchanges in the novel: ‘When you lose somebody, when you miss them, you suffer because the departed person has become something imaginary; something unreal. But your desire for them isn’t imaginary. So that’s what you have to fasten on; the desire. Because it’s real’. (159–60)

In The House of Sleep, Coe shows this desire to be so strong and real, that rather than collapsing into nostalgia, it becomes a transformative force in its own right, which underpins the novel’s closing suggestion of the possibility of a future.

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Works cited Clement, Dick, and Ian La Frenais. The Likely Lads. London: Rapp and Carroll, 1967. Coe, Jonathan. The House of Sleep. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998. ——. The Rotters’ Club. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002. Elliott, Larry. ‘George Osbourne’s Welfare Cuts Pander to the Distortions of Benefits Street’. Guardian. 12 January 2014; https://www.theguardian.com/business/ economics-blog/2014/jan/12/george-osborne-welfare-cuts-distortions-benefitsstreet. Freedland, Jonathan. ‘Reggie Perrin – A Suburban Everyman Who Captured the Essence of his Era’. Guardian. 14 August 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/ commentisfree/2015/aug/14/reginald-perrin-captured-essence-of-age-david-nobbscomedy. Guignery, Vanessa. Jonathan Coe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hunt, Leon. British Low Culture: From Safari Suits to Sexploitation. London: Routledge, 1998. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Jonathan Coe. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. Reed, David. Letter to The Guardian. 17 August 2015; http://www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2015/aug/17/how-the-sitcom-nailed-british-aspirations. Shirbon, Estelle. ‘Labour Took Wrong Path and Must Return to Centre, Grandees Say’. Reuters. 10 May 2015; http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-election-labouridUKKBN0NV09520150510. Thompson, E. P. Writing by Candelight. London: Merlin, 1980. Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’. In British Fiction Today, edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham, 28–39. London: Continuum, 2006. Webber, Richard. Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? London: Orion, 1999. Wickham, Phil. The Likely Lads. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

7

From Prog to Punk: Cultural Politics and the Form of the Novel in Jonathan Coe’s The Rotters’ Club Nick Bentley

Just before the 45-second synthesizer solo kicks in on the first track of Hatfield and the North’s 1975 album The Rotters’ Club, vocalist Richard Sinclair repeats the chorus line ‘Please do not take it seriously, what a joke / The only thing that matters is to share it’. This is a sentiment that fits well with the jazz and folk-influenced, light-hearted inclusiveness of the band’s progressive rock. A sharp contrast can be made with the sentiments expounded in ‘White Riot’ on the Clash’s debut album released a couple years later when Joe Strummer bellows: ‘White riot / I want a riot / White riot / A riot of my own’. Hatfield and the North’s album, of course, is referenced directly in the title of Jonathan Coe’s novel of 2001, but the Clash also make an important appearance when one of the main characters leaves his home town of Birmingham in order to visit the NME offices in London and ends up going to see the pivotal punk band at Fulham Old Town Hall on 29 October 1976. The Clash did indeed play this gig and Coe’s attention to detail with respect to popular musical performances and styles mirrors the characters’ emotional and intellectual investment in them and despite an element of ironic distance, this aspect of the novel is treated with a seriousness that diminishes the conventional distinctions between high and low culture. Indeed, beyond such references providing local, historical and aesthetic detail, in this essay I argue that progressive rock and punk form opposing aesthetic and ideological nodes between which Coe’s examination of the period’s ideological and political culture oscillates. It is through the nostalgic and often comic response to the over-seriousness with which the adolescent characters imbue subcultural affiliations and musical styles that the novel

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pursues its examination of 1970s British politics and society. In this chapter, I concentrate on the thematic place of the various references to subcultural affiliations and how this offers space for the novel’s scrutiny of the social and political transformations taking place in the 1970s. I also suggest that aspects of the aesthetic characteristics of Coe’s novel can be illuminated by reference to the formal styles associated with prog rock and punk. The examination of form will focus on structural and attitudinal aspects of the music, whilst also drawing on some of the classic sociological discussion of subcultures that emerged from the Birmingham School of subcultural analysis pursued in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (in particular work by critics such as John Clarke, Phil Cohen, Dick Hebdige and Paul Willis). Bringing aspects of subcultural theory to Coe’s novel (both from the ‘classical’ subcultural studies produced during this period and the post-subcultural rejection of some of their positions) produces two main effects. First, it illuminates the way in which those theories can be given dramatic poignancy and nuance by reference to fictionalized accounts of subcultural positions; and second, a new reading of Coe’s novel is produced in its sensitivity to subcultural histories of the 1970s. Coe has developed a distinctive style of combining references to popular culture as a way of exploring historical concerns and cultural anxieties. What a Carve Up! (1994), for example, offers a satirical examination of 1980s Thatcherism that takes its title from a 1960s comedy film directed by Pat Jackson and starring those stalwarts of post-war British comedy Kenneth Connor, Shirley Eaton and Sid James. Several critics, such as Dominic Head (35–7) and Philip Tew (83–4), have identified the way in which Coe’s political critique emerges from the personal and often comic scenarios he presents in his novels. As Richard Bradford has noted about What a Carve Up!, [Coe] allows us glimpses into a society entrapped by Thatcherism and, it is implied, its evil consequences: the encroachment of privatization and free enterprise into the National Health Service, the virtual paralysis of an independent media by private sector influences, the stock market as a licensed forum for fraud, the exchange of manufacturing industry for a more controllable service sector, the poisoning of the food chain in pursuit of profit. (39–40)

Coe’s subsequent novel, The House of Sleep (1997), also focuses on the individualistic ideologies of the 1980s as played out through its narrative plots and characterization. This was followed in 2001 by The Rotters’ Club and thus occupies an interesting historical position in relation to Coe’s two previous novels in its focus on the decade before Thatcher came to power. In a sense,



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then, and especially for established readers of Coe, the imminent arrival of those policies and their effects on post-consensus Britain casts a backward shadow over the novel, given extra poignancy by the historical distance the contemporary reader has to both those eras. This is structurally embedded in The Rotters’ Club by the frame narrative, which takes place in 2003. The novel is narrated by the daughter of one of the main characters as she sets out to describe 1970s Britain: ‘A country that neither of us would recognize’ (3). Such a lack of recognition suggested here is specifically subject to the intervening period in which the profound economic, political, ideological, social and cultural changes represented by the Thatcherism of the 1980s and 1990s mark the boundary between the generations. The Rotters’ Club recounts the experiences of a group of school friends (and some antagonists) who attend King William’s Grammar School in the 1970s, a fictionalized representation of the real King Edward’s School in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham attended by Coe during the same decade. The novel follows the main three male characters – Benjamin Trotter, Philip Chase and Doug Anderton – and the two main female characters, Claire Newman and Cicely Boyd, as they become involved in classroom politics and intrigue, the school paper, music and nascent sexual relationships. Alongside the main focus on these characters, the novel develops sub-narratives related to their parents and siblings, setting the coming-of-age stories against their parents’ marriages and sexual affairs, and the broader social and political changes of the 1970s. In terms of its commentary on specific political issues of the period the novel establishes three inter-related contexts. First, the exportation of the Troubles in Northern Ireland to mainland Britain has a dramatic impact on Lois as her boyfriend Malcolm is just about to propose to her in the pub ‘Talk of the Town’ in central Birmingham on the evening of 21 November 1974 when it is blown up by an IRA bomb. Malcolm dies in the blast and although Lois survives relatively unscathed, she suffers a protracted period of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The novel also records examples of the anti-Irish backlash following the pub bombings. The second context is focused on Doug Anderton’s father, Bill, who is a shop steward at British Leyland’s Longbridge car factory. The 1970s, of course, was a decade of high industrial unrest in Britain, and car production was an industry that suffered significantly during this period, with British Leyland being a company that was eventually subsumed into the Rover Group. Colin Trotter, Benjamin and Lois’s father, also works at Longbridge but as a member of the middle management. Bill and Colin are initially linked by their sons’ friendship, but as industrial unrest increases at the car plant an

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ideological distance gradually develops between them. Thirdly, the novel also maps personal relationships onto broader social and political contexts in the sub-plot developed with respect to two other pupils at King William’s: Steve Richards, the only black pupil at the school, and Culpepper, whose jealousy of Richards as the head boy mirrors the plot of Othello, in which production Richards stars in the school play. The novel details how the rivalry between these two characters, though initially athletic and academic, takes on a racial turn, which mirrors wider racial politics in Britain in the 1970s. The school, then, can be seen as a microcosm of the events being played out on the social and political scene more broadly and the young characters’ emotional and intellectual investment in subcultural ideologies, styles and aesthetics form a displacement of those discussions in a form that is immediate to their situation. In his groundbreaking book Profane Culture, originally published in 1978, Paul Willis offers an account of the way in which lived ideologies are played out in subcultures and how youth cultures can be seen as ‘lived through’ the mechanisms of youth alienation and oppression as they are expressed in affiliation to, or engagement with, subcultures and the cultural forms they produce and experience. As Willis argues, ‘The oppression of working-class youth, the alienation of middle-class youth, can be analysed. [...] It is in these [subcultural] places where direct experience, ways of living, creative acts and penetrations [...] redefine problems, break the stasis of meaning, and reset the possibilities somewhat for all of us’ (2). Willis’s approach has clear resonance with the way in which subcultural identities are presented in Coe’s novel, where musical knowledge, subcultural affiliation and creative engagement are shown to be crucial in terms of the main characters’ bildungsroman narratives. There are numerous examples in The Rotters’ Club where the characters’ emotions, relationships with others and attempts to find (however unconsciously) a place within the sociopolitical frameworks of 1970s British society are projected onto the experience of music: listening to it, playing it, arguing about it, and expressing affiliations with certain genres and modes. Indeed, the shift from the ethnographic approach favoured by Willis to the fictional mode allows a dramatization of the relationship between analyst and subculture that is difficult to achieve in sociological studies. Fiction excels at allowing a positional viewpoint from inside the consciousness of a subcultural participant that can only ever be externalized in an ethnographic study, even one that claims to be participant-observation in approach. In this way the relationship between individual, subculture, parent culture and dominant culture can be dramatized through specific character positions, with access to narrative effects such as



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focalization, internal monologue, stream of consciousness and vocalization through intimate dialogue (dramatized private conversations beyond the range of an ethnographer’s recording device), all of which are utilized at different moments in The Rotters’ Club. The way in which youth identity and music are inextricably linked is presented at the outset of the novel. The first chapter in the main narrative takes place in the Trotter family home and describes Lois, Benjamin’s sister, flicking through the personal advertisements in the music magazine Sounds. As she reads the descriptions it becomes clear that powerful markers of personal, cultural and emotional identity are registered in subcultural affiliation and musical preference: ‘Freaky Guy (20) wants crazy chick (16+) for love. Into Quo and Zep. […] Great guy wishes groovy chick to write, into Tull, Pink Floyd, 17–28. […] Lonely, unattractive guy (21), needs female companionship, looks unimportant. Into Moodies, BJH, Camel etc’. (10–11). The citing of the bands and musical styles expresses an unofficial subcultural language that acts as a signification of personality to those who are able to decipher the argot. Lois is setting out to find a partner and in this early part of the novel she recognizes that she needs to learn these codes in order to make an informed life choice (‘Who were Quo and Zep anyway?’ [10]). The acquisition of this cultural knowledge is thus presented for both Lois and her younger brother Benjamin as a vital aspect of acculturation into the youth peer group to which they belong. This aspect of subcultural frameworks of respect has been identified by Sarah Thornton – following Pierre Bourdieu (1984) – as subcultural capital, in which hierarchies of knowledge confer status and value on those who can confidently read the internally legitimized signs and systems of knowledge: Subcultural capital confers status on its owner in the eyes of the relevant beholder. […] Subcultural capital can be objectified or embodied. Just as books and paintings display cultural capital in the family home, so subcultural capital is objectified in the form of fashionable haircuts and well-assembled record collections (full of well-chosen, limited edition ‘white label’ twelve-inches and the like) […] subcultural capital is embodied in the form of being ‘in the know’, using (but not over-using) current slang […]. Both cultural and subcultural capital put a premium on the ‘second nature’ of their knowledges. (11–12)

In the first section of the novel, acquisition of this subcultural capital is delineated as a marker of status within Benjamin’s peer group. In the highly competitive environments of the school classrooms and playgrounds such knowledge forms important registers of status. Indeed, a major part of the attraction for Benjamin

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of his sister’s new boyfriend, Malcolm, is that he can provide subcultural capital to the gauche teenager: ‘Are you in a band?’ Malcolm asked. ‘Not yet. I want to be’. ‘If you’re serious about this’, said Malcolm, ‘I could lend you some records. There’s some pretty far out stuff being laid down out there. Freaky times on the event horizon’. (46)

Although Thornton (above) is referring specifically to a later subculture (the 1990s clubculture of British rave music), such a system holds for the internal structuring of power in all subcultures. In the subcultural landscape of the early 1970s it is the ‘freaks’ and ‘hairy guys’ who hold prominence, a generation that would have imbibed the apparent countercultural ideologies of 1960s hippiedom. It is the desire for acquisition of subcultural knowledge that promises to release Benjamin from his powerless position among his social group at school and the shock of Malcolm’s death affects not only Lois but also Benjamin, and indeed cements the subsequent close relationship between the siblings. However, it also acts as a marker of Benjamin’s character in that the particular British prog rock version of the counterculture he inherits mirrors his introspective intelligence that reveals ambivalence regarding lived political realities of the period. Another example of this linkage of emotional and cultural identity with subcultural contexts that is used prominently in the book centres around the phrase and motif ‘The Very Maws of Doom’, the title of the second of the novel’s three main parts. This phrase is introduced by one of the novel’s minor characters, Harding, who at the school’s debating society’s mock election in 1976, reads out a speech based on a National Front leaflet. Harding’s irreverent parodies have previously become well recognized at the school but his parody of the right-wing rhetoric included in the leaflet has a particularly unsettling effect on the school audience. Harding is representative of the type of anarchic satirical comedy that developed later in the period as ‘alternative comedy’, concomitant to the emergence of punk in the late 1970s, in particular the work of the alternative comedians involved in shows such as Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young Ones, which formed an important part of popular and irreverent resistance to power in the Thatcherite period. The section in which the phrase ‘the maws of doom’ first appears in the novel recounts Doug Anderton’s memory of this period, related in an article written much later (in 1999). This phrase is then rearticulated in a key moment in the parallel development of the novel’s account of music and the politics of the period. The following day, at the first band



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rehearsal of Gandalf ’s Pikestaff, Philip Chase introduces his 32-minute prog rock masterpiece ‘Apotheosis of the Necromancer’, which attempts to narrate ‘the entire history of the universe from the moment of creation up until roughly, as far as I could see, the resignation of Harold Wilson in 1976’ (179). However, the phrase is taken up by Stubbs, the band’s singer, as a moment of fracture representative of mid-1970s cultural definitions of youth culture. As Doug explains: ‘Philip had chosen the wrong moment, historically, to make his personal bid for prog rock stardom’ (179–80). When the drummer and guitarist in the band rebel against Philip’s prog pretensions and move into a ‘ferocious back beat in 4/4’, Stubbs starts to scream ‘“The maws! […] The maws! The very maws of doom’” (180) repeatedly. David Laing has noted how the vocalists in punk bands tend to emphasize ‘speech, recitative, chanting or wordless cries and mutterings’ as a way of disrupting the ‘musicality of singing’ thus avoiding the ‘contamination of the lyric message by the aesthetic pleasures offered by melody, harmony, pitch and so on’ (70). If the insistence of the verbal phrase is heightened here it is to reject the escapism implicit in Philip’s musical epic. As Philip later laments, after the ascendency of punk: ‘These were desperate times for someone like him, whose heroes – specialists, to a man, in fifteen-minute instrument […] – had until recently commanded two-page features in the music press but could nowadays barely get themselves a recording contract’ (250). There is, of course, rich comedy in this aspect of the text, but it also represents the way in which the psychological impact of underlying anxieties over political shifts including class and race relations in the adult world (what the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or CCCS, subcultural theorists, based at Birmingham University, designate as the ‘parent culture’) resurfaces in the forms and language of rock music, articulated in a cultural context for school kids who do not really understand the nuances of those ‘adult’ political contexts. One of the key theorists associated with the Birmingham School, Phil Cohen (whose work, of course, would have been influenced by the debates taking place only a couple of miles away from the fictionalized Birmingham in Coe’s novel), emphasizes the way in which subcultural ideologies map on to parent culture. As he notes with respect to an earlier set of subcultural affiliations: ‘I’m suggesting here that mods, parkas, skinheads, crombies, are a succession of subcultures which all correspond to the same parent culture and which attempt to work out, through a system of transformations, the basic problematic or contradiction which is inserted in the subculture by the parent culture’ (90). Cohen’s classical Birmingham School approach focuses on working-class subcultures of the 1960s and 1970s in the East End of London;

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however, it resonates with Coe’s presentation of 1970s middle-class adolescents in Birmingham and their relationship to the anxieties and ideologies being played out for their parents. The moment referred to above from The Rotters’ Club reveals both something of the naïve and perhaps apolitical ideals of prog and the politically ambivalent nature of the punk rebellion, but it is also connected by Doug Anderton to a shift in the political climate in Britain from the continuation of a broad form of consensus politics to an ideological standoff between left and right from the mid-1970s into the 1980s and beyond. The next evening Doug remembers seeing his trades union activist father have an edgy conversation with Benjamin’s father after the result of a by-election in which the Tories had won a landslide victory causing him to reflect later: ‘Meanwhile waiting in the wings was a new breed of Tory and these people meant business’ (181). Later, this moment, Harding’s parody of right-wing rhetoric, and Philip Chase’s ambitions of producing a prog masterpiece are all connected with ‘the death of the socialist dream’, as Doug reflects: This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. (182)

This section is indicative of a wistful lament for the loss of something in postwar British culture that the arrival of Thatcherism ushers in. This moment of transition is a common rendering of the popular cultural history of the 1970s. Hanif Kureishi, for example, describes a similar moment in The Buddha of Suburbia, when, after seeing a punk band perform for the first time at a gig in London, one of the characters exclaims: “‘The sixties have been given notice tonight. These kids we saw have assassinated all hope. They’re the fucking future’” (131). To return to the phrase the ‘maws of doom’, this is also related to a number of other themes in the novel, for example Benjamin’s coming to terms with his sister’s psychological condition after the traumatic experience of seeing her boyfriend killed in one of the IRA pub bombings. This association with a phrase and the way that phrase surfaces in differing cultural and ideological meanings reveals the context in which language operates in the novel as a series of signifiers passed on and reconfigured differently by different characters,



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as well as an indication of the way in which language is embedded in power structures. Doug, then, associates prog with a left-leaning vision that is no match for the harsh realities of individualism and Thatcherite politics, represented here by punk. However, for the characters generally this movement from prog to punk is not as straightforward as the received version of popular music history would suggest. The characters themselves return to the prog ideal on a number of occasions and I want to turn now to a discussion of the formal aspects of Coe’s novel with respect to this thematic reference to progressive rock. In the introduction to Like a Fiery Elephant, his biography of the 1960s avant-garde experimentalist writer B. S. Johnson, Coe stresses that ‘a work of literature should speak for itself, without the need for glossing, interpreting or contextualizing by reference to its writer’s life’ (7). This is a sentiment with which I usually concur, however, it is surely significant that the publication of this biography in 2004, on which Coe admits working for ‘seven years’ (2), overlaps with the period in which he was writing The Rotters’ Club. As with much of Coe’s fiction, The Rotters’ Club can be seen to include some of the experimental perspectives found in Johnson’s work, although Coe also stresses that he departs from Johnson’s disdain for ‘conventional’ novelistic devices such as characterization and plot. Coe describes his novels as ‘social-realist’ and in the introduction to the Johnson biography makes clear, ‘If I think about it at all, I see the high modernism of Joyce and Beckett as a straightjacket the novel had to break out of […]. Stories […] remain the bedrock of the novel; narrative curiosity […] remains the centrifugal force which draws readers back to the novel and therefore keeps it alive’ (6). For Coe, experimentalism is registered not in a disavowal of plot and character or through an extension of early-twentiethcentury modernism, but in terms of the heteroglossic and multi-stylistic nature of the work. This sentiment is pertinent to The Rotters’ Club, which deploys a series of differing forms of writing with a number of narrators. There are diary entries, letters, journals, political leaflets, song lyrics, theatre reviews and magazine articles, all of which build the rich material texture of the writing and serve to complicate the range of meanings produced. If ever a novel represented what Roland Barthes described as ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of texts blend and clash’ (146), then this is it. However, the model for this structure is not necessarily post-structuralist literary theory, but suggested by the structuring aesthetics of both prog rock and punk as a musical and cultural forms. As Coe stresses, again in the introduction to his book on Johnson, one of the ways in which ‘the British novel has reinvigorated itself ’ is by ‘tapping into the energies of popular film, music and television’ (6).

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The reference here to popular music is especially pertinent to The Rotters’ Club and, indeed, the relationship between social realist and experimental attitudes to fiction in Coe’s writing can be seen in the relationship between prog rock and punk as it is presented in the novel. Prog rock has traditionally had a bad press among musical journalists and cultural commentators as representative of a pretentious and bloated form that had lost touch with the idea of youth as an alienated and marginalized site for potential transgression and resistance to dominant, parent ideologies. As we have seen, Coe (through Doug’s perspective) contributes to the mockery of the form to a certain extent. However, the novel borrows from prog rock aesthetics. Edward Macan, one of the only cultural studies critics to research prog, offers a good description of the make-up of its formal elements of as an extension of the hippie countercultural movement of the 1960s: The heavy reliance on tone colors derived from the Western art music tradition reflects the sense of importance and even ritual that the hippies attached to the music, while the consistent use of lengthy forms such as the programmatic song cycle of the concept album and the multimovement suite underscores the hippies’ new, drug-induced conception of time. The intricate metrical and wayward harmonic schemes of the music, as well as the frequent appeals to instrumental virtuosity, reflect the elements of surprise, contradiction, and uncertainty that the counterculture prized so highly. […] Furthermore the juxtaposition within a piece or an album of predominantly acoustic with predominantly electric sections, one of the hallmarks of the progressive rock style, seems to encapsulate many of the conflicts that were of great significance to the counterculture. For instance it is possible to see in the style’s acoustic/electric dichotomy the contrast of the pastoral and organic with the technological and artificial, the conflict between matriarchal and the patriarchal values, between ancient and modern ways of life, and between the folk and psychedelic musical styles that progressive rock drew from. (13)

This is an accurate reading of progressive rock, but what is intriguing in this description with respect to Coe is the crossover between Macan’s description of prog rock and techniques associated with literary modernism. Firstly, the altered conception of time parallels much of modernism’s emphasis on the distinction between clock time and subjective time as a pre-eminent concern for writers including Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, an aspect theorized by Henri Bergson. Secondly, the similarity between the structural complexity of prog rock and literary modernism is apparent. In this sense, works such as Dubliners and ‘The Waste Land’ would correspond well to



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Macan’s description of concept albums as programmatic song cycles. Thirdly, the conflict between a pastoral and organic past and a mechanized future reflected in the move between acoustic and electric sections in prog songs is reminiscent of similar pastoral and urban contrasts in writers such as E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and Woolf. This last point is particularly interesting in terms of The Rotters’ Club as it is not within the prog song that Coe approaches this tension between the past and present of a post-industrial modernity but in the transition and oscillation between prog and punk as alternative musical forms. For Coe, prog is more associated with the organic and acoustic reflected in the choice of bands selected in the novel to exemplify the form – particularly Hatfield and the North, who although they use electric instruments, are more associated with the folk influence on prog. In this sense then, the intertextual references to modernist techniques help to bind together the relationships between a literary aesthetics and its equivalent in popular music. In the penultimate section of the novel, Benjamin’s stream-of-consciousness account of having sex with Cicely Boyd re-enacts, and in part parodies, Molly Bloom’s chapter at the end of Ulysses in its celebration of the physical and life-affirming ‘yes’ (repeated several times by Benjamin). Indeed, the novel self-reflexively includes details of an encounter with Philip Chase’s father, Sam, who is reading Ulysses in his continued attempt to educate himself. Benjamin also remembers lines from the song ‘The Rotters’ Club’ by Hatfield and the North, which in this section is connected, for him, with a sense that life ultimately tends toward the comedic. Benjamin’s thoughts in the 1970s narrative conclude that ‘not only does God exist but he must be a genius, a comic genius to make everything in the world so funny’ (399). This positive celebration is not, however, the final word, as it is for Molly Bloom, and the euphoric end is undercut by a return to the framing narrative, which places Benjamin’s euphoric moment in a past that has not panned out as he predicted. In terms of a politics of form, and to return to Macan, what distinguishes the hippie counterculture from English prog rock is its watered-down politics. There can be a discernible soft politics assumed in the rejection of the capitalist trappings of modern consumer culture in the escape to alternative worlds; but that escapism could just as easily be read as a deferral from engaging in the political tensions of the late 1970s, a practice that is of course at the forefront (often problematically) of the punk movement. As Macan claims: ‘Progressive rock could never have emerged from the working-class milieu that was responsible for the formation of genres such as heavy metal and later, punk rock; throughout the 1970s progressive rock’s audience consisted largely of a middle-class, post-hippie extension of the counterculture’ (19). Macan’s strict reading of subcultural form

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against class identities is problematic; for while he is perhaps correct in terms of the class background of many of the musicians, his reading over-determines the subcultural audience for prog rock. In my experience of growing up on a council estate in Stoke in the mid- to late 1970s it was the working-class kids who followed the prog rock bands Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant and their North American prog counterparts Rush, Styx and Kansas, and the kids from the private housing estates nearby that were rebelling against their middle-class parents by latching on to punk when it arrived in the mid-1970s. It could be argued that the respect for craft and skill among the children of working-class families is reflected in the celebration of the technical prowess of prog musicians while the rejection of musical competency by punk bands parallels the celebration of style and image associated with a managerial class. Indeed, as Ken Gelder stresses (echoing Simon Frith): ‘It has often been noted that punk subculture was more middle class than working class, coming not out of working-class communities at all but out of a “bohemian” English art school scene’ (103). Formally, however, Coe’s novel also draws from the punk aesthetic, in its irreverent drawing together of different textual and material styles as discussed earlier. The typographical diversity of Coe’s novel represents to a certain extent the bricolage approach of punk with its raiding and subverting of images and styles from a broad range of cultural contexts. There has, of course, been much more written about punk than prog, but a common identification of the former’s aesthetic practice was established early by Dick Hebdige: The [punk] subculture was nothing if not consistent. There was a homological relation between the trashy cut-up clothes and spiky hair, the pogo and amphetamines, the spitting, the vomiting, the format for the fanzines, the insurrectionary poses and the ‘soulless’, frantically driven music. The punks wore clothes which were the sartorial equivalent of swear words, and they swore as they dressed – with calculated effect, lacing obscenities into record notes and publicity releases, interviews and love songs. (114)

The Rotters’ Club details the appeal of this new rebellion to a number of characters most notably Harding and Doug, whose diverse political affiliations represent something of the anarchic but often contradictory ideological positions within the subculture. Punk, however, stands in the novel not so much as a structured expression of political marginalization but more as an expression of destructive individualism. Richard Bradford, for example, notes that Doug Anderton is ‘fascinated by punk, not because it is art but because it seems to him to distil a selfish disregard for collective or personal responsibility’ (44). Punk has also been



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seen as a particular transition point in the very nature of subcultural affiliation. Dylan Clarke has called it the last subculture and identifies a distinction between its earlier authentic stage phase (identified by critics like Hebdige) and its later commodification and incorporation via the culture industry. For Clarke, ‘Early punk was a proclamation and embrace of discord. In England it was begun by working-class youths decrying a declining economy and rising unemployment’ (225). Whereas that earlier potentially radical spirit became incorporated back into the mainstream, this transition of punk signalling for Clarke the model for future manifestations of youth subcultures: ‘Having ostensibly neutralized early punk, the culture industry proved itself capable of marketing any classical youth subculture’ (227). The Rotters’ Club registers this political dichotomy of punk through its characterization. Doug Anderton, son of a senior shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union at the Longbridge car factory, represents the way in which the parent culture’s class politics is manifest through the attraction to a politically informed punk. In one section, Doug attends a Clash gig in London, responding to the physical and later political content of the music and lyrics: ‘Doug had never heard any of these songs before but in the months and years to come they would become his closest friends: “Deny”, “London’s Burning”, “Janie Jones”. He was transfixed by the sight and sound of Joe Strummer shouting, screaming, singing, howling into the microphone’ (162). As one of the text’s proleptic jumps into the future tells us, Doug becomes involved in Labour Party politics and the inspiration for this political direction is a combination of his family background with the political content of the punk subculture to which he is attracted at the moment he is developing his political identity. Punk, as many commentators have noted, has a complex set of political (and apolitical) associations. Elizabeth Wilson has argued, ‘Punk spoke the anger of youth in a crumbling economy administered by out-of-touch politicians, and, insofar as nihilism is political, it was political; it was anti-establishment, it was about outrage, shock, violence, pornography, anarchy and self-destruction’ [emphasis in original] (135). However, punk evades a systematic ideology that maps the left–right political landscape of 1970s Britain. As Roger Sabin points out, punk’s ‘political ambiguity left ample space for right-wing interpretation’ (199). Neither version tells the full story; certainly punk appealed in different ways to different people with respect to the complexities of class politics of 1970s Britain. Dylan Clarke notes, ‘Some punks went so far as to valorize anything mainstream society disliked, including rape and death camps, some punks slid into fascism’ (226). In Coe’s novel, this darker side of the punk subculture is represented by a number of characters, including Benjamin’s younger brother Paul who at one point invades a

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conversation between Benjamin and Philip in a rural setting which might promise ‘fine old English folksong’ with the opening lines of the Sex Pistols’ ‘Anarchy in the UK’: ‘I am an anti-CHRIST/I am an anar-CHIST’ in ‘an excruciatingly tuneless boy soprano’ (211). This irritant interruption within the older boys’ cultural enclave punctures their idealistic escapism. Will May identifies the way in which the essentialist and ahistorical nature of Benjamin’s attitude to experimental prog music is set against the temporally grounded punk championed by his brother Paul. As May suggests, the novel provides a ‘curious feeling of synchronicity: Benjamin looks forward to an immortal future of music-making; his brother, the music journalist, places each new single within its specific moment in time’ (230). Later, Paul is recorded as pursuing a similar disruptive attempt to Doug Anderton’s left-wing political idealism; Doug recalls an incident on Bonfire night during a strike at the Longbridge plant where Paul thrusts a sparkler in front of Doug’s face asking ‘“What’s this?”’ and when it burns out laughs, ‘“The death of the socialist dream”’ (182). Paul, then, is representative of what Doug describes as ‘a new breed of Tory’ whose ‘rhetoric was fierce: it was anti-welfare, anti-community, anti-consensus’ (181). As the text moves forward, Paul is found to be attracted to the monetarism and emerging neo-conservative economics of Milton Friedman, and right-wing cultural journals and magazines such as The Spectator (272). I would argue, then, that the novel stitches together the complexities of the structuring organization of prog rock, with the avant-garde cut-up bricolage effect of punk. It is in the marrying of the two subcultural identities that Coe sees a potential rapprochement of the ideological political stand-offs of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rather than a before and after – a modernist prog rock followed by a postmodernist punk – the novel presents an oscillation of the two forms and sentiments, as indeed is achieved in the combination of Benjamin and Philip, Doug and Harding as reflective of a series of binary oppositions in the text. Benjamin’s affirmative stream of consciousness is not the last word, but it is placed in such a way as to project its sentiments into the future, giving validity to its desire for a unified culture made up of disparate, mutually enhancing elements, despite the imminent arrival of a divisive Thatcherism.

Works cited Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.



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Bradford, Richard. The Novel Now. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. Clarke, Dylan. ‘The Death and Life of Punk, the Last Subculture’. In The PostSubcultures Reader, edited by David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, 223–38. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Clarke, John et al. ‘Subcultures. Cultures and Class: A Theoretical Overview.’ In Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain, 9–74. London: Hutchison 1976 [1975]. Cohen, Phil. ‘Subcultural Conflict and Working-class Community [1972]’. In The Subcultures Reader, 2nd edn, edited by Ken Gelder, 86–93. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Coe, Jonathan. The House of Sleep. London: Viking, 1997. ——. Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2005 [2004]. ——. The Rotters’ Club. London: Penguin, 2002 [2001]. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Viking, 1994. Gelder, Ken. Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Head, Dominic. Modern British Fiction, 1950–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London and New York: Routledge, 1988 [1979]. Kureishi, Hanif. The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Laing, David. One Chord Wonders Meaning in Punk Rock. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015 [1985]. Macan, Edward. Rocking the Classics: English Progressive Rock and the Counterculture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. May, Will. ‘Unrest and Silence: The Faithless Music of the Contemporary British Novel.’ In Write in Tune: Contemporary Music in Fiction, edited by Erich Hertz and Jeffrey Roessner, 227–39. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Sabin, Roger, ‘“I Won’t Let that Dago By”: Rethinking Punk and Racism.’ In Punk Rock: So What?: The Cultural Legacy of Punk, edited by Roger Sabin. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1999. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel, 2nd edn. London: Continuum, 2007. Thornton, Sarah. Clubcultures Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. London: Polity Press, 1995. Willis, Paul E. Profane Culture. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014 [1978]. Wilson, Elizabeth. Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

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Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle and a Satiric Mirror Sebastian Jenner

Pamela Thurschwell suggests in ‘Genre Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’ that Coe’s two most celebrated satirical novels, What a Carve Up! (1994) and The Rotters’ Club (2001), ‘represent, among other symptoms of cultural stress, the breakdown of the post-war British consensus that the state ought to look after people “from cradle to grave”’ (28). Surely Jonathan Coe’s novel, The Closed Circle (2004), must therefore delineate the moment such a vision collapsed. As a sequel to The Rotters’ Club, the novel transposes the lives of its characters from the context of their late 1970s adolescence and childhood to a post-millennial adulthood. Such a transition serves to directly contrast a period characterized by divisive lines of contestation between socialism and Conservatism with the comparatively undifferentiated political landscape of the early twenty-first century. This political homogenization arose via the doctrine known as ‘Third Way’, as influenced by Anthony Giddens who notes in the preface to The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998): ‘In Britain “third way” has come to be associated with the politics of Tony Blair and New Labour’ (vii). Indeed, such a convergence is articulated by the character of Doug in The Closed Circle, who describes the context in which a New Labour government operates: ‘“[t]he left’s moved way over to the right, the right’s moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle’s been closed and everyone else can go fuck themselves”’ (139). The Closed Circle is therefore concerned with the entrenchment of Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal project, twenty years after her first electoral victory, under the premiership of Tony Blair. Yet, while the plot of The Rotters’ Club is variously driven by sociopolitical contextual events, instigating much of the narrative, the events of The Closed Circle seem framed as nothing more than aesthetic devices which are manifested only as unimposing backdrops for plot developments.

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Such semi-detached contextual moments in fact drew criticism from reviewers, such as Christopher Taylor, whose ‘Hindsight Tickling’ in the London Review of Books argues that Coe’s satirical treatment of the first four years of the twentyfirst century is ineffectual because the period ‘doesn’t come conveniently preestranged. Coe sometimes sounds as if he’s writing science fiction’. However, as I will explore below, perhaps there is some ulterior intention to Coe’s seemingly ineffectual articulation of contextual events in The Closed Circle, gaining potency when considered as a satiric mirror to The Rotters’ Club. Coe states, outlining the composition of The Closed Circle on his personal website, that the novel was intended as a ‘mirror image’ of The Rotters’ Club and that he sought ‘to ensure that the two novels reflected each other as precisely as possible’. The most immediate rendering of this is in the sequel’s title itself, which refers to the name of an elite club at the grammar school figured in The Rotters’ Club, in which The Closed Circle is described as ‘a select debating society, composed of no more than sixteen members at one time. […] Everything about it was cloaked in impenetrable (and somehow infantile) secrecy’ (145). This curious organization reappears, featuring many of the same members, as a rather grotesque realization of the adolescent aspirations voiced in the 1970s by a minor character in The Rotters’ Club, Paul Trotter, younger brother of protagonist, Benjamin Trotter. In The Closed Circle Paul is central to the narrative, having progressed to being a New Labour politician, and thus embodying the very archetype of everything associated with Blairite politics. The pubescent Paul’s ‘leaked’ letter to a compatriot, printed in The Billboard – the school paper frequently featured in The Rotters’ Club – declares that ‘The Circle does not have to listen to the voice of the rabble. […] In essence it’s undemocratic and that is its strength. Ideas and policies can germinate much more quickly and efficiently in this atmosphere’ (288). This precocious young man, with his celebration of elitism and the oncoming tide of Thatcherism, ultimately becomes a backbencher under Tony Blair’s New Labour government and in The Closed Circle he pens a twenty-first-century manifesto: Responsibility for substantial areas of health provision, state education, local government, prison services and even air traffic control were now in the hands of private companies whose duty of care lay towards the interests of shareholders rather than the general public. In order to advance this programme even further – to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ to a point which even the author of that phrase (Margaret Thatcher) would not have recognized – members of the CLOSED CIRCLE were going to have to think the unthinkable, and imagine the unimaginable. (206)



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Such a display of neoliberal ideology, as a hallmark of the Blairite ‘Third Way’, and the scenario of a corrupt clique seem unsurprising within the contemporary political landscape and therefore offer little space for Coe’s usual satiric humour. Though the reader is assumed sympathetic to Coe’s distaste for the New Labour project, the absence of an alternative left from which to challenge the new status quo, in contrast to the dialectic configured in The Rotters’ Club, destabilizes the potential for satiric collusion. Such a comparison to the first novel, however, suggests that Coe’s focus for the sequel is not on a critique of the dominant political ideology, but rather on the absence of a discernible challenge since the sociopolitical landscape figured in The Rotters’ Club. Vanessa Guignery identifies in Jonathan Coe (2016) that alongside the return of the debating society ‘[t]he image of the circle should therefore be understood in terms of exclusion and homogenization of political opinion’ (86). Indeed, the very title of the novel and the debating society itself inflects the common perception of political circles and Whitehall as an enclosed milieu, the Westminster Village. The recurring metaphor of the circle therefore assumes a gesture toward the impenetrable and seemingly infinite repetition of the contemporary political position, and more explicitly a tacit entrenchment and homogenization of politics under the dominion of neoliberalism. The pervasive theme of circling and the structural mirroring perhaps evokes a suggestion of collective culpability that denies the possibility of humour. Indeed, The Closed Circle proclaims that ‘[t]here didn’t seem to be a difference between the two perspectives any more; between anybody’s perspectives’ (273). Coe identifies and reflects the apathy that has consumed the public since Thatcher, nullifying a traditional state of political debate and dialectic. Paul Gilroy, in ‘The Closed Circle of Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia’, identifies this legacy of Thatcher’s project as having individualized people but also inclined them towards a particular kind of being together. Their anxieties about the loss of collectivity and mutuality were answered with fantasies of primordial belonging and mystical national communion. Simultaneously, their need to recover the dimensions of sociality that had been excluded from the dubious world in which a new Britain’s ideal, neoliberal subjects were imagined into being, was mystified. (189)

Gilroy discusses the entrenchment of Thatcher’s policies of deregulation, privatization and regressive narratives of Britain’s place at the ‘top table’ of world politics. He stresses the enabling of xenophobic nationalism that gained traction in such ideological underpinnings, which can be seen articulated in

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Coe’s incorporation of various racially troubling political configurations. In The Rotters’ Club, for example, Coe ruminates that people ‘forget that in those days, the National Front sometimes looked like a force to be reckoned with’ (176). Indeed, Gilroy’s essay describes Britain’s imperial past as having been, due to a repressed guilt, subsumed into a collective melancholia. Yet, he remarks that The Closed Circle should be celebrated for its ‘perennially unfashionable dimension: its loud and unusual antiracist advocacy […] telling us something profound about the character and the boundaries of English national consciousness’ (200). Suggestive of this, the rise of the far-right British National Party (BNP) in the post-millennial political landscape is identified in Coe’s The Closed Circle as having gained success from ‘“watching New Labour […] targeting women voters, and middle-class voters. […] There’s no spirit of inquiry any more, we’re just consumers of politics, we swallow what we’re given”’ (234). This simultaneity of collective apathy and anxiety concerning impenetrable political enclosures has exaggerated further in recent years, and as Coe anticipated ‘“it’s actually about the way the whole country is going, the whole culture”’ (234). Arguably, though, there was a brief moment in which some sense of communal optimism was discernible, however misguided. The Blairite ‘Third Way’ was a refrain first greeted with great collective hope, which resulted in New Labour’s landslide victory of 1997 and produced – albeit to a lesser extent – the ‘quiet landslide’ of 2001. There was a misplaced sense of arrival, at a political position that reconciled the fractured oppositional political rhetoric and proposed a centrist model in which a synthesis between socially responsible policies and market economics could be forged. Tony Blair’s inaugural ‘Leader’s Speech’ claimed that ‘[a]fter 18 long years of opposition, of frustration and despair, I am proud, privileged, to stand before you as the new Labour Prime Minister of our country. I believe in Britain. I believe in the British people. One cross on the ballot paper. One nation was reborn’. The subsequent trauma of the project’s inability to deliver was therefore collectively met by hopelessness and apathy. Indeed, the satiric voice of Coe is, on the surface of The Closed Circle, one that appears to ineffectually circumscribe the political corruption and barely concealed Conservatism of the period. However, a factor that Claire alludes to in the novel is that, ‘if you scratch the surface of that apathy, I think what you find underneath is something else altogether – a terrible, seething frustration’ (14). Similarly, beneath the reflective ennui, there is perhaps more potency to Coe’s technique than has been previously considered. With the apparent exception of Paul, the returning characters from The Rotters’ Club appear disenfranchised, having surrendered their ideological



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hope to empty rhetoric, so that their adolescent aspirations are reduced to mere gestures. Paul’s rise to share the role of protagonist in the sequel is illustrative of his ability to benefit from the dashed hopes of those around him and of his seemingly egotistical principles. Indeed, the precocious young Conservative of the earlier novel celebrated the final demise of the ‘Socialist dream’, figured in The Rotters’ Club, with the ‘same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed’ (182). Furthermore, Paul is depicted in The Closed Circle as deliberating over his parliamentary vote on the issue of the war on Iraq simply on the selfish grounds concerning its impact on his adulterous affair: ‘He thought If we go to war against Iraq, Mark will be sent there too and we can start using his flat again’ (350). In such moments, Coe’s previous satirical commentary on the Thatcherite period appears to turn to farce in his configuration of Blairite Britain. Certainly, without the pre-estrangement of the period – suggested earlier in this chapter – such instances appear as Coe’s only means of pointing toward the political trauma of the contemporary moment. However, Paul is increasingly aware of the widespread public apathy characterizing modern politics, and his weaponization of the inadequacy of satire, together suggest a different reading of Coe’s text. The young student, Malvina, astutely instructs Paul that ‘“Irony is very modern,” she assured him. “Very now. You see – you don’t have to make it clear exactly what you mean any more. In fact, you don’t even have to mean what you say, really. That’s the beauty of it”’ (53). The target of Coe’s reproach here is the collective acquiescence to the insipid political sheen of the Blairite period, against which Coe’s satiric voice rallies. In this manner, rather than seeing his novel as satirically critiquing political ideology or the structures of government, the text ought to be read as a satire of collective apathy and of the very impotence, in a post-millennial context, of the language of satire itself. In Jonathan Coe’s doctoral thesis, ‘Satire and Sympathy: Some Consequences of Intrusive Narrative in Tom Jones and Other Comic Novels’, he identifies ‘a quality which we nowadays tend to expect of satire if it is not to fall into preachiness, namely a sense of complicity with the objects satirised’ (295). Often described as a canonical satirist himself, in the tradition of Henry Fielding, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, Coe appears to have found a satire of the contemporary problematic, despite the great success of What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club as comically invective commentaries. A similarly satirical treatment of the evidently disconcerting period of politics reflected in The Closed Circle requires the reader’s collusion with the author toward the object of scorn. However, given that the apathy and disengagement of the period was at the centre of Coe’s

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lens, it becomes evident that any conventional satirical approach was in itself problematic for the author. Tellingly, at a Longbridge plant protest featured in The Closed Circle, around which the earlier novel’s political fervour had centred, ‘[t]he speakers’ rhetoric had started to sound like meaningless shouting, a barrage of hectoring noise in some language he had long forgotten’ (114). Furthermore, in the later novel, one can trace Coe’s growing perception that satire might have been transformed into a means of processing political anger to the point where we are pacified and made comfortable with the situation. In 2013 in ‘What’s So Funny About Comic Novels?’, Coe acknowledges this ‘growing disillusionment with the role played by laughter in the national political discourse’ reiterating the critique of satire in his essay ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’, written in the same year for the London Review of Books. In this he argued that ‘Britain’s muchvaunted tradition of political satire was itself an obstruction to real social change, since it diverted everyone’s contrarian impulses into harmless laughter’ and that the current reflexive satirical culture was ‘ineffectual as a form of protest’, emerging as an entirely institutionalized technique. Akin to Coe’s critique of satire – arguably a language that has been pervasive in British culture since the eighteenth century and the lampooning of George III – David Foster Wallace problematized irony as the political ‘snark’ that has become so prevalent in American popular culture. He stated, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, that ‘irony, irreverence, and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about’ (66). His explanation of such a situation is reminiscent of Coe’s position, in that it focuses upon the popularization of the form: What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second answer to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart. (69)

Furthermore, the problem of satire and irony is that they both destabilize communal values. Having previously enabled an interrogation of establishment rhetoric, irony and satire have become so routine as to be rendered as techniques that simply deconstruct rather than constructively critique. Indeed, Paul’s appearance on ‘a satirical TV show’ in The Closed Circle is described as: a weekly panel game on which young comedians would sit around making scathing jokes about the news, sometimes joined by a high-profile politician. It was considered a great coup for an MP to be invited on to this programme, even



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though he (it was rarely she) would often find himself subjected to a barrage of mockery from the other guests, and could sometimes scarcely be expected to leave with his reputation intact. (68)

While theoretical perspectives on the role of satire and irony have evolved drastically in recent years, there remains a perhaps misguided perception, expressed in Northrop Frye’s much-cited passage from The Anatomy of Criticism (1971), that the ‘chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear’ (223). Considered in conjunction with Paul’s television appearance, one sees the root of the growing concerns that Coe’s novel The Closed Circle turns upon. Satire has become so thoroughly normalized that its moral position has been diluted and any such language rendered passive as a form of protest. The cause, perhaps, is simply that a prolific heritage of lampooning politicians has rendered public opinion entirely untrusting of any political figure. Coe acknowledges the academic Steven Fielding, whose ‘Comedy and Politics: The Great Debate’ in Ballots & Bullets suggests that the stereotype of the politician as morally inferior is ‘a convenient view, for it means we, the audience, the voters, are not to blame for anything: we are not to blame because we are the victims of a politics gone wrong’. Indeed, the pervasive mockery that surrounds politicians has enabled the establishment’s manipulation of this situation. Coe illustrates this via the exemplar of Boris Johnson, who has numerously appeared on Have I Got News for You to great success. In ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’, Coe states: [Boris Johnson] seems to know that the laughter that surrounds him is a substitute for thought rather than its conduit, and that puts him at a wonderful advantage. If we are chuckling at him, we are not likely to be thinking too hard about his doggedly neoliberal and pro-City agenda, let alone doing anything to counter it. With a true genius for taking the temperature of a country that has never been closer to sinking ‘sniggering beneath the watery main’, Boris Johnson has become his own satirist: safe, above all, in the knowledge that the best way to make sure the satire aimed at you is gentle and unchallenging is to create it yourself.

This is curiously foreshadowed by Paul’s appearance on what is evidently the same television programme in The Closed Circle, and his own corruption of the ‘moral norms’ of satire. Previously, the satirist typically held a leftist position and there existed an assumed collusion with the audience; a dialogue that often became a form of civic and collaborative protest against the injustice of dominant conservative politics. However, Coe’s landscape captures a snapshot in which the

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left appears ravaged by its own failures, offering little alternative and rendering itself redundant. Satire itself, in its assumed collusion, has not only descended to left-liberal ‘preaching’ but also is doing so impotently to the converted. In this sense, satire itself becomes a closed circle that excludes the possibility of political dialogue. Indeed, W. H Auden stated in ‘Notes on the Comic’ in 1952 that ‘satire flourishes in a homogenous society where a satirist and audience share the same views as to how normal people can be expected to behave, and in times of relative stability and contentment, for satire cannot deal with serious evil and suffering’ (385). Rather than flourishing, as with the prevalent and insistent satire that occurred in response to Thatcher’s dominion, the homogenous society under Blair was instead characterized by a collective apathy which conspired to normalize satire. Indeed, Munir states in The Closed Circle, ‘“I hear that on every side, nowadays! Defeatism. Apathy. It’s not good enough”’ (329). In hindsight, it is evident that Coe’s position of collusion with his readership is mediated by a growing acknowledgement of the dangers of our disengagement, and he exhibits subtle dissatisfaction with the lack of fervour, and a general inability to fathom the problem at hand. The challenge is to respond to the serious evil and suffering of the period, the trauma that was demarcated by the horror of 9/11, yet what is manifested is a shared inability to oppose a growing political terrain that becomes seemingly both vapid and terrorizing simultaneously. The crucial issue for Coe, though, is how one points the finger toward an unsettling cultural shift using a language that ‘cannot deal with serious evil and suffering’ and may in fact have contributed to such a situation. In an interview with Philip Tew published in Writers Talk, Coe indicates dissatisfaction with The Closed Circle, stating ‘I think I was slightly pushing what could be done in the form of what is basically a traditional third person social realist novel. I’m not sure I’ll try that again with a novel that tries to deal with contemporary events because I think the two don’t match up anymore’ (45). The reader tangibly feels the overwrought manipulations of the novel’s structure as a disconcerting act, especially in light of having read The Rotters’ Club which deals with such matters more persuasively. Indeed, Coe also states that ‘[t]rying to be objective, there was an element of over-determination in working out the narrative’ (38). However, this chapter’s argument that Coe was attempting to simultaneously satirize both political apathy and the ineffectuality of satire itself militates for a reading of the book’s form as a reflexive structure. The novel’s very incongruity and the demonstrably strained problematization of satire are possible redemptions. The text’s very systems which have been met with criticism, and which appear to affront the reader, could well represent moments



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of potentiality within the book. On his website, Coe furthers the discussion of the novel’s poor reception in regard to its devices: I don’t know, for instance, if many people noticed that the two novels have exactly the same number of chapters, but in The Closed Circle they are numbered in reverse order; or that the last words of each of the three sections of The Rotters’ Club are also the titles of those sections, whereas in The Closed Circle, the same is true of the first words of each section. Perhaps people did notice these things, and didn’t think them worth remarking on. But they were among a number of devices I used to ensure that the two novels ‘reflected’ each other as precisely as possible.

Such strategies indicate the later novel’s possible status as an effective satire, but only when directly considered alongside The Rotters’ Club, for such symmetries amount to a mirror on the internal paradox of satire, and in turn satirize it. If such a style traditionally aims toward a moral reform of injustice, only effective within the circle of those who are in agreement with the position, how can such a technique be aligned with a cultural moment in which we identify the institutionalization of satire and a collective symptom of apathy. Coe’s problematization of this paradox finds stable ground in turning the satire onto himself. If, as he stated about What a Carve Up! in the Guardian’s Book Club of 2011, that ‘[o]ver the years I’ve found that one of the reasons its admirers like it so much is because they already share its politics’, perhaps the antidotal protest was to reconcile oneself with the problem of our closed circle of influence. So as to ‘not fall in to preachiness’, the logical solution is to satirize the mechanics of satire and hold a mirror up to its very limits. Having previously shown that the character of Paul descends so frequently in to situations of farce – even to such lengths as the politician naming his first born child Antonia after his party’s leader – it is the counterpart of Benjamin that offers space for satire to unfold in The Closed Circle. The grotesque parallel between Paul and Benjamin is a mirroring that signifies the clash between farce and satire at the heart of the post-millennial period. Tellingly, Benjamin is repeatedly overlooked, having found no platform from which to broadcast himself: ‘I have hardly given Benjamin a thought (truthfully) in the last decade or more’ (26). Furthermore, in ‘Genre Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’, Pamela Thurschwell identifies that ‘[w]hat once was the basis for tragedy (for instance the incest taboo: Oedipus’s unknown illicit coupling with his mother) turns to farce in the postmodern, post-Thatcher era’ (34). The novel’s repeated use of circular imagery and mirroring devices, reflecting The Rotters’ Club, means it

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can be read as an incestuous text itself. It demands to be considered in relation to its kin, so as to be effective. Thurschwell argues that Coe ‘punishes his intensely exasperating but likeable protagonists by making them unable to escape defining events of their childhood’ (36), and identifies that ‘they can’t write their way out of their historical predicaments, or break free of their arrested adolescences’ (37). Further to this, however, one senses that Coe cannot disengage from the reformulations of historical predicaments that make up the task of writing a sequel. The Closed Circle therefore appears, on the surface, as a farcical parody of The Rotters’ Club, where this incestuous coupling is exaggerated by Paul’s failure to confront the trauma of his relationship with Malvina: ‘“Paul’s the one I blame. […] I mean, what does he think he’s going to do? What’s he going to do when it all falls apart?”’ (425). This sensibility is reflected by the inability of Benjamin to truly determine and act upon his own confused feelings for Malvina, and ironically the character is later revealed as the offspring of his relationship with Cicely in The Rotters’ Club. Indeed, Benjamin’s great adolescent trauma from which he cannot escape, unlike his sister’s experience of the IRA pub bombings and the tragedy of Malcolm’s death, is the ongoing crisis of his teenage infatuation with Cicely, perversely mirrored in and prolonged by his passion for their adolescent daughter. Benjamin therefore can be read as the manifestation of a post-millennial ennui and a radical inability to process the cultural trauma that has accelerated after Thatcher, made explicit in his defeatist attitude to the contemporary: ‘Benjamin agreed, but said: “What can we do, though? Once these people are voted in, they can do anything they like. We’re stuck with them”’ (328–9). Such ostensible cultural trauma and apathy is arguably the defining sensibility and cultural disposition of the new millennium. Philip Tew argues in the Contemporary British Novel (2007) that ‘Aesthetically [Roger] Luckhurst’s pre-millennial individual “traumaculture” is superseded by a broader post-9/11 traumatological culture by a sociologically significant disposition that permeates both selfhood and artistic renditions of this perspective’ (199). In the most part, for the characters and arguably even for readers, the isolated incident of Malcolm’s death is offered as the only way one might make sense of the mounting collective and traumatic spectacle of the public sphere. Tellingly, at the novel’s capitulation, Lois states: Christ, you only have to turn on the television. Lockerbie. September the 11th. Bali. I’ve watched them all. I can’t keep away from them, in a terrible kind of way. […] And that’s nothing Philip – nothing – compared to the people the Americans killed in Iraq this year. Every one of those people meant something. Every one of them was like Malcolm, to somebody. (427–8)



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The accumulation of mirroring images, however, is again at play in this statement, and not just in the echoes between each traumatic incident. Lois’s poignant recounting of her trauma as intrinsically associated with the traumatological culture is prefigured in the novel, which offers yet more mirroring. Earlier in a discussion between Claire and Philip, about the terrible randomness and yet seemingly infinite connectedness of the various traumas, Claire states: The Birmingham bombing was a small atrocity if you look at it statistically, compared to Lockerbie, or compared to the Bali bombings, or compared to September the eleventh, or compared to the number of civilians who died in the 2003 Iraq war. So what would happen if you tried to explain all those deaths, all those messed-up lives, tried to trace those events back to the source? Would you go mad? (368–9)

Ultimately, in The Rotters’ Club Lois suffered mental health problems, and both novels attempt to trace lines of influence between historical events and the personal, between causality and chaos and thereby account for the sheer incomprehensible randomness of such trauma. Yet, following Claire’s statement, she remarks to Philip: ‘If there is an exception to what I was saying, it’s not Sean, it’s Benjamin. That I would probably admit. You can’t blame anyone for what happened to him. There’s no chain of cause and effect there. Nobody forced him to fall in love with Cicely and waste twenty years of his life obsessing over her. He’s entirely responsible for that’. (378)

Benjamin is configured as solely responsible for his own experience, aside from being subject to the collective state of trauma and apathy that Coe depicts. Arguably, though, Benjamin characterizes and represents a satirical view of the author himself, trying to make sense of the apathetic world that circles him. The satirical mirror in which Benjamin Trotter and Jonathan Coe are reflected is most keenly revealed in the great artistic project that The Closed Circle’s protagonist has been pursuing doggedly since adolescence. Sharing his life’s work with his niece, Benjamin explains that ‘“what I’m trying to achieve formally – this sounds very ambitious, I know – crazy, really – is a new way of combining text – printed text – with the spoken word. It’s a novel with music, you see”’ (257). Similarly, Coe’s writing has frequently used music as a scaffold for cultural and conceptual articulations. In The Rotters’ Club, for example, the narrative is framed by the turn from prog rock to the burgeoning anarchism of punk, articulating the visceral and aggressive onslaught of Thatcherite Britain. Such contextual musical developments serve as expressive points from which

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to effectively hang the social moment, to delineate the environment, and place the characters within a cultural milieu. Coe’s synthesis of personal and political voice in The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle is echoed by Benjamin’s work, which appears as its own commentary on sociopolitical environs: ‘“well, it’s called Unrest, and it’s about some of the political events from the last thirty years or so, and how they relate to … events in my own life, I suppose”’ (257). Coe’s frequent employment of musical references effectively instigates comprehendible sketches of mood, tone and thematic foundations from which to build upon. Clearly his treatments of music offer Coe ways in which to delineate conceptual considerations, articulating broader cultural inclinations. Importantly, Coe has stated – in an interview with fellow B. S. Johnson aficionado Vanessa Guignery, in Novelists in the New Millennium – that ‘If my life had worked out the way I would have wanted it to, I would be a composer’ (36). Perhaps, then, it is no coincidence that in addition to Coe’s employment of musical techniques and allusions in his writing, he has also embarked upon numerous collaborations with musicians – such as with Danny Manners and Louis Phillipe on the ‘9th and 13th’, as well as his 2008 ‘spoken musical theatre’ piece Say Hi to the Rivers and the Mountains, in collaboration with The High Llamas. Such examples reveal Coe’s predilection for a synthesis of musical and literary style and form, as well as an avant-garde tendency that is shown in his view expressed to Guignery, that ‘[t]he way we read books will change a lot in the next few years and that will definitely throw up new formal possibilities’ (40). These very real aspirations, however, are the ammunition for Coe’s self-satire in The Closed Circle, in which one encounters Benjamin attempting an ‘ever-evolving, never-completed masterwork: which, if its fusion of words and music had any precedent at all, harked back to Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a concept which had also turned out to sit far too comfortably with Nazi ideology’ (273–4). Such a reference to the totalitarian appropriation of ‘total art’ is figured here as a mirror on to Coe’s burgeoning awareness of the institutionalization of satire, and the failure of a once successful technique that had previously characterized much of his career. The self-reflexive problematization of satire is perhaps best illuminated by a return to Coe’s doctoral thesis, in which he remarked that the ‘consequence of this paradoxical position for Tom Jones is that the novel’s total structure, which has been so lavishly praised for its sense of formal enclosure, retains a strong element of very open-ended irony’ (276). The echoes of a structural enclosure, as with the formal image of a closed circle, and the potentiality of occupying a paradoxical position are revealing with regard to Coe’s own project, The Closed Circle. Indeed, Coe states on his website that his initial ‘intention was to write six novels involving the



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same characters’. He is evidently aware of his own grandiose desire to heighten a burgeoning collective consciousness, of apathy and the corruption of satire, to the point where his voice turns toward parody as a way to problematize the paradox. Indeed, Benjamin questions whether he is ‘“just raking over the embers of my little life and trying to blow it up into something significant by sticking a whole lot of politics in there as well? And what about September the eleventh? How do I find room for that kind of stuff in there?”’ (259). Somewhat tragically, although Benjamin is a variously self-reflective character, he is revealed as artistically, politically, and indeed sexually impotent throughout the novel, held in a state of arrested adolescence. This is the terrain in which Coe successfully tethers a satirical approach, enabled by self-mockery. Benjamin’s attempt to create a commentary on the current political and cultural state of the nation is sought by way of employing a new form to reveal the crisis of the individual in the traumatological culture and galvanize beyond apathy in contrast to the superficiality of his brother’s success. The moment in which he is most primed to properly engage in such a project is a situation that involves one of the few characteristically comic moments that Coe allows to develop in the novel: ‘Everything – everything that happens to me is going to feed into this book and make it richer and stronger. It’s good that it’s taken me so long. I’m ready to finish it now. I’m not callow any more. I’m mature. I’m in my prime.’ He might have said more in this vein; but just then, there was a knock on the door. It was his mother, carrying a tea towel over her arm and wearing an expression of mingled reproof and solicitude. ‘You haven’t eaten for ages, have you?’ she said to her son. ‘Come on downstairs – I’ve made you a boiled egg and some Marmite soldiers.’ (260)

The parody of the pretentious ‘total artist’, a typology who would consider themselves as commentator on the sociopolitical landscape of the past thirty years, doubles as Coe’s self-satirical treatment. Benjamin is illustrative, in his self-aggrandizing and subsequent deflation, of the institutionalization of satire and the collective sense of political impotence. In ‘The Strange Death of British Satire’ Mark Fisher describes a set of relations in which the ubiquitous employment of satire by the establishment as self-preservation has cultivated a culture that means, like Benjamin, ‘we increasingly live inside the mind of this psychically mutilated adolescent bourgeois male’. In this light, as a grammar school-educated product of the Thatcherite ideal, Benjamin is shown as entirely ineffective in leading any resistance to contemporary political homogenization.

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The infantilizing of Benjamin, after his brief and passing moment of confidence in his project, is swiftly followed by a scene in which he wakes in the night and contemplates masturbation as a means to fall asleep. As with his project title, the ‘Unrest’ capitulates in an arrested scenario of impotence: ‘the image of those thousands of joyless sperm about to be left stranded on the bedsheets […]. Millions of the poor little sods had spent their energies on futile encounters with his wife’s eggs in the last twenty years, and in the end they had fuck all to show for it’ (261). This moment encapsulates the crux of the problem at the heart of this chapter’s reading of The Closed Circle, the combination of apathetic collusion and an ineffectual language of protest that has been perverted toward political dominance. Satire thereby becomes a language of entrenched pacification and political impotence. Coe’s paradoxical intention to satirize the ineffectuality of satire is unmistakably an act of self-gratification, euphemistically appeasing a growing concern about the threat of his favoured language of political critique. However, by revealing the mechanics of this unsteady parallel he is perhaps offering more than a gesture of self-appeasement, but instead a portrayal of self-reproach in the figure of Benjamin as a reflection of the author. John R. Clark states in The Modern Satiric Grotesque and its Traditions, ‘the antiheroic remains the quintessential ingredient of satire’s caustic grin and grimace. Our debunking literature is full of him’ (35). In this context the depiction of Benjamin as an anti-heroic representation of Coe’s artistic impotence might allow a particularly satirical configuration. Indeed, Clark further states that ‘The satirist is particularly alert to debunk authors – other writers certainly, and even himself ’ (36). Targeting the self and reflecting on the pervasive individualization that has propagated collective apathy are strategies that offer Coe his own satiric mirror. Arguably, rather than satirizing Paul as the emblem of all that is morally questionable in the post-millennial political arena, it is both Benjamin and Coe who pose the greatest threat to open democracy and renewed hope in the novel. Responding to satire’s loss of potency, its co-option by the very establishment it once lampooned, Coe revitalizes the satirical form by dissenting from his typical state-of-the-nation novel and focuses instead on destabilizing individual political indolence. Liberal complacency, surveyed by Coe in The Closed Circle, gave rise to a concentration on the marginal – both in talking of, rather than with, marginalized communities and in probing at the margins of political discourse – which has arguably led to a populist right. Yet, Coe offers some semblance of renewed hope by turning a mirror on to ‘the obscene weightlessness of its cultural life, the grotesque triumph of sheen over substance’ (325).



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Works cited Auden, W. H. ‘Notes on the Comic’. In The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, 371–85. New York: Random House 1962. Blair, Tony. ‘Leader’s Speech, Brighton 1997’. In The Penguin Book of Modern Speeches, edited by Brian MacArthur, 523–9. London: Penguin Books, 2008. Clark, John R. The Modern Satiric Grotesque and its Traditions. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014. Coe, Jonathan. The Closed Circle. London: Penguin Books, 2016. ——. ‘Jonathan Coe Writes: The Closed Circle.’ JonathanCoeWriter.com. N.d.; N.Pag.; http://www.jonathancoewriter.com/books/closedCircle.html. ——. The Rotters’ Club. London: Penguin Books, 2002. ——. ‘Satire and Sympathy: Some Consequences of Intrusive Narrative in Tom Jones and other Comic Novels’. PhD Thesis: University of Warwick, 1986; http://go.warwick.ac.uk/wrap/55828. ——. ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’. London Review of Books. 18 July 2013, N.Pag.; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n14/jonathan-coe/sinking-giggling-into-the-sea. ——. ‘What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe’. The Guardian. 16 April 2011, N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/16/jonathan-coe-carve-bookclub. ——. ‘What’s so Funny about Comic Novels?’ The Guardian. 7 September 2013, N.Pag.; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/07/comic-novels. Fielding, Steven. ‘Comedy and Politics: The Great Debate.’ Ballots & Bullets. 29 September 2011: N.Pag.; http://nottspolitics.org/2011/09/29/comedy-and-politicsthe-great-debate/ Fisher, Mark. ‘The Strange Death of British Satire.’ New Humanist. 24 August 2015, N.Pag.; https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4919/the-strange-death-of-britishsatire. Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Giddens, Anthony. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998. Gilroy, Paul. ‘The Closed Circle of Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia’. In The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, edited by Martin Middeke and Christina Wald, 187–206. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. Guignery, Vanessa. Jonathan Coe. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ——. Novelists in the New Millennium: Conversations with Writers. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Taylor, Christopher. ‘Hindsight Tickling’. London Review of Books. 21 October 2004: N.Pag.; http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n20/christopher-tayler/hindsight-tickling.

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Tew, Philip. Contemporary British Novel, 2nd edn. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. ——. ‘Jonathan Coe.’ In Writers Talk, edited by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson, 35–55. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’. In British Fiction Today, edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham, 28–39. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Wallace, David Foster. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. London: Abacus, 1998.

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A Terrible Precariousness: Financialization of Society and the Precariat in Jonathan Coe’s The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim Francesco Di Bernardo

In Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994), Michael Owen affirms ‘“The 1980s weren’t a good time for me, on the whole. I suppose they weren’t for a lot of people”’ (102). The decade proved most disagreeable for Coe’s protagonist, to the extent that he was unable to even leave his flat. The period is also, not coincidentally, the decade which witnessed the transition from industrial capitalism to the model of what David Harvey describes as ‘flexible accumulation’ (141), with the rise of global capitalism. Coe’s oeuvre has consistently addressed sociopolitical issues from the 1970s to the post-2008 financial crisis and most of his novelistic production is, in fact, centred on the vexed relationship between the individual and the neoliberal society. Coe’s novels, indeed, conjoin macro phenomena (history and sociopolitical shifts) with the micro level (individual stories) that deal with the effects of neoliberalism on ordinary people in their everyday lives. While several British authors have dealt with Thatcherism and its legacy, Coe is perhaps unique among contemporary authors for having produced a set of works on the subject, which can be read as a proper series, describing political transformations from the 1970s onward. The Rotters’ Club (2001) focuses on the 1970s, describing life-conditions at the time of the stagflation that led to the crisis of the Fordist model of production; What a Carve Up! (1994), his most well-known novel, focuses entirely on Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution and what it meant to individuals and communities most affected by the policies and culture she introduced. However, the ‘trauma’ of Thacherite politics was also at the core of his earlier novel A Touch of Love (1989), and of the 1997 The House of Sleep.

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In Coe’s oeuvre, the rise of Margaret Thatcher is perceived as the moment when the shift from the welfare state to neoliberalism happened. The transition from modern Fordist industrialization to the post-industrial era, in fact, coincided in Britain with fundamental political turnarounds: the rupture with post-war consensus, the end of the welfare state conceived after the Second World War, and the entrenchment in the mid-1990s of the neoliberal values Thatcherism firstly fostered. In his novels, the late prime minister is, therefore, a ‘revenant figure’, to use the words of Louisa Hadley and Elizabeth Ho (1). Her policies are the reason that the protagonist of What a Carve Up! refuses to engage in social life for the whole period of her term in power, as described above. Moreover, the 2003 sequel of The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle focuses, on the other hand, on the third-way policy of the New Labour and the entrenchment of neoliberalism into British society under its time in power. However, the effects of that political, social and economic transformation, which in Britain was brought about by Thatcher but indeed occurred on a global level, have never been so evident as they are today, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010) further explores themes related to the implementation of neoliberal labour policies and to the so-called structural adjustments initiated in the 1980s. In this novel, Coe’s examination of the present historical socioeconomic and political condition focuses on two phenomena which characterize our times: financialization and the casualization of labour, both resulting in widespread precarity.

Financialization and the financial crisis In the 1970s, a severe stagflation signalled the crisis of the Fordist model of development. Prominently from the 1980s onward, capitalism has undergone a transformation, which Harvey defines as a transition to the mode of flexible accumulation. A new model of capitalism, characterized by ‘a startling flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption’, surfaces from this crisis (2). Namely, capitalism goes beyond the boundaries of those that were the traditional poles of power of the industrial modern society, namely the state and its apparatuses, the factory, the welfare provisions, and the political parties, its dynamics become instead global. This process is followed by a phenomenon of de-industrialization. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim precisely begins with perspectives on this process of de-industrialization. It does so by referring to the dismissal of the Longbridge



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plant, a factory which plays a fundamental role in Coe’s historical narration of the labour relations in the past four or five decades. It also appears in Coe’s previous novels such as The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle and has a symbolic importance due to the fact that it is a symbol of Birmingham’s working-class history. In The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, the main character Maxwell Sim drives along the ruins of the plant: I was driving now past the gaping hole in the landscape where the old Longbridge factory used to be. It was a weird experience: when you revisit the landscapes of your past, you expect to see maybe a few cosmetic changes […] but this was something else: an entire complex of factory buildings which used to dominate the whole neighbourhood […] throbbing with the noise of working machinery, alive with the figures of thousands of working men and women […] all gone. Flattened, obliterated. (155)

The reference to obliteration of the industrial past, along with describing the transition to post-industrialism and the rise of immaterial labour, in the case of the novel also suggests the obliteration of the working-class communities and particularly the security nets they provided with the result of more isolated and atomized workers. The dismissal of poles of production and the transition to global capitalism meant that finance became a metonym for the economy. The deregulations and the monetary policies implemented by governments in several countries since the late 1970s and particularly during the 1980s have, in fact, opened the doors to an extraordinary transformation. Finance has redesigned the world economy but it has also changed work practices and influenced society and culture. In other words, finance has become one of the most important triggers of social, economic and cultural change in contemporary society. All these transformations together are part of a social phenomenon often defined as financialization, a term which highlights how in contemporary society the logics of finance have become dominant paradigms. In Britain, the liberalization of the financial sector in 1986 appeared in the eyes of politicians and ideologues of neoliberalism to be the engine of a wealth-creating machine. Since the 1986 ‘Big Bang’, generations of ‘Gordon Gekkos’ have been praised as alchemists capable of generating sound money through their abstruse algorithms, incredible accumulations of wealth and jobs in the de-industrialized space of the postmodern neoliberal society. Due to its immateriality, volatility and flexibility, but also utter control over the real economy and over the materiality of everyday life, finance is the totem of the neoliberal political economy. However, the short-termism of the

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money-economy ineluctably took its toll on society with a crisis that is still affecting the global economic system. As Lanchester explains, the libidinal greed for immediate and grand wealth accumulation has had the high price of ‘loss of jobs […] livelihoods and savings [...] [and with the] near implosion of the global economy, and then a worldwide recession/depression.’ The 2007–8 financial crisis, in fact, revealed the fallacy of the alchemic dream of deregulated finance. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim moves in the territory of the postindustrial consumerist society built up on the ephemerality of moneyeconomy. The novel, published in 2010, presents several references to the 2007–8 financial meltdown and indeed the events narrated are haunted by a spectre of a financial Armageddon that would annihilate Western civilization: ‘The world seemed to be on the point of economic collapse and the newspapers were full of apocalyptic headlines saying that the banks were about to crumble, we would all lose our money and it would be the end of Western civilization as we knew it’ (106). The criticism of the practices of the financial sectors is, however, conveyed particularly through a re-visiting of the Faustian myth. According to Ian Watt, Faust is described in different cultural contexts as the magician, the alchemist, the charlatan and most importantly the ‘unrepentant individualist’ (10). The abstruse financial algorithms that bank traders employ to create wealth out of nothing resemble the magic formulae used by alchemists and magicians. The narrative device deployed to rework the Faustian myth to apply it to finance is a novella embedded in the novel, which takes the form of memoirs written by Maxwell Sim’s father, found by the former while digging into his father’s documents. The events narrated are set in the late 1950s, however, the date on the top page of the memoirs is June 1987, the date of Thatcher’s landslide in the general election, and the year between the 1986 ‘Big Bang’ and beginning of the construction of the financial district in Canary Wharf in 1988. By dating back the narration of the events to the 1950s the events of the novella acquire a prophetic aura. The story begins with a comparison drawn by Harold Sim between the old city and the new one and their different codes of conduct, which while uncritical of capitalism as a system and idealizing old forms of finance, gives a perspective on the transformed practices and role of the financial sector within society: The old City of London […] had witnessed a revolution […]. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there […] but wedged in amongst them there were dozens of new tower blocks […]. As for the working practices. … Well, nearly



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all of the trading was done on screen now. […] Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days […] never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. (246)

Afterwards, Harold Sim recalls his meeting with Roger Anthrusther and the events related to this encounter. Roger is a trader but primarily a dandy, whose main artistic interest is in music but who ‘could also discourse, with absolute authority, on any other branch of the arts’ (250). Interestingly the novella shares the themes of two of the major reinterpretations of the Faustian myth, Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. In Mann’s novel a friend of the dandy musician Adrian Leverkühn narrates the vicissitudes of Adrian’s parable from artistic perfection to perpetual damnation. Similarly, the relationship between the friend/narrator and the main character is a dominating and deceitful one. Harold Sim, like Zeitblom with Leverkühn, is enthralled with the fascinating personality of Roger Anthrusther. ‘He dominated me completely’ (251), wrote Harold Sim, a statement which echoes the relationship between Dorian Gray and Lord Henry. At the same time he immediately perceives the demonic and masochistic nature of the relationship: ‘I was in thrall to Roger. However cruel he was to me, I could not escape him’ (255). Roger suggests that to get enough money to fund a grandiose trip to the sites of ancient Roman and Greek civilization, they could follow the advice of the stockbroker Crispin Lambert. Here the Faustian metaphor becomes clearer: Crispin Lambert, the stockbroker, is Mephistopheles and the solution that he offers to make money is betting on horses through complicated formulae which are in fact notorious derivatives. As Gammon and Wigan outline, ‘the derivative provides that the seller gains if the debt is repaid and the buyer, who purchase insurance against non-payment, gains if the borrower fails to pay’ (232). What Roger explains to Harold is, indeed, something similar: ‘Mr Lambert has already placed his bet […]. This is the betting slip, and what he is proposing, is that he sells us the right to buy it from him, in the future. What he wants to sell us, in effect, is an option on the bet. […] If we just bet one pound at 6–1, we’d only make five pounds profit. This way we make almost twice as much.’ […] ‘It’s what we call leverage’, Mr Lambert explained. (257)

Roger and Harold, excited by the easy money, keep betting using the increasingly complicated and obscure but more remunerative algorithms devised by Crispin. The references to the Faustian myth as a metaphor for the relation between society and finance become progressively clearer as Roger starts accumulating

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‘volumes on witchcraft and paganism’ (263), a reference to the legend of Faust as the magician. Finally Roger suggests that they could bet using a single gigantic high-risk algorithm. When Harold denounces the danger of the bet, Roger replies: ‘“We’re above all that. We’re alchemists”’ (265). This clearly refers to the tradition of Faust as an alchemist, but metaphorically also to the bankers’ megalomania; they regard themselves as capable of making money out of nothing. However, as per the Faustian tradition, Mephistopheles takes his toll; because of one single variable out of control Harold and Roger lose the bet and end up in misery. When Harold asks Roger if he could ask Lambert to waive the debt, Roger replies: ‘“The City has a code of conduct for this sort of things. Dictum meum pactum – ‘My word is my bond’”’ (269). The pact with the Devil cannot be broken. Faust must repay the debt. Faust must go into ruin. This is the price for relying on finance as the engine of the economy. Finance takes society’s soul, shaping it to its own image and obliging society to the damnation of the debt. Gammon and Wigan, deriving from that claim, assert that ‘individuals engage in behaviours that confer minimal or ephemeral pleasure despite foreseeable painful outcomes’ (223). This exactly describes the nature of the money-economy, which exchanges long-term ruin for immediate gain. This is also exactly the topos of the Faustian myth. Coe represents the masochistic relationship between society and finance and the short-termism of the moneyeconomy specifically through a rewriting of the Faustian myth.

Precarious life The financialization of capitalism and the implementation of neoliberal labour policies have, however, also determined a change in the ways the capitalist elites forge class and labour relations. The use of technological innovation as an instrument to bend unionized labour (by outsourcing labour thanks to the rapid transformations of the transport system) and the immateriality of the economy based on financial speculation have caused a proliferation of temporary, parttime and supposedly self-employment job contracts. To explain this phenomenon many theorists have used the concept of precarity, which in its current connotation it was used for the first time in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Italian trade unionists and autonomists to denounce the uncontrolled and thoroughgoing casualization of the job market as an effect of neoliberal labour reforms. In recent years the concept has managed to break into the language of the mainstream media and politics. In this regard, Guy Standing,



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probably the most well-known theorist of precarity in the English-speaking world, proposes a reconceptualization of social classes: at the top there is a global elite, a ‘tiny number of absurdly rich global citizens’; below this elite there is a class he dubs the ‘salariat’, which remains ‘in stable full-time employment’, with ‘some hoping to move into the elite’. Alongside them are the so-called ‘proficians’, a class of professional technicians. Below them, Standing locates the traditional working-class, unionized manual labour with stable job contracts. The most vulnerable and underprivileged class is what remains ‘underneath’ these strata, so to speak: the precariat, made up of people employed on a casual basis and earning low incomes (1–9). However, this concept lies on a faulty foundation, as it disguises the essential nature of capitalism and its inescapable relation with precariousness as an aspect of the way capital functions and reproduces itself. Today’s defenders of the concept of precarity, by contrast, claim that the advent of ‘immateriality’ has determined a radical change in the nature of labour; whereas Fordist capitalism required a loyal and well-regulated workforce, the crisis of Fordism in the 1970s demanded radical transformations of work and the pursuit of flexible production. However, as I have said elsewhere, precarity is rather a symptom of a return to the pre-Fordist and pre-welfare state labour conditions. The mechanisms of appropriation of time and workers’ subjugations to the rhythms of production, in fact, form the kernel of capitalism. Stable working conditions were the result, during the Cold War era, of a compromise between the capital and labour organizations in order to avert the threat posed by communist ideology and by Soviet support to anti-capitalist movements as Jeremy Gilbert, among others, affirms. The disappearance of existential threat to European capitalism, with the fall of the Soviet Union, cleared the way for its offensive against workers’ rights, and in Harvey’s terms to ‘the restoration of class power’ (16), thus restoring pre-welfare state industrial relations, which inescapably means more casualized labour. The flattened Longbridge industrial plant described by Maxwell Sim in the quotation above, for instance, well exemplifies the demise not only of an industrial sector but also of a whole social class, which was previously well regulated to satisfy the needs of Fordist capitalism, but then became expendable with the rise of financial capitalism. Also in relation to the transformed labour relations, Coe’s novel draws attention to the effects of the political and economic decisions on the lives of ordinary individuals. In this case money-economy overwhelms the lives of Poppy and Maxwell, who are relegated to a precarious existence. These two characters represent in this context the majority of the population, which is paying the consequences of a disastrous political economy. Coe’s novel,

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moreover, highlights the relation between precarious labour and solitude, precarious personal life, stressing the effects of this process of casualization and de-unification of labour. The novel opens, in fact, with a description which is highly metaphorical of the precarious condition. It recounts through the narrative device of a newspaper article the story of the police rescue of Maxwell Sim, found naked and nearly dead due to hypothermia in his car while on a business trip. Maxwell Sim is a freelance salesman for a company specializing in ecologically-friendly toothbrushes: Grampian Police patrolling the snowbound stretch of the A93 […] spotted a car apparently abandoned at the side of the road. […] On closer inspection it became clear that the unconscious driver was still inside the car. Clothes belonging to the middle-aged man, who was almost naked, were found scattered throughout the vehicle. On the passenger seat beside him were two empty whisky bottles. […] The man was suffering from severe hypothermia […]. He was later identified as Mr Maxwell Sim. […] Mr Sim was a salesman employed on a freelance basis by Guest Toothbrushes […] a company specializing in ecologically friendly oral hygiene products. The company had gone into liquidation that morning. (1)

This episode evokes Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman: the failure to fulfil the American Dream in Miller’s play is mirrored by Maxwell’s failure to fulfil the neoliberal dream of self-entrepreneurship. The themes of extreme, of freezing, subtly evoke for the reader the Alaskan and Western imaginary of Miller’s play. The loneliness faced by the human being when the individualist pursuit of success ends in failure is a common central theme in the literary works of both Coe and Miller. Apart from the literary references, what also strikes the reader is the sense of isolation, loneliness and despair that the scene conveys. The naked body certainly symbolizes the lack of societal protection, the hypothermia reminds the lack of empathy and the un-affectivity of what Zygmunt Bauman calls the liquid society; he explains that such a condition is characterized by the ‘policy of deliberate “precarization” conducted by the operators of labour markets’  (163) and this critique of the postmodern condition of work is conveyed in this section of the novel through reference to Sim’s employment on a freelance basis. The idea of freelancing refers not only to the post-industrial condition of work but also to the consequences of this condition on the wider spectrum of human life. Freelancing, in fact, epitomizes the liquid precarious condition in postmodern society where relationships among humans are consumed as a product and commitments are made on a temporary basis, or as Bauman puts it, ‘until further notice’ (162–4). Throughout the novel Maxwell



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Sim engages in relationships which are all ephemeral and superficial, as if with an expiry date, a situation which echoes the inability to develop stable human bonds under the precarious conditions imposed by neoliberal bio-power. The precarious and atomized existence under global capitalism is well represented in one episode with great visual and emotional impact, where Maxwell Sim is alone in a restaurant at the Sydney harbour and a Chinese woman and her daughter draw his attention due to the genuine human affection that they seem to radiate. After the Chinese woman and her daughter have left, Maxwell makes his way to the toilet in the basement of the restaurant: So I sat down in one of the cubicles […] and that was when it really hit me. The loneliness. I was sitting, underground in a tiny little box, tens of thousands of miles from home. If I were to have a sudden heart attack sitting on that toilet, what would be the consequence? Some member of the restaurant staff would probably find me just before they locked up. The police would be called and they would look at my passport and credit cards and somehow, I suppose, through the use of some international database, they would work out my connections to Dad and to Caroline, and they would phone them up and tell them. How would Caroline take the news? She’d be pretty upset, at first, but I’m not sure how deep that would go. I didn’t play much part in her life any more. It would be worse for Lucy, of course, but even she was growing steadily more distant […]. And who else there? […]. But my passing wouldn’t send out many ripples […]. A Facebook account gone inactive – but would any of my Facebook friends really notice? I doubted it. I was alone in the world, now, terribly alone. I would be flying home the next day, and pretty much all that would be waiting for me when I got there was an unlived-in flat full of Ikea furniture and three weeks’ worth of bills, bank statements and pizza delivery adverts. (14–15)

This paragraph foregrounds references to contemporary hyper-individualism times and the solitude which dominates the precarious existence that is symptomatic of this period. Given such a condition of lived experience, reality is reduced to an environment filled with consumer junk and characterized by a virtual life as replacement for the real one. As Slavoj Žižek claims: ‘Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance, of the resisting hard kernel of the Real – just as decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like real coffee without being real coffee, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being so’ (11). Žižek here conceptualizes and conveys exactly the reality of Maxwell Sim who perceives himself to be alone in the real world, yet in the company of forty-six friends on Facebook. The

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postmodern hyper-reality is what Maxwell ponders when scrutinizing a contact list on a mobile phone (his reductive surname Sim, which evokes a mobile simcard, thus also evoking a solely virtual existence): ‘A face, a personality, a pair of lively eyes, a body, a human being, all reduced to eleven digits on a screen’ (72). Such a virtual reality with its virtual contacts seems the dominant and sometimes only interaction among humans in postmodern times, when individualism is so entrenched that the interaction with the other is perceived as a threat. As Maxwell also notes: ‘Every time I tried to make eye-contact, or looked as though I might be about to speak to them, they would look away, hurriedly and pointedly, and quicken their step. […] It was sobering to see how even the little spark of common humanity I was trying to ignite between us made them panic, turn tail and flee’ (73). Individuals live a compartmentalized existence, as if caged, a feeling emphasized by the resorts and the compounds in which the neoliberal elites live. Such an existential condition has therefore become the norm in an atomized society dominated by uncertainty and precariousness: the privacy granted by hyper-individualism is indeed, as the title claims, a terrible one. A similar sense of solitude and despair characterizes the entire novel. During a stopover from Sydney to London, Maxwell meets Poppy, a young woman who works as an adultery facilitator for important business-people. Her task is to provide support and evidence for people who are cheating on their partners to imply the contrary. Much of her job consists of travelling around the world from one airport to another to record announcements to produce contemporaneous background noise for the clients of her company, used when they phone their partners to justify their nights out as part of a business trip. Poppy typifies a class of casualized workers who, although well-educated and young, are obliged to do a degrading, zero-hour job. In her conversation with Maxwell, when asked if she had qualms about the nature of her job, she offers a reply that well epitomizes the condition of the large part of contemporary youth: ‘I’ve gone past the stage where I bother about that kind of thing. I got a First in History from Oxford, you know. And do you know what kind of jobs I’ve been doing since? The shittiest of the shitty. The best was PA to the director of a lapdancing club. The worst was … Well, you don’t want to hear about the worst. And that’s without the months of unemployment in between. This job gives me easy money’. (37)

In a later passage Poppy criticizes the older Thatcher-voting generations who kept voting into power parties that proposed neoliberal agendas, turning young people into a precariat, consumer zombies unable to take control of their lives (37–8).



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The reduction of labour rights and existential precariousness has reduced opposition, with most people unable to articulate any viable, voter-attractive resistance to neoliberalism. Jerome Roos proposes an explanation, claiming that in neoliberal societies, oppositional voices are silenced by three factors: 1. The total dis-aggregation and atomization of the social fabric as a result of the rise of indebtedness and the precarious nature of work. [… ] The social atomicity of late capitalism inhibits the development of a sense of solidarity. 2. The pervasive sense of anxiety […] which keeps people isolated and perpetually preoccupied with the exigencies of the present moment. […] Closely connected to the rise of indebtedness and precarity, anxiety becomes the dominant affect. 3. The overwhelming sense of futility. [… ] [T]he conviction that ‘there is no alternative’ to capitalist control – thus becomes the most important weapon in the ideological arsenal of the neoliberal imaginary. Therefore, Lois McNay adds, in many circumstances, ‘individuals are unwilling or unable to act as agents of their own interests’ (37). Inability or disinclination to express agency is one of the most visible effects of what Bourdieu calls ‘social suffering’: the inability to take action because of an overwhelming feeling of pointlessness, along with de-politicization and resignation to the status quo (3). Social suffering is mostly the result of what Bauman calls the ‘policy of deliberate precarisation’ (163), which is, conversely, a form of bio-power. Foucault coined the word to refer to ‘the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species [become] the object of political strategy’ (1). Neoliberal elites in power effectively take control of people’s lives through deliberate ‘precarisation’. ‘Precarisation’ is closely associated with instability, fear and unpredictability, which are sentiments highly internalized by individuals living in neoliberal societies. Bauman affirms that the modern ‘liquid’ (or late capitalist, neoliberal) society is, in fact, characterized by anxiety. Drawing from Lagrange, Bauman describes contemporary society as imbued with ‘derivative fear: the sentiment of being susceptible to danger; a feeling of insecurity […] and vulnerability’ (3). This feeling has, therefore, become widespread in contemporary society. Mark Currie states, moreover, that ‘in an age of increasingly interested, detailed and accurate prediction, the notion of the unpredictable has emerged as a way of characterising the new epoch’ (55). Finger affirms that this pervasive sense of anxiety is caused by stress on productivity, by the ‘financialisation’ of neoliberal, global capitalism and by the short-termism of its policies. The deregulation of the labour market, Bauman asserts, has caused ‘conditions of

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constant uncertainty’ (2). Anxiety is the fear of a sudden, abrupt, destructive event which can change the course of life. Maxwell, in this regard, commenting on the abyss of uncertainties and solitude in which his life has sunken, reminds that in today’s world ‘most people have gone about their daily business on the comfortable assumption that something real and solid underpins everything we do. Now, it’s no longer possible to assume that’ (110). Uncertainty is also a result of disciplinary structures, which force the individual to comply with certain rules of social recognition. Honneth argues that ‘social recognition appears merely to serve the creation of attitudes that conform to the dominant system’ (323). The discourse of entrepreneurship, productivity and the self-made person in neoliberal society becomes normative. Hardt and Negri also agree that, in neoliberal society, ‘behaviors of social integration and exclusion […] are […] interiorized within the subjects themselves’ (23). Fear of social exclusion thus functions as a form of self-policing, which works as follows: you are the only one to blame for being poor or unsuccessful (according to the dominant standards). Self-blame and self-policing consequently inhibit agency, dissidence and resistance to neoliberal hegemony. The result of this set of conditions to which subaltern sectors of the society are subject is a widespread sense of futility, inability to express agency. These are also the reasons why Maxwell, disenfranchised and self-blaming, is resigned to ‘failed’ existence and retreats into his own world, made of reminiscences of his past and self-secluding fantasies, such as his love for the female voice of his car’s GPS. Moreover, the sense of loss of control over life is represented at the end of the novel through a postmodern narrative device. The precarious Maxwell Sim decides to take control of his personal life to catch a plane, which will take him to his new life. However, the author of the novel intervenes. Maxwell is, in fact, approached by a man with ‘the eyes of a serial killer’ (339) who tells him that the story (and therefore the novel) will not conclude in the manner Maxwell would prefer, but as the author wishes. This authorial figure apparently prevents any other ending to Maxwell’s story: ‘Like I said, Max – I’m sorry but you’re not going anywhere.’ ‘But I have to catch that plane’. […] ‘But the story’s finished, Max’. […] ‘It can’t have finished,’ I protested. ‘I still, I don’t know how it ends.’ ‘Well, that’s easy’, said the writer, […]. ‘Like this’. (340)

So the novel ends. By denying autonomy to the character, Coe implicitly refers to the bio-power nature of the precarization of labour under neoliberalism. Maxwell



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Sim, as a precarious individual, is denied autonomy, while the author represents the neoliberal elite which, by taking control over people’s time and personal life, turns the individual into a controllable robot-labourer, a consumer zombie.

Conclusion The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim focuses upon and illuminates the condition of social suffering under neoliberalism, and on the widespread sense of futility determined by the bio-power of neoliberal governance which impedes agency and resistance. To do so, it reworks literary canons such as the Faustian myth and draws from Arthur Miller’s requiem for the American Dream in Death of a Salesman, only to declare fallacious the new American Dream that permeates this period of global capitalism. Coe’s novel might well be interpreted as constituting another volume of the author’s literary saga focused on the transformations brought about by global capitalism and its effects on individuals and communities started with What a Carve Up!. The Terribly Privacy of Maxwell Sim portrays the results of that process of carving up of public good started by Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution. However, Coe’s ninth novel can be also read as an introduction to his eleventh novel, Number 11, an unorthodox sequel to What a Carve Up!. Its overlapping chapters, in fact, describe the austerity Britain faced, born from the process of financialization and the 2008 financial crisis that cast their shadows on the life of Maxwell Sim.

Works cited Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Coe, Jonathan. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Penguin, 2010. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Viking, 1994. Currie, Mark. The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014. Di Bernardo, Francesco. ‘The Impossibility of Precarity.’ Radical Philosophy. 198 July/August 2016: N.Pag.; https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/theimpossibility-of-precarity. Finger, Barry. ‘Financialization and Profitability.’ New Left Project. 2 April 2014: N.Pag.; http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/financialization_ and_profitability.

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Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Gammon, Earl, and Duncan Wigan. ‘Libidinal Political Economy: A Psycho-Social Analysis of Financial Violence.’ In Global Political Economy, Contemporary Theories, edited by Ronen Palan, 223–34. London: Routledge, 2013. Gilbert, Jeremy. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. London: Pluto Press, 2013. Hadley, Louisa, and Elizabeth Ho (eds). Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Honneth, Axel. ‘Recognition as Ideology’. In Recognition and Power: Axel Honneth and the Tradition of Critical Social, edited by B. Van den Brink and D. Owen, 323–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lanchester, John. ‘Bankocracy: Lehman Brothers.’ London Review of Books. 31 (21) 5 November 2009: N.Pag.; https://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n21/john-lanchester/ bankocracy. McNay, Lois. The Misguided Search for the Political. Oxford: Polity Press, 2014. Roos, Jerome. ‘Where is the Protest? A Reply to Graeber and Lapavitsas.’ ROAR Magazine. 9 April 2014: N.Pag.; https://roarmag.org/essays/protest-austeritygraeber-lapavitsas/. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011. Watt, Ian P. Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London and New York: Verso, 2002.

10

Jonathan Coe’s Rewriting of Popular Genres in Expo 58 José Ramón Prado Pérez

Jonathan Coe’s major concern with form reveals his systematic engagement with the exploration of the suitability of representation. As he comments in an interview Philip Tew included in Writers Talk (2008), ‘It’s one of the hardest things to do in writing, I think, to try and impose an imaginative narrative shape onto contemporary reality, because you know contemporary reality is in flux’ (44). The nature of Coe’s fictions consists of presenting reality as representation, events mediated by adapting their form to match our shifting reality. In his case, this would imply reformulating or parodying genre writing because of its ingrained conservatism, or, conversely, to free the form from any such ideological complacency. Umberto Eco stresses the point in his classic analysis of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels: ‘Fleming is conservative as, basically, the fable  – any fable – is conservative; his is the static inherent dogmatic conservatism of fairy tales and myths, which transmit an elementary wisdom […] by indisputable archetypes which do not permit critical distinction’ (162). Choice of form constitutes for Coe an ideological statement, an opportunity to articulate his worldview of an unstable and chaotic reality upon which his narratives establish an order, which is, nevertheless, based on randomness. And probably that is the closest he comes to bridging the paradox of representation, being well aware that it cannot be resolved unless falling prey to the very dangers of genre fiction that he sets out to challenge. In Expo 58, Jonathan Coe seems to be on the borderline between the fictive and non-fictive, articulating a historical moment where categories are in transition, thus, precarious and uncertain. They have not yet solidified into a new doxa or dominant cultural mode of representation. I will suggest that Coe senses the contradiction which compels him to reproduce a somewhat schizophrenic state of permanent change by resorting to static formula writing. In so doing,

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Coe’s narrative must be one that is never fulfilled, suggesting and longing for a potential future, which in the case of the novel’s protagonist, Thomas Foley, never arrives. Hence, the reader’s pleasure of narrative closure and fulfilled expectation is denied by all and any of Expo 58’s narrative turns. The imposition of a narrative shape would account for what Eco describes as the ideological component of form: ‘It is true that such structures inevitably entail ideological positions, but these do not derive so much from the structural content as from the way of structuring them’ (161). In Expo 58 the predicament of the protagonist, Thomas Foley, summarizes the overall paradox of representation at which Coe aims. He thinks he has the freedom to choose, but his acts are predetermined by a superior consciousness, that of the author implied in the narration, of which he remains unaware. His realization, by way of plot disclosure, both for the character and the reader, of such a delusion is what makes him appear free in an ambivalent sense. He must come to accept that he is just a secondary character in a fiction over which he exerts no control whatsoever. Such self-awareness that his freedom relies on its very lack may appear to be antithetical; however, it also opens a potential space for rupture and optimism, and, to a certain extent, subverts the unrestricted transmission of received belief systems. This apparent dichotomy has been voiced by Coe in relation to satire’s power to destabilize fixed categories, and would partly explain his adoption of formula fiction. In two short pieces included in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements (2013), ‘The Paradox of Satire’, written in 2010 and 2013, he concludes that, instead of stirring consciences, satire brings about the opposite of what the author was intending. It creates a space – a warm, safe, welcoming space – in which like-minded readers can gather together and share in comfortable laughter. […] An impulse which might have translated into action is therefore rendered neutral and harmless. […] We write in the hope of changing the world. But in fact, it [satire] is one of the most powerful weapons we have for preserving the status quo. (N.Pag.)

The establishment’s capacity to easily naturalize or appropriate any criticism encapsulated in satire would readily apply to formula fiction in its collusion with and/or reproduction of dominant ideologies uncritically. By contrast, Walter Benjamin’s conception of the ‘storyteller’ tackles the issue of formula fiction from a positive angle which would suitably account for Jonathan Coe’s writing enterprise: The fairy tales tell us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which the myth had placed upon its chest. […] The liberating



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magic which the fairy tale has at its disposal does not bring nature into play in a mythical way, but points to its complicity with liberated man. A mature man feels this complicity only occasionally, that is, when he is happy; but the child first meets it in fairy tales, and it makes him happy. (102)

Indeed, the author’s complaint about satire articulates the unresolved tension between Eco’s and Benjamin’s approaches. Thus, Coe acknowledges Eco’s warning about the reactionary component in genre fiction, intellectually well aware of the perils implicit in the act of representation. However, I will argue that, at the practical level of his stories, he also shares Benjamin’s views about storytelling’s potential to contest dominant ideologies through its liberating element of shared communal imagination. And so, to give Benjamin’s idea a twist, in this fashion Coe sets out to liberate the story, or the narrative, from any mythical status that it may gain through form, carefully trying to avoid allowing his own stories to solidify into, collude with or transform into new dogmas. In the case of Thomas Foley, his being sent to Brussels to manage a Baudrillardian replica of an English pub illustrates the case: his stay is temporary, while he inhabits a virtual reality which bears a striking resemblance to actual life, precisely subsumed into everyday patterns and meaning. Yet, it remains a breach outside temporality which can be experienced as some sort of permanent present; that is, between his past history and his future. The sense of inhabiting an illusion will intensify later in the novel when the reader realizes that the character’s conflicts are derived from dwelling in the fantasy world of spy stories. In the rest of this chapter I will explore how the self-reflexive and intertextual techniques which Jonathan Coe uses interact so as to ameliorate the ideological conservatism of imposing form on chaotic reality, while simultaneously catering for in-between areas that may foster the narrative’s emancipatory aspects. In such a way, Expo 58 engages with the age of narrativity and storytelling fully and openly. According to Linda Hutcheon, postmodern historiographic fiction ‘ends up calling attention not to what fits the master narrative, but instead, in the ex-centric, the marginal, the borderline – all those things that threaten the (illusory but comforting) security of the centered, totalizing, masterly discourses of our culture’ (82–3). Coe resorts to a similar paradigm when he presents Thomas Foley as living a spy fiction, which experience would apparently reinforce and comfort him in stark contrast to his monotonous domestic and workaday former existence commuting daily from the suburbs into London. His temporary stay at the Brussels Expo constitutes a flight from reality into a world of freedom he would otherwise be unable to attain. Yet, he can only fulfil such secret desires by diving into the most conventional of totalizing narratives, to use

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Hutcheon’s term, that of spy formula fiction. He suffers, therefore, a condition of double alienation: London’s grim reality estranges him from rupture and change (which elements would constitute major dynamics of the classic realist plot), whereas the alienation of fantasy, thrill and constructed fiction provides him with an imaginary escape route. The latter delusion is, in turn, challenged by the revelation that he has been just a puppet, a decoy. As it happens, the character stands between the disaffection of social realism and that of fantasy fiction, construed as his liminal space. Coe establishes the paradox of this double alienation because Foley is, by definition, governed by the fictional laws rather than reality. In fact, what the reader is asked to consider, then, is whether, in an age of facts and economic materialism, certain flights from reality, particularly those that involve the artistic, may acquire an oppositional and fundamentally disruptive nature, provided that self-consciousness and awareness are provided. Foley’s estrangement appears in textual form throughout. He is haunted by the past in archival form: photos, recordings, official language that he produces in the manner of governmental slogans and public notices. He even happens to experience a certain amount of desire from the past once it is too late to materialize it in the future, thus his innate paralysis: Anneke said: ‘Why do you always talk about the future? What about now?’ He didn’t answer. (224)

The character’s silence highlights his refusal to deal with the present and its consequences, rendering his ensuing sexual encounter with Anneke as a temporal breach of his habitual code of conduct. Being no man of action ‒ like his alter ego David in the short story ‘Pentatonic’, whose reminiscing bars him from taking any course of action; and unlike Wormold, his other alter ego, who takes his fate in his own hands in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana (1958) – Foley’s subsequent description of the event is delivered in the stilted language of 1950s fiction to reinforce his constant endorsement of contrivances. His succeeding sentimental and hackneyed account demonstrates how language operates as a protective barrier which prevents the spontaneous circulation of emotions and affects. In fact, this very instance of accomplishment for the character contains yet another ironic plot twist. The storm that so stereotypically features as a romantic backdrop for tumultuous passions is conjured up in this sex scene as some sort of Gothic literary effect, to be disclosed in the chapter ‘Unrest’ as another drawback for Thomas. The thunder and lightning that the lovers imagine hearing and seeing is nothing but the camera flash from one of Foley’s colleagues. The incriminating photograph which he takes will allow



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Radford and Wayne to blackmail Thomas into continued spying for them, as well as obtaining his silence and discretion about the whole Brussels affair. Hence, the one moment of satisfaction and achievement for Thomas is falsified by the narrative. The picture of a naked Anneke becomes a permanent reminder of his remorse and guilt, a dangerous object that might destroy him, while freezing in time the only moment of pleasure and achievement of his life. The proof of his infidelity and his bliss will only be accessible by a distorted image which, with the passing of time, would not be faithful to Anneke or the real experience itself. The chapter ‘Pastorale d’été’ introduces another element of textual distortion which problematizes the tension between fiction and reality for both character and story. It is the verbatim account of Yuri Frolov’s article ‘The Man of the Twenty-First Century’ from Sputnik magazine. In it, the reader obtains a glimpse of the future utopia to be expected from Soviet propaganda. As such, it now reads as pure science fiction and fantasy, and fits perfectly with the parodic tone of the novel. In fact, it is questionable whether any reader would identify it as a real historical published document, rather than ascribing it to Coe’s comic genius. The purpose of such a narrative interference is to cancel any possibility of emotional engagement, while parodying the stock quality of the supposedly idyllic pastoral moment of peace and quiet, described in the section. But this window into the future of humanity and the characters, which is also the present tense of the reader, can be better explained with reference to Jonathan Coe’s interpretation of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements, where he points to the existential nature of Gulliver’s encounter with the immortal beings belonging to the Struldbrugs species: After reading this passage, we can actually feel grateful – newly and unexpectedly grateful – that death awaits us. The very thing that humanity normally contemplates with terror is ingeniously revealed to be a blessing. And yet Swift is truly a sadistic writer. It’s just one more of his manipulative touches that the climax of Book III makes us feel a temporary (if gloomy) satisfaction with the human condition, because the final Book is designed to shatter that satisfaction beyond repair. (N.Pag.)

Coe appears to incorporate into Expo 58 a strategy similar that of Swift which he describes above. Structurally, he sets expectations for both main character and reader, only to smash them once and again in an exercise of narrative selfdenial that has no end. Additionally, he questions the worldview that living without moral responsibilities, that is, in ignorance, leads to a comfortable untroubled existence. Foley’s self-realization that he is living within a narrative

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not of his own choice, but that of spy fictions, would mark the point of departure toward his freedom. However, in the process of narrative disavowal, which implies returning to his former domestic life, repeatedly identified as his main source of alienation, he fails to realize that the Brussels adventure is yet another narrative beyond his reach and comprehension, making his apparent source of liberation also his undoing. If anything, Foley comes to realize what the condition of modern man has become: the anguish of learning that one has to live within narratives or stories over which one cannot exert any control. It is the impossibility of accessing experience or reality other than through textuality, which implies a strong statement about the nature of representation and mediated reality. Foley’s emotional sphere is blocked precisely because of this assumption. It is, as with Swift, a strong statement about the predicament of modern man and the construction of reality: aren’t narratives, after all, symbolic constructs to transcend our finite nature and death? And is not Coe’s narrative ironically reminding us of such a stark outcome, and his bleaker tone denying any mythical status assigned to them? In the case of Expo 58, Coe moves a step further by substituting the godlike figure of the author, which he had used in The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, for the clash of conflicting narratives that dominate Foley’s life. However, by making the character have a presenttime consciousness, being self-reflexive through the number of revelations and defeated expectations, Foley inhabits a space in-between where he can never choose correctly, precisely because he does not belong to the logic of any of those self-same narratives. Such a liquid state causes his permanent state of confusion, and by the same token makes Foley an identifiable character, almost a realist one against the backdrop of the constructed sophistication of the plot. He is, in fact, described as a crossover: ‘a hint of Gary Cooper in his pale-blue eyes; the other saw a striking resemblance to Dirk Bogarde’ (21). The writer thus insinuates the character’s duality and symbolic schizophrenia. In that respect, Richard Lane and Philip Tew identify the pathological as a recurrent theme in the Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite periods, which they describe as follows: the pathological can be thought of in relation to the disordered state of the individual in society, often involving an intense sense of dislocation. […] [T]he individual becomes prone to extravagant, immoral impulses or involved in situations that they often feel strangely detached from. Such characters find themselves at odds with the social norm, drawn to actions that highlight the oddity and falseness both of the political and social environment that they confront and of their own inadequate responses. These are individuals who are marginalised, peculiar, and yet oddly and perversely comic. (193–4)



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While a number of Coe’s characters would fit such a description, the trope of insanity being its outstanding expression, in Expo 58, the opposite appears to be the case. The pathological emerges from the randomness and madness of the narrative denouement that contaminate the protagonist. When, eventually, the narrative settles into an unsatisfactory, dull spy story, it is also when Foley’s paralysis is fully revealed. Interestingly, self-reflexive elements feature intermittently in Our Man in Havana in order to introduce some of the recurrent philosophical and moral concerns in Graham Greene’s novels. Beatrice and Wormold discuss the spy plot they have been involved in thus: ‘“The world is modelled after the popular magazines nowadays. My husband came out of Encounter. The question we have to consider is to which paper they belong”’ (118). Greene, unlike Coe, does not pursue the theme further, so as to remain within the confines of illusionism. Conversely, Foley is subjected to multiple self-reflexive instants like the one he experiences a few pages before declaring his love for Emily. Here, the device of the double-time scheme that informs the whole novel is disclosed, namely that Foley possesses a twenty-first-century consciousness, enhanced by the running joke about smoking, while being constrained to live in the historical period of the 1950s: How could his life have been changed so profoundly by experiences which had taken place inside what was, essentially, a mirage? A place which would shortly be closed down, dismantled and finally unmasked for the chimera it most certainly was? In the grip, once again, of the bizarre feeling that he was the only real person walking through a room thronged by ghosts […]. [H]e thought to himself: Well, she looks real enough. (Until he remembered, of course, that this was the same smile she turned on and off every day for the benefit of spectators to her fauxdomestic activities at the American pavilion). (212)

The double-time design resembles Fredric Jameson’s (33) articulation of the double system of temporality in relation to realist novels, catering for the emergence of spaces in-between. The quotation introduces an eerie tone regarding Thomas’ feelings, and constitutes the prelude to the spy plot that he misinterprets. Ironically, Foley seemingly senses that the spy narrative is about to take control, although he is still unable to process the information in what could be described as a fine self-reflexive aside. From his uncertainty, the narrative keeps sliding toward the solid nature of genre fiction, albeit in a parody of spy fiction or romantic comedy, as indicated by Emily’s reply: ‘“I don’t

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suppose you had the foresight to order me a drink?”’ (212). Her fresh behaviour counterbalances the affected idiom Foley uses to display his infatuation: ‘Excuse me?’ said Emily, turning towards him with her glossiest and most disarming smile. ‘I mean, I caught most of that but I’m not sure that I understood it. It sounded like something you might read in a Henry James novel.’ (214)

In yet another parodic moment to account for, the characters’ exchange is interrupted by an insight into Foley’s consciousness to mark that he is gathering the courage to communicate his love for Emily, and plans to elope. Emily’s literary reference seems directed at Foley’s topographical lack of spontaneity, as much as to the style of his interior monologue, in a clear mark of intertextual self-reflexivity. The irony regarding Thomas is of a different kind, though. He is thereby revealed as the only character with any psychological depth in contrast with his actual behaviour. Indeed, the transition from Foley’s thoughts to his utterance is mediated by a social idiom belonging to official bureaucratic cant. Convention and feigned politeness hinder any endeavour at building up personal relations, while preventing any genuine human encounter. Since Foley cannot be left to experience success, his intended love confession is interrupted by the arrival of Mr Chersky, from the Russian delegation, whom Foley has wrongly identified as his adversary regarding Emily. Accordingly, his solemn, climatic moment is delivered in comic fashion by presenting the unromantic image of two seducers, Emily and Mr Chersky, alternately gobbling crisps. Such linguistic and narrative intrusions thwart Foley’s designs, inevitably condemning him to the realm of frustration and stasis. Therefore, filtered through the grotesque distortion of Thomas’ deficient point of view, the contradictory nature of the scene parallels the awkward, yet pleasant, ambivalence of popular fiction. It would appear the number of occasions where the narrative plunges into fantasy is closely related to Foley’s incapability for handling sexual desire: Thomas took a sip from his Martini, and stirred it thoughtfully with the olive on the end of the cocktail stick. […] It was not just his personal happiness at stake – although that was certainly, at the moment, the consideration uppermost in his mind. But there was also the not entirely negligible matter of the job he was supposed to be doing for Mr Radford and Mr Wayne. (214)

In his emulation of the James Bond figure, to which he resorts for lack of a better model, Foley fails to recognize its defective quality. He imagines himself at the crossroads between personal life and duty to his country which subsequently, in the chapter ‘Unrest’, proves false: he is simply a decoy, a secondary character



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in a story he thought he was leading. However, in ‘Unrest’, he concedes the inadequacy and falsity of spy stories, as his later rendering of services points out: ‘In 1963, Thomas travelled to Bratislava in Czechoslovakia as part of a business delegation from Phocas Industries. It was the first of many trips he made to the Soviet bloc countries throughout the 1960s and early 70s’ (252). The Bond archetype can only procure for him escapism; therefore, what he had construed as adventure and sexual excitement is rather a mirage, the result of straining reality so as to make it conform to fictional patterns. In fact, as a stock character, Bond is never put in the position of choosing, his actions determined by one sole aim – service of Queen and country – yet governed mainly by his exuberant sexual drive. Thomas Foley, on the other hand, is made to face a number of dilemmas which, unlike Bond’s, belong to the quotidian realm, rather than fantasy and adventure. The substitution of the Bond figure for that of Foley, an average man trying to cope with his unsatisfied desires, constitutes a rewriting that destabilizes the inherent misogynist ideology encountered in the traditional spy story. In this fashion, Coe subverts such a sublimated male fantasy, anchored in power by way of sexual domination, thrill and adventure, as David Seed suggests: ‘The soul of the spy is somehow the model of our own; his actions and his trappings fulfil our unsatisfied desires’ (115). Indeed, Expo 58 does not readily read as a spy novel; if anything, it would read as a parody of that genre and a satire of Englishness. By ‘Unrest’ the reader realizes Coe’s book is not even a conventional mock spy novel. The revelation is simultaneous with Foley’s one, that he has just been a secondary character in the plots he was involved in. And to that effect, the classic James Bond plot is condensed, its artificiality highlighted when transformed into a parodic music-hall routine performed by Radford and Wayne: ‘Mr Chersky had the sachet.’ ‘He had the sachet and the packet.’ ‘He had the sachet and the packet in his pocket.’ ‘He had the sachet and the packet in the pocket of his jacket.’ (244)

This is rendered as farce rather than satire. Concerning intertextuality, it would be futile to try and trace the multiple references made by Coe in his fiction, and Expo 58 is no exception. Coe plays this game for the zealous reader, and, in so doing, he articulates the tension between the modernist and postmodernist literary and philosophical approaches to meaning. In fact, his intertextual references stand in-between the categories of the tribute and parody, an attempt also at decentring and freeing the narrative from the constraints of representation. According to Benjamin, ‘the perfect

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narrative is revealed through the layers of a variety of retellings’ (93), to which Coe contributes by revisiting both his dearest authors, as well as himself, so as to stress the shortcomings derived from rendering reality through fictional plots. The self-referential, semi-autobiographical short story ‘Pentatonic’ acts as a template for Expo 58 in this fashion.1 Rendered as straightforward psychological realism, the former contains the major thematic concerns expanded in the latter. The plot focuses on marriage breakdown, a couple’s lack of communication, and the male character’s eventual redemption through his daughter’s ability to understand the functioning of the paternal mind. Moreover, ‘Pentatonic’ and Expo 58 share the reference to the orchestral composition Pastorale d’été by Swiss musician Arthur Honegger. In the short story, it is established as the casual event that triggers off the main memory in the plot. Not surprisingly, Expo 58 features a chapter titled ‘Pastorale d’été’ where Foley suffers his particular reversal of fortunes by learning about the falsehood of nostalgic memories. Thomas’ return to the primal scene of his being, understood as the untroubled past existence before the traumatic events of the war, proves unsuccessful, whether by his own clumsiness in finding the exact spot, or his mother’s inability to recollect correctly: ‘Today’s visit to the site of his grandfather’s farm had taught him that, at least: it was pointless trying to recapture the past, returning to scenes of longlost happiness in search of relics, consoling souvenirs. As his mother had said – “What’s gone is gone”’ (204). Foley’s mother’s remark refers the reader back to the second chapter to remind us that such unsatisfactory outcome was a foregone conclusion anticipated by the narrative. Concurrently, it constitutes just another step in Foley’s descent into self-awareness, and final loss of any sense of security. In the course of the action this is also an ironic let down for Foley, since the narrative device of adopting the character’s restricted point of view makes him misjudge events. While biking back to Brussels, he had indulged in thought: ‘For months, privately, secretly, he had been railing against the shackles of married life; he had begun to feel like a prisoner in his own self-constructed, suburban cell. Well, here was a chance to get away from that: an opportunity to start again’ (204). His introspection is falsified as much as it is his effort to recover his family’s happy past. And, just in case the point had been missed, later in the novel, in ‘Well and Truly Over’, Coe makes Foley confront his mother again to deny him any residual respite associated with his train of thought, or the apparently faithful reproduction of reality encapsulated in a photograph: ‘Martha Foley looked down at her lap, where she was holding the photograph Thomas had brought home for her. […] “But this buttercup field doesn’t look at all how I remember it. Are you sure you went to the right place?”’ (233). What Foley perceives as a



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revelation constitutes a moment of confusion, entangled in textual signs, due to the fact that Foley himself, and a whole society, that of 1950s Britain, were not trained to experience spontaneous or unrestrained emotions like the ones he encounters in this chapter; that is, face highly charged situations, which he is unable to handle appropriately. The meeting with his mother betrays the paradox that determines Foley’s life: he can only win by losing, by being destroyed or by surrendering himself to social conformity. His self-assurance, or rather his wholeness as a character, can only arrive at the cost of his destruction. Such is Foley’s predicament, and by extension, the predicament of present-day man: a permanent state of non-definition, never to become stable in his own time. Foley’s daughter, Gill, encourages him to make one final journey of discovery back to Belgium where he will learn that he has another daughter, Delfina, from his brief encounter with Anneke. Placed at the crossroads, he must admit that he has chosen conservatively because, following his sense of narrative closure inadvertently learnt from his passion for formula fiction, he had construed the pivotal event of his life as a static remembrance, rather than as an actual instance of choice. Thus, the craving for a meaningful life narrative, which Foley so eagerly seeks as comforting self-justification, is ultimately dismissed, bringing him back to his inbred state of ennui. As a consequence, he does not sense any autonomy gained at the end of the novel, rather that the multiple narrative endings prevent him from abandoning the grey zone of indeterminacy by which his life is governed. The narrative anticipation of such a deflating ending had already been suggested at the picnic scene with the introduction of the Sputnik article and its parodic rejection of a potential ideal future, since Foley’s apprehension of any forthcoming events can only be effected in the contradictory fashion of past remembrances: ‘this vestigial reminder of that unique moment in their lives: a moment poised on the edge of the future, when past conflicts had been left behind, and anything had seemed possible’ (261). Furthermore, the revelation that Anneke, whom Foley had idealized in a likewise manner, conducts a dull married life with an Italian colleague from the Expo exhibition contributes to reinforcing Foley’s disaffection. Correspondingly, in ‘Pentatonic’, David’s daughter Amy’s final epiphany is delivered as a card and a photograph, thus precluding the physical encounter with his father. Such mediated means of communication compromise the credibility of David’s memories and corroborates his deficient access to the emotional domain. Since Amy’s recognition and understanding also endows the story with its positive outcome, the resulting dichotomy resembles the analogous one faced by Foley, placing both him and David in a provisional position where judgement is somehow

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suspended. The ensuing ironic disclosure that David is none other than Foley’s son at the end of Expo 58 introduces a certain sense of circularity and repetition to which the male characters are exposed: ‘In May 1959, Sylvia gave birth to a son. The boy was named David James Foley, after his two grandfathers’ (251), and subsequently, ‘In 1996, David Foley and his wife Jennifer (from Melbourne, Australia) had their only child, a daughter called Amy’ (252). Presenting the novel’s ending both as parody of eighteenth-century novels and the filmic convention of stories based on real events constitutes a further attempt by the writer to problematize the precarious balance between reality and its fictional representation. And, by the same token, the psychological realism and crisis of masculinity of ‘Pentatonic’, when transferred to the improbable environment of Expo 58 and its formulaic spy story, establishes a dissonance and cacophony aimed at questioning narrative authority. One might well read Foley’s deconstruction as his peeping into the abyss of freedom and choice. His encounter with affect entails a journey from structure to chaos, whereas his impossibility to codify the resulting emotional state, a neglected opportunity related to the contingency of life. His self-delusions register as the endeavour to rationalize affect as a coherent narrative or understandable story, although ironically such efforts at naming, at defining, at explanation are bound to fail, particularly since Foley has neither the audacity nor the authority to exert such control. Foley’s adventure puts him at the centre of history. However, he is denied any heroic status because his only access to it will be in mediated fashion, whether through memory or representation, photographs or textually, which would ultimately mean distortion and lack of authenticity. In this manner, Coe reveals his project, not so much to become modern, but being modern, by giving form to a tension which cannot be resolved, either in the novel or outside it. Such a tension cuts across the divisions between the modern and the postmodern, realism and fictionality, positing as the current social and individual idiom. In Jameson’s words: ‘This irreconcilable divorce between intelligibility and experience, between meaning and existence, then can be grasped as a fundamental feature of modernity’ (47), whose articulation in narrative terms puts Expo 58, and Jonathan Coe, at the forefront of those artists capable of grasping our cultural zeitgeist. Fictionally Coe attempts to realize the uncanny atmosphere where fiction and metaphor begin to supersede reality. The mid-1950s were a time when certainties and a sense of coherence still felt possible, when meaning appeared graspable and unified. However, it also marked the point of departure for an era that would produce metafiction and narrative self-reflexivity. Hence this



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historical juncture is entirely appropriate for Coe’s Expo 58, representing the brink between realism and fictionality, a space where he might articulate his own aesthetics of tension and in-betweenness.

Note 1 Due to limitations of space, I will omit Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, which caters for a hybrid comic model of spy novels and questions the stable notions of fiction and reality; and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Lady Vanishes, acknowledged by Jonathan Coe himself as a primary source of inspiration for Expo 58.

Works cited Benjamin, Walter. ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.’ In Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, edited by Hannah Arendt, 83–110. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. Coe, Jonathan. Expo 58. London: Viking, 2013. ——. Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements. Non-Fiction, 1990–2013. London: Penguin, 2013. E-Book. ——. ‘Pentatonic.’ In Loggerheads and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 2014. E-Book. ——. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Penguin, 2011. Eco, Umberto. ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming.’ In The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 144–72. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Greene, Graham. Our Man in Havana. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958. Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989. Jameson, Fredric. The Antinomies of Realism. London: Verso, 2013. Lane, Richard, and Philip Tew. ‘Introduction to Part IV. Pathological Subjects.’ In Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Richard Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew, 193–4. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Seed, David. ‘Spy Fiction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman, 115–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Tew, Philip. ‘Jonathan Coe.’ In Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists, edited by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson, 5–55. London and New York: Continuum, 2008.

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Gothic Horror and Haunting Processes in Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 Vanessa Guignery

Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness (2015) is Jonathan Coe’s eleventh novel in twenty-eight years. In the interview ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation’, the author described the book to me as ‘a sort of “Jonathan Coe’s greatest hits”: everything I’ve done in fiction before is thrown into this novel and done in concentrated form’. Among these are the narrative device of separate stories (as in A Touch of Love and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim), a reliance on such popular forms as Gothic horror films, the detective novel and reality TV shows, and an acerbic portrayal of contemporary British society as in What a Carve Up!, The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. Number 11 casts a light on international events such as the invasion of Iraq and the death of Dr David Kelly in July 2003, on British politics with allusions to the coalition government of 2010– 15 led by David Cameron and its introduction of the so-called ‘Bedroom Tax’, on recent social developments through references to library closures, food banks and the widening gap between the rich and the poor, highlighted by its depiction of the financial background during the age of austerity. Like other books by Coe, Number 11 might be labelled a state-of-the-nation novel (covering the period from 1999 to 2015) – or rather, as Coe suggested in a conversation with Julia Jordan, a facetious ‘interrogation of what a state-of-the-nation novel might be’ – but it also offers a partly nostalgic perspective (as in The Rain Before it Falls) in its yearning for the stability and security of childhood and of the welfare state. As in most of the author’s earlier works, the book contains metafictional passages, makes good use of comedy, humour, jokes and linguistic puns and emphasizes the opposition between London and the provinces. Coe gratifies the attentive reader by including characters from previous books, not only descendants of the Winshaw family plus Phoebe Barton from What a Carve Up!, but also Norman

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Sparks (35) from Expo 58 and Terry Worth (159) from The House of Sleep. The author thus plays with intra-textual references while also inscribing his novel within a tradition to which he had already paid homage in What a Carve Up! and Expo 58, that of British popular films of the 1940s to the 1970s, some of which are quoted within the book, thus offering clues for its potential of interpretation to the reader. Coe, who used to be a film critic, is well known for his obsession with lost films or lost scenes – Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as recorded in ‘Diary of an Obsession’ in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements, Michael Powell’s Gone to Earth in The Rain Before it Falls and the fictional Latrine Duty in The House of Sleep – and he returns to this motif in Number 11, in which the haunting memory of a film seen as a child drives a character to insatiable nostalgia and longing for the past, and eventually to grotesque death. Number 11 thus picks up some of the threads woven by Coe both in What a Carve Up! twenty years earlier and in other works, and is marked by the motif of the return or ‘the comeback’ – the title of Part II and a reference to Pete Walker’s 1978 British horror film – and by an intricate web of filmic and literary echoes. As such the novel could be said to be haunted, both by the author’s past creations and by other artists’ (more particularly film-makers’) productions. The result is an assemblage which evokes the concept of bricolage and collage and recalls the genre of portmanteau films, which developed in the middle of the twentieth century. Coe’s polymorphous novel thus posits a postmodernist fragmentation at its heart, which seemingly mimics the dismantling of humanist values and institutions in contemporary British society, while simultaneously placing itself within a continuum of diverse traditions. The aim of this chapter is to show to what extent the haunting intra-textual and inter-filmic dimension of Number 11 affects the narrative structure, the aesthetics, the generic episteme and the political thrust of the book. Spectrality and haunting have become major tropes of contemporary culture, and Coe’s reliance on a number of comic-Gothic-horror movies in Number 11 not only confirms his attachment to popular culture, but also obliquely reflects upon the terrifying, horrific and haunted times in which we live. While discussing What a Carve Up! some twenty years after its publication in a 2016 interview, Coe told me: ‘there seemed to be some correlation between the ruthlessness of the political times during the 1980s and this note of Gothic horror pastiche that I had struck’. Indeed, the second part of What a Carve Up! was inspired by the 1961 Gothic horror comedy film of the same title, directed by Pat Jackson and loosely based on Frank King’s novel The Ghoul (1928), a comedy Gothic potboiler. The author thought that this correlation might ‘suit



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the present time as well’ and therefore wrote what he described in the same interview as ‘five slightly grisly, slightly macabre, slightly horrific stories which, in one way or another, look at some aspects of British life in the present years.’ The epigraph to Number 11 is a quotation from What a Carve Up! (485), which refers to the point ‘“where greed and madness become practically indistinguishable”’ (a confusion noticeable in Britain and the West during Thatcherism and beyond) and where ‘“the willingness to tolerate greed, and to live alongside it, and even to assist it, becomes a sort of madness too”’, a statement which is still valid in the new novel set in a third millennium marked by increased financial rapaciousness and a widening gap between the wealthy, who are epitomized by the Gunns and their multistorey house in the fictional Turngreet Road, based on the real Tregunter Road in Chelsea, and the underprivileged, symbolized by Alison who is ostracized as the ‘“black one-legged lesbian on benefits”’ (195), or ‘BLACK, DISABLED LESBIAN BENEFITS CHEAT’ (291), and Val, a librarian made redundant who ends up relying on food banks. Coe said in an interview with Sylvain Bourmeau that one of his original ideas for Number 11 was to have the Winshaws come back as ghosts, an idea he discarded even if the ghostly presence of the infamous family Winshaws can be felt in the book. If Tony Blair, quoted in the epigraph to the first part, argued in 2003 that ‘In another part of our globe, there is shadow and darkness’ (1), Number 11 shows there is just as much in this part of the world. The general atmosphere of the book, peopled with ghosts, gloomy landscapes and scary creatures, evokes a tradition of Gothic horror tales and films belonging to popular culture, to which Coe self-consciously pays tribute while playfully exploiting its ingredients. The novel might be said to be postmodernist in the way it both installs and subverts, uses and abuses the codes of the genre, a process delineated by Linda Hutcheon in The Poetics of Postmodernism (3). For instance, the incipit of the novel reads like a pastiche of the Gothic mode as it includes all the expected clichés: ‘The round tower soared up, black and glistening, against the slate grey of a late-October sky. As Rachel and her brother walked towards it across the moor, from the east, it was framed by two leafless, skeletal ash trees. It was the hour before dusk on a windless afternoon’ (3). The time of the day (dusk) and year (late-October), the prevailing colours (black, slate grey), the sense of deprivation (leafless, windless), the significant places (tower, moor), the ominous shadow of death (skeletal) and the geometrical disposition (soared up, framed) all conjure up a traditional Gothic landscape typical of eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature as exemplified by the works of Ann Radcliffe or Matthew Lewis.

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Coe both faithfully abides by the rules of the genre and ludically subverts them through the means of an exaggerated pastiche, in full knowledge of the fact that the reader has identified the codes which will be thoroughly developed in the first chapter set in Beverley Minster in West Yorkshire, where two children meet a warden who has supposedly been dead for ten years. Coe exploits similar clichés of the Gothic tradition in the description of the Mad Bird Woman’s painting of the Winshaw Towers – ‘a mad conglomeration of gothic, neogothic, sub-gothic and pseudo-gothic towers’ (53) – a passage which repeats the description of the actual place in What a Carve Up! (186). In the second chapter of Number 11, the narration shifts some fifteen years ahead when an adult Rachel looks back on the events of the recent past, and writes about them for the sake of catharsis. In particular, Rachel decides to revisit the mysterious vision of a ‘creature’, a ‘memory, come back to haunt me’ (14), the ‘horror’ of which, if she chooses to believe it, will cause her to ‘lose my mind’ (14). The lexical field (come back, haunt, horror) is in keeping with the tradition of Gothic literature but the words also meta-textually point to the haunting memory of that very tradition. The text is thus both haunted by horrible visions and marked by the – partly playful – return of an age-old tradition. The adjective ‘haunted’ itself is applied to contemporary Britain after the apparent suicide, in July 2003, of Dr David Kelly, a United Nations weapons inspector who had had an unauthorized discussion with a journalist about the British government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq: ‘Britain would be a different place from now on: unquiet, haunted’ (17). Such a spectral quality is confirmed shortly afterwards when the scene of Kelly’s death is seemingly replayed as a ten-year-old girl, Alison, insists that she saw a dead body propped up against a tree ‘“[j]ust like that man in the paper”’ (29). The repetition of a scene only witnessed vicariously through a front page photograph on a newspaper, may be compared to the response to trauma, which, according to Cathy Caruth, ‘occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’ (11). Such a delayed response suggests that the past has not been experienced at the time at which it occurred, but that it returns as a form of haunting. To quote Caruth, ‘trauma is not locatable in the simple violent event or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on’ (4). The ten-yearold child who learnt about Kelly’s death through intermediaries – her friend Rachel’s ‘garbled explanation’ (24) of what she read in the newspaper – could not assimilate the terrifying image of the dead man, and as Coe’s narrative specifies,



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plays out ‘in her mind like some scene out of a horror movie’ (25). As Ann E. Kaplan puts it, ‘in trauma the event has affect only’ – producing emotions of terror, fear or shock – but ‘not meaning’ (34), and it is because the traumatic experience has not yet been given meaning, in the sense of rational thought, that the subject continues to be haunted by it. To quote Maurice Blanchot in The Space of Literature, ‘What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided. What no one can grasp is the inescapable’ (259). This may encapsulate not only what the young girl but also possibly what British people as a whole experienced; Kelly’s death cannot be grasped because it has not been given meaning. Therefore, to draw on Blanchot, his corpse remains ‘an invading presence’ (259) and the secret that surrounds this death takes the form of transgenerational haunting since, according to Christine Berthin, who relies on the work of psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, haunting is ‘primarily the unconscious transmission of an unsayable, unnameable secret, which […] is passed from generation to generation’ (9). And indeed, nine years later, when Rachel is at university, she chooses as her favourite text a song by Thom Yorke about the death of David Kelly (133) and visits the place where he died on Harrowdown Hill, thus confirming that the memory is still tormenting her. Such haunting processes may be related to discussions of ‘hauntology’, a concept coined by Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx, in which, according to Colin Davis, he rehabilitates the figure of the ghost as one ‘which is not comprehensible within our available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are responsible for preserving’ (373). In 2003, the body seen by Alison against a tree was not the returning spectre of David Kelly but the body of a moribund Chinese immigrant worker, Lu, the victim of a vast underground system of forced labour in contemporary Britain. Lu is another ghostly presence in the novel, not only because he recalls the figure of the deceased inspector, but also because he stands for the vulnerable community of spectral immigrant workers who are exploited by unscrupulous employers, whose names are unknown or interchangeable and whose contribution to the English economy is carefully overlooked. They only become visible when a tragedy occurs, such as that of Morecambe Bay in February 2004 when twentythree Chinese undocumented migrant labourers drowned while picking cockles at night. The tragedy was made into a film by Nick Broomfield in 2007, aptly called Ghosts – the name given by the Chinese workers to the British, which also applies very well to the ghostly condition of the illegal immigrants – a film Rachel’s boyfriend, Jamie, watches in the last story (328). The spectrality of these

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individuals, hovering between presence and absence like Derrida’s spectres, speaks to Jamie whose thesis on H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man leads him to reflect on ‘[h]ow people become invisible, when the system loses sight of them’ (276). This metaphor of social invisibility brings to mind Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs in which the disincarnated narrative voices belong to homeless people and drug addicts dwelling in a social limbo, whose presence remains unnoticed by most but whose choral voices consistently haunt the book and the readers who are thus reminded of the ethical responsibilities owed to what Jean-Michel Ganteau describes as ‘the vulnerable other.’ In Number 11, the Chinese immigrant’s ghostly figure sitting in the basement of the deceased Mrs Bates’s house belongs to the Gothic horror tradition as the two girls spying on the house believe the body is the corpse of Mrs Bates kept there by the Mad Bird Woman, in a haunting echo of Hitchcock’s 1960 psychological thriller Psycho. As David Punter specifies, the film, widely regarded as ‘the most important exercise in filmic terror’ (112), is directly referred to in a conversation between the two girls (43) who are struck by the parallelism between the scene they are witnessing and the name of the psycho in Hitchcock’s film (Norman Bates), who keeps the corpse of his dead mother in his house. As in Expo 58, Coe thereby pays homage to, and emulates, the director he called in Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements the ‘Master of Suspense’, who put viewers ‘through the emotional wringer’ and placed ‘mystery and horror at the heart of his vision.’ The next chapter of Number 11 is precisely filled with suspense and horror as Rachel goes down to the basement to see for herself the dead body, wondering if the corpse would ‘crumble and decay the moment I laid my hand on it’ and if an arm would ‘fall off in a cloud of powder and dust, the bones clattering to the floor’ (56). The frightful scene is marked by its very visual and filmic dimension, each gesture being followed in a camera eye movement and in slow motion – ‘I raised my hand slowly’, ‘My hand came closer, closer’, ‘And then, at the moment of contact …/… at the moment of contact’ (56). The aposiopesis and the repetition increase suspense until ‘the corpse jerked abruptly and violently into life’ (56). The scene that follows is firmly inscribed within the Gothic horror tradition, with the traditional ingredients of distraught screaming and frantic gestures combined with a grotesque dimension, a mixture which, according to Punter, ‘has always been a hallmark of the Gothic’ (112). Coe’s intertwining of filmic references and Gothic parody with political discourse through a denunciation of the working and living conditions of immigrant workers in Britain highlights how his art is marked by an aesthetic pluralism mixing popular genres, comedy and politics, thereby, according to



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Philip Tew, ‘recuperat[ing] the role of the novel, its need to critique and engage, even in a postmodern environment’ (81). On the one hand this highlights the fact that the Gothic is inscribed within a political and social framework despite having often been branded as escapist, for as Dani Cavallaro asserts, ‘its tales are culturally, historically and economically relevant to a very tangible social reality’ (9) and as Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik note, the Gothic is marked by ‘a textual engagement with profound social collective neuroses, the study of which can teach us much about cultural and political oppression’ (1). On the other hand, Number 11 differs from such examples of militant social and political works of art as Broomfield’s film Ghosts which situates itself in the wake of a tradition of British social cinema spearheaded by Ken Loach, as Coe’s novel brings to light social ills but retains an attachment to popular culture, in particular that of the Gothic horror tradition. Coe’s fondness for popular culture is highlighted as early as the subtitle of the novel, Tales That Witness Madness, which is the title of a 1973 anthology film set in a lunatic asylum, in which the psychiatrist who runs the place tells the case histories of four patients to one of his colleagues. The film’s director was Freddie Francis who, the year before, directed the anthology film Tales from the Crypt in which five strangers visiting old catacombs and meeting the Crypt Keeper are told how they died. Coe revels in intertextual games and it is therefore no coincidence that one of the characters in Number 11 should be called Frederick (Freddie) Francis. Although Coe does not consider Tales That Witness Madness ‘a particularly good film’, he admires what, in a 2016 interview with me, he called ‘its narrative vulgarity’, which, for him, is not a pejorative word but encompasses all that he enjoys, that is, ‘strong stories, […] mysteries, […] humour’. These three ‘vulgar’ ingredients are certainly present in Number 11. In addition, the structural pattern of Tales That Witness Madness and Tales from the Crypt is emulated in Number 11 which is based on five interlinked stories (two of them titled after films: The Comeback and What a Whopper!) written in the Gothic horror mode. The novel thus chimes in with a filmic tradition, that of the anthology or portmanteau film, which has been brought back to light in recent years, for instance in Wild Tales (2015) by the Argentinian director Damián Szifrón. This genre of horror film was usually composed of five separate stories connected through a linking device and was devised in the mid-twentieth century ‘to try and keep the flagging British film industry going’, as Coe suggested in the 2016 interview I edited. The portmanteau narrative structure is reproduced in Number 11 and visually echoed on the cover of the hardback

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first edition which displays the drawing of a stately mansion and a wealthy area in London on the top part of the front cover (the shadow of Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe, informally known as The Gherkin, can be seen in the background), while the top part of the back cover shows a food bank, a dilapidated thatched-roof cottage and ominous black birds. Once the reader takes off the lapel at the bottom, he/she sees what is going on beneath the house, with the construction of multiple storeys, but also, on the back cover, the shadow of an oversized spider chasing a small figure, and a skeleton among the rubble. The cover creation thus reflects the various threads and generic modes of the book, and points to the spatial verticality which now characterizes London as a superposition of underground and hidden strata. It also confirms Dani Cavallaro’s suggestion that in contemporary literature, ‘the heir of Gothic castles and mansions is the bourgeois house’ (86) and the disruption of order through the invasion of the supernatural ‘amounts to a desecration of bourgeois ideology itself ’ (87). The archetypal British portmanteau horror film is Dead of Night (1945), an assemblage of five embedded stories made by the Ealing studios and counting four different directors.1 The framing scene is one of assembled guests in a  country cottage who share stories of uncanny or supernatural events they experienced, witnessed or were told about. One of them entitled ‘Golfing Story’ features the actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne who played in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 comic thriller The Lady Vanishes and to whom Coe paid homage in Expo 58 by choosing a quotation from the film as the first epigraph and naming two British secret service agents Mr Radford and Mr Wayne. Coe goes further in his tribute in Number 11 as the novel is not only structurally inspired by Dead of Night but also marked by significant echoes with this and other films and texts. Thus, the story entitled ‘The Haunted Mirror’, in which a man sees in the mirror the reflection of an ornate Gothic bedroom which is not the one he is standing in, is echoed in Number 11 by the mirrored door in the Gunns’ house, which Rachel passes through to move from the staff side of the house to the ‘haunted, enchanted kingdom that was the Gunns’ living space’ (311) – a door which might evoke the mysterious internal door connecting 10 and 11 Downing Street. Mirrors typically contribute to a blurring of boundaries and realities, and the ‘magic door’ in Coe’s novel (264) recalls Alice’s adventures Through the Looking-Glass but also the mirror Orpheus goes through to ‘make his way into the underworld’ in Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film as recorded by Professor Laura Harvey in Number 11 (264). The door also evokes H. G. Wells’s 1911 short story ‘The Door in the Wall’, which provides the epigraph to the third story (‘The



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Crystal Garden’) and highlights the haunting processes which pervade the novel and can be related to the perils of lingering nostalgia: ‘The fact is – it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions – but – it’s an odd thing to tell of, Redmond – I am haunted. I am haunted by something’ (127). The mysterious mirrored door in Coe’s novel (like the green door in Wells’s short story) thus epitomizes the shift from realism to the uncanny, especially when the servants’ half of the house is invaded by spiders, threads and webs (342) and the book veers into the horror genre, echoing the chilling atmosphere of Dead of Night. In Dead of Night, the last (and most famous) tale is entitled ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ and as suggested by Leonard G. Heldreth in his analysis of ventriloquist films, the ventriloquist represents the social self and the dummy the anti-social self: ‘The ventriloquist, a proper member of society who often dresses in a tuxedo, tries to stifle the dummy’s satirical or off-color remarks and apologizes for its behavior’ (83). This duality between the ventriloquist and the dummy finds an equivalent in Number 11 in which Josephine and Peter Winshaw represent established (though obnoxious) members of society and attempt to stifle comedians who deploy satire against them. In ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’, the dummy breaks free from his ventriloquist who can no longer control it, so that the man is driven to madness and ends up shooting a fellow ventriloquist, which lands him in prison. In Number 11, the shift from comedy to horror and madness operates through the murder of two comedians who happened to mock the Winshaws. It turns out that they were killed by a blogger named ChristieMalry2 (after B. S. Johnson’s bank clerk-turned-terrorist protagonist in his 1971 Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry) who developed arguments about contemporary political comedy being the enemy of political action because anger against corrupt politicians, greedy hedge fund managers and right-wing columnists is ‘released and dissipated in the form of LAUGHTER’ (205) – words which closely echo those of Jonathan Coe in a 2011 essay on What a Carve Up! as well as several subsequent essays on satire, ‘I am Less Convinced that Satire is Good for Democracy’ and ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea.’ The fictional blogger’s suggestions are radical as he recommends killing ‘middle-class liberal-left comedians’ (206). One such murder is to be implemented by a talking menu (a head protruding from the centre of the table while the rest of the body remains hidden underneath) during a charity dinner, attended by the Winshaws and by a well-known comedian (218). The figure of the talking menu may evoke the dummy’s status in that it recites a text written by somebody else but will soon deviate from the official track by trying to murder the comedian seated at that table. The disembodied head recalls the poster of the horror film Tales

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That Witness Madness – the subtitle to Number 11 – which displays a screaming woman’s face in the middle of a dish on a dining table. However, Coe said in ‘Eleven Sources of Inspiration’ his initial idea for the talking menu derived from ‘a picture of a dinner staged by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović, in which the menus, instead of being printed, were read aloud by performers who had stuck their heads through holes in the diners’ tables’. In the 2011 show at the Museum Of Contemporary Art Los Angeles gala, the performers actually remained eerily silent for the whole length of dinner, stationed on a revolving lazy Susan under each table and unnervingly staring at the attendees. In the three cases (film, performance, novel), the disembodied heads evoke horror and provoke discomfort, but in Number 11, horror veers into farce as PC Pilbeam, having understood the talking menu’s murderous motive, lunges at his legs and yanks him downwards through the hole while other guests attempt to pull him up, resulting in the overturning of the entire table (228). The intertwining of horror and comedy is common in Coe’s work and the fourth tale in the volume – written in a mode reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse – was meant to provide some comic relief before tipping over into horror fiction in the last story. As in the episode of the illegal Chinese workers, Coe thus both conveys a political message (this time on satire) and retains his attachment to popular culture by embracing farce and comedy. This combination is confirmed by his reference to the 1961 British comedy film What a Whopper!, the title to the fifth tale and what, according to James Walton, used to be the working title of Number 11, a film watched by Rachel and the Gunn girls on DVD and presented by Rachel as ‘this terrible, creaky, inept, black and white British comedy film from the early 1960s’ (326). Rachel had heard about the film from her Oxford tutor Laura Harvey (145) because she was doing research on it and her late husband had written the following notes about it: Lame British comedy, she read, about a bunch of beatniks who travel to Loch Ness to build a model of the monster. 1962. Sequel to What a Carve Up! (1961)? Not really. Two of the same actors. * Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery. (152)2

Through these notes, as Coe explains in ‘Eleven Sources of Inspiration’, he inserts a humorous metafictional comment on the relation between his own novel What a Carve Up! and Number 11, an ‘oblique, slippery’ sequel to the earlier novel from which only three characters have survived (Phoebe Barton, Josephine and Peter Winshaw). What a Whopper! was directed by Gilbert Gunn, which is also



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the name of Rachel’s employee in Number 11, another example of Coe’s playful winks at the complicit reader and spectator. In addition, the final apparition of the ‘real’ Loch Ness Monster in the film finds a parallel in the seemingly confirmed existence of the giant spiders in the last pages of Coe’s novel. In Number 11, the Oxford professor Laura Harvey is interested in the myth of the Loch Ness Monster as a ‘generator of income in books and films’ (134), a way of ‘“monetizing wonder”’ (131) and ‘“Commodifying fear”’ (134) – an example of the academic jargon Coe enjoys mocking. In 2013, she is the one being interviewed about the ‘ghoulish discovery’ made by construction workers in Liverpool Street station, of ‘twenty-five human skeletons, probably dating back to the fourteenth century’ (258). The Oxford professor compares the product of such excavations (which have indeed been going on in London for several years and have revealed thousands of skeletons and relics) to two horror films set in London: ‘“Quatermass and the Pit, from the 1960s, in which a construction crew digging a new tube line unearths a human skeleton, among other things; or Death Line, made a few years later, in which a disused Underground station turns out to be housing a colony of cannibals”’ (259). The first film dating from 1967 was based on a BBC television series written by Nigel Kneale, also the director of The Abominable Snowman (1957), which forms part of Laura’s husband’s extensive film collection that gives him ‘“pride and joy”’ (145). Laura argues that such popular films are ‘“part of our consciousness”’ and suggest that ‘“if we dig too deeply beneath London’s surface, we might uncover something sinister, something nasty”’ (259). This remark can be seen as a proleptic clue as to the sinister turn taken by the excavations in the Gunns’ basement in Chelsea, a wealthy part of London in which a ‘phantom life’ is taking place as the houses are only occupied by members of staff dusting ‘haunted rooms’ (235). After Romanian workers take over the Gunns’ construction site and the family dog (named Mortimer like Mortimer Winshaw in What a Carve Up!) is horribly mangled, Rachel chillingly notes: ‘the horror began’ (304). In the very last pages (350–1), Livia, ‘the smiling, pensive’ dog-walker (258) from Bucharest and a literary descendant of Dracula, reveals her true identity as the head of a team of revolting giant spiders responsible for the death of six people, including Freddie Francis who dies ‘in the most grotesque and unbelievable way’ (325). In the last twenty-five pages, the novel shifts into the fantastic and the macabre, following the model of popular horror films. As noted by José R. Prado Pérez, Number 11 differs from Coe’s previous novels in that it moves closer to the categories of the fantastic grotesque and the Gothic macabre delineated by Geoffrey Harpham in his taxonomy of the grotesque (464), thus, as Prado Pérez explains, Coe’s

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novel takes ‘as its point of departure the premise that madness has installed itself as normality, and, thus, constitutes the rule through which events are to be interpreted, including their uncanny outcomes.’ This postulation applies not only to the generic and literary framework of Number 11 but also to the contemporary society that is depicted, in which the spectre of insanity is raised. As Coe explained in an interview with Bourmeau he deliberately wanted to upset and disturb the reader (and thus get away from gentle and comforting political comedy) but also, more prosaically, he simply ‘love[s] films about giant insects.’ The numerous implicit or explicit references to B-films (comic horror films, anthology films, etc.) in Number 11 conjure up a whole dimension of popular culture rarely acknowledged in highbrow literature. As Coe explains in ‘Eleven Sources of Inspiration’, they underline his fondness for ‘disreputable figures who operate on [the] fringes’ of British cinema and highlight his recurrent effort in his novels to bridge the gaps between British high and low culture. The examination of the haunting processes in Number 11 has confirmed critics’ assessment of Coe as what Merritt Moseley has called ‘a writer astutely aware of his influences, resourceful in using them, and generous in acknowledging them’ (114) as well as being what, in Jonathan Coe, I describe as a novelist ‘politically engaged with the society [he] dissects’ (19). Coe’s exploitation of the concepts of haunting and spectrality enables him both to inscribe his novel within a specific filmic and literary tradition and to portray contemporary British society as a frightful world haunted by past and present traumas. While reconnecting with the grisly, comic and political atmosphere of What a Carve Up! the author treads on different paths by turning his back on satire and pointing to the limits of nostalgia. While he could have ended the novel with the comforting image of Rachel biting into a ripe plum and relishing ‘the taste of her childhood; the taste of home; the taste of autumn sunshine’ (349), Coe significantly left the final pages to the vengeful dog-walker and her unsettling statement: ‘I am not angry. I am anger itself ’ (351).

Notes 1 Alberto Cavalcanti directed ‘Christmas Party’ and ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’, Charles Crichton ‘Golfing Story’, Basil Dearden ‘Hearse Driving’ and ‘Linking Narrative’ and Robert Hamer ‘The Haunted Mirror’. 2 What a Whopper! was actually released on 17 October 1961.



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Works cited Berthin, Christine. Gothic Hauntings. Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Translated by Lydia Davis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982 [1955]. Bourmeau, Sylvain. ‘Entretien avec Jonathan Coe.’ Maison de la poésie, Paris. 17 November 2016 [Unpublished]. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Stockholm and London: The Continental Book Company, 1946 [1865, 1871]. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cavallaro, Dani. The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Coe, Jonathan. The Closed Circle. London: Penguin, 2008 [2004]. ——. ‘Eleven Sources of Inspiration.’ Waterstones.com Blog, 23 May 2016: N.Pag.; https://www.waterstones.com/blog/eleven-sources-of-inspiration-by-jonathan-coe. ——. Expo 58. London: Penguin, 2013. ——. The House of Sleep. London: Penguin, 2008 [1997]. ——. ‘I Am Less Convinced that Satire is Good for Democracy.’ The Financial Times, 11 September 2010: N.Pag.; http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5784ac84-bc50-11df-8c0200144feab49a.html#axzz2c9Y2fZFw. ——. Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements. London: Penguin, 2013. ——. Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness. London: Viking, 2015. ——. The Rain Before it Falls. London: Penguin, 2008 [2007]. ——. The Rotters’ Club. London: Penguin, 2008 [2001]. ——. ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea.’ London Review of Books 35 (14) 18 July 2013: 30–1. ——. The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. London: Penguin, 2010. ——. A Touch of Love. London: Penguin, 2008 [1989]. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Penguin, 2008 [1994]. ——. ‘What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe.’ The Guardian. 16 April 2011: N.Pag.; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/16/jonathan-coe-carve-book-club. Davis, Colin. ‘État présent. Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms.’ French Studies 59 (3) July 2005: 373–9. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Ganteau, Jean-Michel. ‘Trauma and the Ethics of Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs.’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 45, 2013: N.Pag.; http://ebc.revues. org/940. Guignery, Vanessa. Jonathan Coe. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ——. ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation.’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 51, 2016: N.Pag.; http://ebc.revues.org/3371.

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Harpham, Geoffrey. ‘The Grotesque: First Principles.’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 34 (4) Summer 1976: 461–8. Horner, Avril, and Sue Zlosnik. Gothic and the Comic Turn. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Johnson, B. S. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. London: Picador, 2001 [1971]. Jordan, Julia. ‘Andrew O’Hagan & Jonathan Coe on the State-of-the-Nation Novel.’ Primrose Hill Summer Lectures, London, 22 June 2016. Unpublished. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New York: Rutgers University Press, 2005. King, Frank. The Ghoul. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928. McGregor, Jon. Even the Dogs. London: Bloomsbury, 2011 [2010]. Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Jonathan Coe. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 2016. Prado Pérez, José Ramón. ‘“There’s a Lot to be Said for Making People Laugh”: The Grotesque as Political Subversion in Jonathan Coe’s Fiction.’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 51, 2016: N.Pag.; http://ebc.revues.org/3336. Punter, David. The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. Volume 2: The Modern Gothic. London and New York: Routledge, 2013 [1996]. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. New York: Continuum, 2004. Walton, James. ‘Jonathan Coe: Poking Fun at Broken Britain.’ The Telegraph, 1 November 2015: N.Pag.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/jonathan-coeinterview-number-eleven/ Wells, H. G. The Door in the Wall and Other Stories. West Valley City, UT: Waking Lion Press, 2006 [1911]. ——. The Invisible Man. London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1897.

Films cited The Abominable Snowman. Dir. Nigel Kneale. Warner Bros, 1957. The Comeback. Dir. Pete Walker. Troma Entertainment, 1978. Dead of Night. Dir. Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden and Robert Hamer. Eagle-Lions Distributors Limited, 1945. Death Line. Dir. Gary Sherman. J. Arthur Rank Film Distributors, 1972. Ghosts. Dir. Nick Broomfield. Beyond Films, 2007. Gone to Earth. Dir. Michael Powell. RKO, 1952. The Lady Vanishes. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. United Artists, 1938. Orpheus. Dir. Jean Cocteau. DisCina, 1950.



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The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Dir. Billy Wilder. United Artists, 1970. Psycho. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Paramount Pictures, 1960. Quatermass and the Pit. Dir. Nigel Kneale. Ass. British Pathé, 1967. Tales from the Crypt. Dir. Freddie Francis. 20th Century Fox, 1972. Tales That Witness Madness. Dir. Freddie Francis. Paramount Pictures, 1973. What a Carve Up! Dir. Pat Jackson. Regal Films International, 1961. What a Whopper! Dir. Gilbert Gunn. Regal Films International, 1961. Wild Tales. Dir. Damián Szifrón. Warner Sogefilms, 2015.

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Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity in Jonathan Coe’s Satire, Number 11 Philip Tew

May these banished monsters live somewhere else henceforth, not among men Friedrich Nietzsche, Dawn, 202 Jonathan Coe’s Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness (2015), references repeatedly, albeit at times obliquely, his earlier highly satirical novel, What a Carve Up!. For both narratives Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of the monstrous cited in the quotation above is central, but it seems initially hidden rather than banished. The subtitle of the later novel summarizes a central theme that is threaded through their interlinked tales of the rich and powerful, and both narratives are concerned with the intersections of such privileged people with other fundamentally far more mundane lives. In both novels ordinary, disempowered individuals suffer in various ways, victims of a sociopolitical system indifferent to their fate. If both evoke the monstrous qualities to which Nietzsche refers, it is important for understanding Coe to recognize that Nietzsche identifies them as being derived from concepts including those of guilt, revenge, sin and punishment that act as animating forces (as they do in  Coe) which he suggests ought to be regarded as coterminous with savagery. Coe extends such attitudes so as to indicate they may be interrelated to a wilful social indifference that permeates contemporary culture, a disempowered insouciance. In both novels the powers-that-be by implication represent the interests rather of Britain’s increasingly global, wealthy elite, which class remains implacable, if not downright hostile, to such quotidian existences and the exigencies suffered by those without influence. In Number 11 the transnational element is foregrounded, superimposed over the local perspective, the elite removed from its everyday worries and struggles. As will be argued below, this initiates such Nietzschean monstrosity, the fully monstrous

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returning from any banishment, first thematically and toward the end of the later novel, literally. In an interview with Vanessa Guignery Jonathan Coe insists that Number 11 ‘is a satire on greed, inequality, social media, reality TV and so on. […] a fierce satire on social injustice’ (146–7). One might add severally to the contexts which the author identifies: first is the sociopolitical manipulation of attitudes and promotion of certain explicit agendas on the part of the media including the banalization of any public debate concerning more economic equality and outright attacks on the lower classes; and, second is an inability on the part of many of Coe’s characters to either comprehend or respond appropriately to the lessons of the past. I will demonstrate how in Number 11 Coe fictionalizes lives that exemplify such dynamics, while incorporating aspects of what Jerrold E. Hogle describes: The Gothic intermixture of the sublime with what Burke calls the unthreatening ‘beautiful’ and with the comically bathetic and the other incongruous elements only adds to the deliberately forced unreality that allows this mode to symbolize the threatening inconsistencies – including irrational desire and the immanence of death – in the personal and political unconscious. (15)

However, as I will seek to illustrate, Coe combines what Hogle describes as the form’s ‘insistent artificiality’ (15) with mundane, often domestic settings rendered uncanny; in this fashion the narrative offers itself as what Anthony Vidler in The Architectural Uncanny calls ‘an instrument of “defamiliarization” or ostranenie’ (8). As Merritt Moseley says of Coe’s novels, ‘they are strongly plotted and bold in formal innovation’ (2). Nevertheless, the quotidian familiarity of Coe’s multiple dialogues still evokes a foundational if at times residual realism underpinning each novel and in so doing, Coe makes narrative exchanges central to the actions of his characters. Characters’ dialogue contrasts their often unarticulated inner fears, an important strategy, since the abutment of ideas and their implications evoke what Ben Highmore calls the ‘“tangle” of relationships’ (144) of everyday life, whose complexities not only underpin the nuances and dynamics of Coe’s novel for the readers, but, as will be seen below, help evoke social contexts utterly familiar to them. In a December 2006 interview undertaken by me (published later in Writers Talk in 2008) Coe stated: ‘I think observing the relationship between individuals and historical forces is one of the biggest and most ambitious things that a novel can do’ (46). To explore such contexts Number 11 is told from multiple shifting perspectives, although most extensively through the prism first of two initially ten-year-old friends, Rachel Wells and Alison Doubleday,



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as well as subsequently the latter’s mother, Val, a failed, once briefly successful singer, and also of Rachel’s tutor at Oxford, a young widow, Laura. At times the narrative focus remains both curiously oblique and yet intensely personal, embracing a lower middle class, emphatically non-metropolitan provincial perspective. Vanessa Guignery notes: ‘Cases of interest in the underclass and down-trodden are relatively rare in Coe’s work, possibly because he recognizes the dangers inherent in successful middle-class writers attempting to ventriloquize those below them in an apparent economic-social order’ (20). Certainly, in Number 11 both his authorial and narratorial perspectives seem utterly English and the author self-consciously magnifies both the minutiae and mundanity of ordinary lives offered as neorealism. However, the author synthesizes overlaid imagery, motifs and neo-Dickensian coincidence and parallels, achieving a sense of reflexivity. Such experimental aspects are conjoined with more traditional narrative approaches, for as Kate Webb observes, ‘in its conjectures, self-doubt and formal game-playing Number 11 is avowedly postmodern, yet it clings to realist ideas about common ground and the virtue of the ordinary.’ So as to emphatically reflect contemporary mores, Coe combines conventional narration with emails, newspaper articles and a section incorporating certain coordinates drawn ironically from the sub-genre of detective fiction, a short pastiche of the form. He also revisits explicitly his own work, specifically the world of the Winshaws, around which family’s Thatcherite values and propensities What a Carve Up! revolved, and of which Pamela Thurschwell suggests ‘rather than an originally tragic happening degenerating to farce when it is repeated later by lesser actors, farce itself becomes the modern form of tragedy’ (28). The beliefs that underpinned the Winshaws in Number 11 have mutated posteconomic banking crisis to become seemingly even more widespread, far more embedded, informing both a new social consciousness and a growing sense of disenfranchisement. Of the novel Alex Clark comments: ‘Coe’s targets are clear. In the new world order, there is no welfarism, no safety net. There is no trusting the political elites.’ Yet, despite Coe’s framework in Number 11 of a sociopolitical satire and critique of the super-rich, their power and celebrity, nevertheless everyday life is also sustained as a key perspective although Coe intercalates the mundane and quotidian with a penumbra of what Webb labels a ‘pastiche of the gothic […],’ which permeates the sense of the apparitional that permeates the opening. This aspect resurfaces periodically, growing ever darker toward the end. As Jacqueline Howard suggests, this sub-genre involves ‘disparate discursive structures’ (3) as

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well as satirical possibilities (172, 178), which element, as Beth Lau indicates, may be combined in the novel form, with early Gothic influencing the emergence of ‘a wave of satire’ (33) attacking romance as a form. Coe’s narrative remains firmly multi-chronic, the first section, ‘The Black Tower’, concerning the recollection of a visit to Beverley Minster during a visit to grandparents, with a frightening encounter with a ghost, a trick played upon protagonist Rachel by her brother, Nicholas, to terrify her. They also encounter a striking pair of women, one flying a kestrel, whose threatening and aggressive attitude imprints itself on the protagonist’s mind: It was a tableau, a moment in time, that would remain forever stamped on Rachel’s memory: the Mad Bird Woman (as she would always be called from now on) twirling the lure around her head with ferocious energy and concentration; the unimaginable swiftness and sureness of the bird as she plunged towards her prey and then soared upwards again, thwarted but dauntless; in the background, the black tower, tall, implacable and lowering; and in the foreground, the old lady in her wheelchair, fully alert now, her eyes bright and shining as they followed the movements of the bird, her vividly rouged lips parted in a rapturous smile as she called out to the plunging kestrel: ‘Come on, Tabitha! Come and get it! Dive for the meat! Dive, Tabitha, dive!’ (7)

Throughout the novel Coe evokes such a sense of the uncanny, rendered in part spatially, a mood of trepidation, and implied, unknowable forces, beyond human control, all coalescing to produce a sense of the preternatural. Beneath the surface, the world seems consistently darker than that depicted in What a Carve Up!, the reader gradually comprehending that the attitudes and policies that epitomize the ruling elite might are just as mindlessly cruel, but perhaps even less forgiving, and more subject to global forces beyond local control. This shift represents a deepening of what Rod Mengham and I described as ‘a penumbra of fear and uncertainty [which] signifies a more general perspective, a post-millennial vulnerability and unease’ (xv). Even if Coe parodies Gothic forms in Number 11 he still relies heavily on many of its staples beyond violence and terror, including coincidence, uncanny parallels, sudden revelations and misunderstanding. Subsequently Rachel recalls another later familial visit in 2003 where she reencounters the Mad Bird Woman accompanied by ‘Alison, my dear friend Alison, who at last after so many years’ mysterious distance I have found again, picking up the threads of our precious friendship’ (15). In this section everything dissolves, nothing being what it first appears, the two girls encountering frequent reversals, the twists of understanding



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emphasizing their youthful naiveté, presuming certain narrative codes and dynamics that dissolve. Through such innocence Coe enfolds several classic Gothic characteristics described by Danel Olson as ‘unreliable or compulsive narrators, the anxiety of the displaced’ (xxvi). Inspired by the oddity and abruptness of the Mad Bird Woman, real name Phoebe, the two girls assume that Mrs Bates, the woman in whose house Phoebe lives, is being held captive or has died, associating the woman’s name with Psycho, and its neo-Gothic imagery. Alison finds an apparent body in nearby woods, and they set out on a quest to discover assumed, appalling truths underlying the death. And as Olson observes, ‘Perhaps the greatest reason why we can’t quit the Gothic and why we must press deeper to disclose its secrets is because we are ensorcelled by death, haunted by the day or night of our own death, wondering if death is the definite end of our existence’ (xxiv). During this episode the girls retrieve a curious card with a hideous arachnid drawing, which they later learn is part of a set for playing Pelmanism. Phoebe’s house and that of the woods are rendered mysterious and unsettling, which spaces incorporate what Vidler describes in Warped Space: ‘Fear, anxiety, estrangement, and their psychological counterparts, anxiety neuroses and phobias, have been intimately linked to the aesthetics of space throughout the modern period’ (1). Knowing from an earlier encounter that Phoebe is searching for these, they visit, when tellingly a painting and her responses indicate to the reader she once worked at Winshaw Towers (linking her to that Gothic domain) where she was witness to the earlier ‘tragic’ deaths detailed in What a Carve Up!. Phoebe, now an eccentric artist, who is destined to become Alison’s friend and mentor, demonstrates to the child the value of art, offering an account of her work, initiated which ironically is solicited by Alison simply to distract their host so Rachel might snoop elsewhere in the house: ‘Can I ask you something about this?’ she said. ‘I just wondered what you were trying to do when you painted it. I mean – this is a football, right? And this a tennis racket … ’. Upon hearing these words, the Woman made a noise we had not heard before – something akin to a growl – put down the milk jug and came storming over towards the picture. […] ‘Why does everybody get this painting wrong? It’s Orpheus, for God’s sake. It’s the lyre of Orpheus and his disembodied head being carried along by the waters of the Hebrus. How many times do I have to explain this.’ (54)

Coe toys repeatedly with Gothic elements drawn from film, and his pastiche becomes what Olson describes as ‘the neo-Gothic’ (xxiii). In the basement

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Rachel apparently discovers another body. However, in an alarming reversal of expectations, ‘The corpse jerked abruptly and violently into life. It swiveled around in its chair and instead of being confronted by a fleshless skull I found that I was looking at a pair of wide-open, startled, madly staring eyes’ (56), in which moment, as Olson describes, ‘The Gothic involves confrontations between us and the uncanny, between us and the other’ (xxvi). Phoebe reveals this is an illegal Chinese migrant worker, Lu, who has escaped from people-traffickers (coincidentally while working for a Winshaw-connected company, Sunbeam Foods of the Brunwin Group) and was clearly Alison’s original sleeping ‘corpse’. Later, he suddenly vanishes (as various characters do). The episode is a turning point, since, as Rachel reflects, subsequently ‘Phoebe’s paintings – in fact not just the paintings, but the studio, the atmosphere in her house, her whole way of life, everything about her – seemed to have inspired Alison and from then on art became her passion’ (65). As Arthur Asa Berger suggests, ‘[N]arratives shape our perceptions of ourselves and others and how they have affected and continue to have impacts on our lives, our culture, and society in general’ (xi). Unexpectedly, the exchange will shape Alison’s future. Coe comprehends such dynamics, in their application to life’s minutiae, the everyday exchanges and the objects and eventfulness to which such conversations relate. As Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann say, ‘[T]he reality of everyday life always appears as a zone of lucidity behind of which there is a background of darkness. As some zones of reality are illuminated, others are adumbrated’ (59). Another key moment concerns a more public narrative which is critical to Rachel’s private experience and her later development, found initially in her grandfather’s reaction to the death of Dr David Kelly, a real-life figure appearing unexpectedly in a novel at this point concerned almost entirely with two young pre-adolescent females’ world view. This adviser on biological warfare appeared on 15 July before a parliamentary Foreign Affairs Select Committee investigating claims undermining the British government’s dossier on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where not only was he humiliated, but died two days later. Andrew Gilligan recollects: ‘Dr Kelly’s main contention, which became the centrepiece of my BBC story – that a government dossier making the case against Iraq had been “transformed”, at the behest of Downing Street and Alistair Campbell “to make it sexier”.’ Wholly innocent of such events Rachel recalls: Up until that point I’d known almost nothing about the war with Iraq but now I could tell something had changed; a line had been crossed. A good man had



Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity in Jonathan Coe’s Satire, Number 11 191 died, and could not be brought back. And our Prime Minister (I realized now that this was who Grandad had been talking about) had blood on his hands. ‘Whatever else you say about her,’ he told me, ‘Mrs Thatcher would never have allowed anything like that to happen. She was a great lady.’ (22)

Given Thatcher is one of Coe’s primary satirical targets in What a Carve Up!, there is a curious irony in the implied relativistic scale of ignominy enshrined in the above comment (and arguably reflecting the admiration for Thatcher of Coe’s own father, discussed in my introduction to this volume), implying both comparison and context (as well as the intertextual interconnection, itself mildly sardonic). According to Nick Richardson, Rachel isn’t awakened into activism and the novel seems uninterested in the truth of what happened to Kelly. The scene of his death ‘in that remote woodland, silent and unvisited’ is used to set the novel’s mood, and repeatedly to re-establish it. Rachel says that Kelly’s death sent ‘ripples of unease and mistrust throughout the country’, transforming Britain, making it ‘unquiet, haunted’.

In Number 11 various lives intersect intermittently, and Coe’s portrayal of human interaction involves an aspect that cannot be fully understood or defined thematically, which is precisely why the text insistently focuses on life’s minutiae, offering a multiplicity of ordinary lives, detailing myriad exchanges, conversations and associated reflections upon apparently inconsequential matters. By doing so Coe delivers a cumulative, although often muted portrayal of key cultural dynamics, thereby capturing the ideological and social currents of contemporary Britain. In effect Coe incorporates aesthetically several crucial elements identified by Berger and Luckmann first: [I]n so far as all human ‘knowledge’ is developed, transmitted and maintained in social situations, the sociology of knowledge must seek to understand the processes by which this is done in such a way that a taken-for-granted ‘reality’ congeals for the man in the street. In other words, we contend that the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the analysis of the social construction of reality. (15) [emphasis in original]

Second, as Berger and Luckmann also observe: ‘In the face-to-face situation language possesses an inherent quality of reciprocity that distinguishes it from other sign systems’ (52), adding later that people possess ‘recipe knowledge of the workings of human relationships’ (57). In an interview with Silvia Dumitrache, Coe said: ‘My feeling now is that it doesn’t really matter what

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you write about, it’s how you write, truthfully and honestly and in a way which encourages people to think more about the world around them.’ Despite Richardson’s observation above, in effect, the grandfather’s words represent an embedded, if somewhat compressed narrative, one that has to be unpacked, alongside Rachel’s recounting of its impact upon her. Coe aestheticizes certain sociologically significances concerning narrative itself as praxis, most especially its embedded quality, but also the importance and potential unreliability of both the everyday and the commonly understood. Subtle, intrinsic truths circulate implicitly within all social interactions, signifying key aspects of the social order, including for instance how Alison’s mother, Val, becomes a victim of media and more widespread prejudice. In the second section, ‘The Comeback’, Val, once a member of a band with a solitary number one hit, serves as a counterpoint to the super-rich, epitomized by Rachel’s elite employers in Chelsea in the final section. She lives in Yardley, Birmingham where the government cuts overseen by the Chancellor of the Exchequer at Number 11 – which results in ‘This new buzzword – austerity’ (89), a reaction to the 2008 global financial meltdown caused by reckless bankers – has reduced her to travelling around Birmingham on an orbital bus, another number 11, for warmth, unlike the bankers or so she imagines. As Erica Wagner observes, ‘The number of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s official residence can never be far from the reader’s mind.’ Val finds curious solace in a reality television show where former celebrities survive in ‘the Australian jungle’ (91) (modelled on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!, which is shot in Springbrook National Park), on which Val is invited to appear. Radically disoriented she is humiliated deliberately to increase ratings. With an underlying sarcasm, in this hostile environment Coe’s narrative insists ‘Only Danielle, the endlessly lovely, the beautiful Danielle, seemed to be keeping her composure and her dignity’ (93). The contempt inherent in this observation is not for Danielle, rather for a sociocultural system producing a curious adulation for incoherent youngsters. This young glamour model typifies a media culture obsessed with the topographical self, making an idol from mere appearances. Danielle is later revealed to be so ill-educated as not to know the relationship of the moon to tides. Alison watches as her mother is pilloried by the press as a non-entity, trolled on Twitter and the internet. In ‘Is Martin Amis Right? Or Will Jeremy Corbyn Have the Last Laugh?’ Coe reflected: ‘The internet seems to be making our brains more binary, reducing everything to the polarised options of “Like” or “Dislike”, thereby thwarting the human impulse to entertain two contradictory responses at the same time, which seems to be one of the cornerstones of humour.’ Oblivious to



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her unpopularity, Val is edited to appear hostile. The initial exchange between the two is rendered as a script: DANIELLE: A bit of a damp squid, yeah … VAL: (after a beat) Squib, you mean. DANIELLE: What? VAL: That’s the expression – ‘damp squib.’ DANIELLE: Oh, I see. So you’re correcting me? VAL: Well, a lot of people get it wrong. (101)

Val faces several ordeals involving first devouring the insects she so loathes, and second crawling through a dark cave full of more insects despite her claustrophobia, nyctophobia and entomophobia (fear of enclosed spaces, darkness and insects) all of which she had kept from the production team. According to Vidler in Warped Space such conditions derive from a particular intensity inherent in urban existence, often with a spatial dimension (67, 77, 144). Later Val’s broadcast conversations are distorted so she seems more aggressive and callous as regards Danielle. Val plays to her fellow contestants the new song she has written, only for her performance, in which she had placed so much anticipation to revive her fortunes, to be cut. Val misreads her true role, for as Webb indicates ‘her willingness to collude with the programme-makers counts for nothing: she has not understood that she is the fall guy.’ The manufactured aggression evoked for Val by the series’ producers (for in reality Coe indicates that she empathizes with the ill-educated Danielle) is unsurprising since, according to Minna Aslama and Mervi Pantti, such reality shows involve consciously placing real people in unreal situations such as a specially-constructed house or wilderness, offer a context where extreme emotions may be considered normal and where emotional realism may be achieved even in the midst of the overly melodramatic setting and plotting of the show. Some argue that, while celebrating the ability to display spontaneous feelings is valorized in these discourses, contemporary culture is also wary of uncontrolled emotions, especially negative feelings. (170)

Val’s experience is worsened when the old boyfriend, whom she had taken up with again after many years, dumps her when she exits the show, having commenced a romance with one of the younger contestant’s aunt, Jacqui. The media’s fear of any genuine depth of visceral mutuality and expression and the excessive commercial manipulation of ideas are targets of Coe’s satire, but so too is the impulse in the face of the awfulness of the present-day, evoking nostalgia for a manufactured past. James Walton records Coe’s commentary on

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Corbynism, which represents ‘a nostalgic hankering for a politics that didn’t, or possibly couldn’t, ever exist.’ Walton suggests: The novel adds further layers of ambiguity, as Coe wonders whether the desire of old Lefties to return to a kinder, gentler Britain might sometimes be based on a simple longing for childhood.

Such a desire certainly underpins the retrospective narrative of Roger, the husband of Rachel’s widowed tutor at Oxford, Laura Harvey, whom she visits in the third section, ‘The Crystal Garden.’ As Alex Clark explains: Roger has died in bizarre circumstances while pursuing an obsession (a familiar enough predicament for a Coe character); hunting down the print of a short film, The Crystal Garden, that he remembers – or thinks he remembers – seeing on television as a child, in which a young boy comes across a magical walled garden filled with crystallised flowers and fountains. All he can really swear to is ‘an atmosphere, a feeling’, but it transpires that the film does exist, an interstitial filler excised from a long-forgotten TV schedule. His widow suspects his quest to have been motivated by the wish to return to life in the 1960s and 70s.

Both grieving and angry about her loss, her husband crushed to death in a storage locker by possessions poorly stacked years before by filmmaker Fred Goodman, aka Friedrich Güdemann, director of Der Garten aus Kristall. On one level Laura blames the halcyon delusion Roger harboured concerning his childhood, encapsulated by the quest for the film. She reacts by subjecting her own son to a regime of cold, formal parenting, verging on cruelty and while speaking to her son ‘Rachel was struck again by the note of severity and impatience in her voice’ (148). Laura justifies this and insists of her husband: ‘“The whole thing that defined the situation, and the whole beauty of it, as far as he was concerned, was passivity. Other people were making choices for him. People he trusted. He loved that”’ (176). Significantly, Rachel’s stay with Laura comes after she has submitted a favourite text, Thom Yorke’s song ‘Harrowdown Hill,’ concerning the death of David Kelly. Coe indicates early where culpability lay for the so-called ‘suicide’, and as Andrew Gilligan (Kelly being one of his sources, outed by government) wrote: ‘[O]ver the months and years that followed, my views and those of most of the country changed. […] [W]e had not realised that our government was capable of such folly and such crookedness,’ an epiphany shared by Rachel’s grandfather. Together Laura and she go in a curious twilight pilgrimage to the site of Kelly’s death, after which, while looking through Roger’s collection of taped films, Rachel encounters one with a commentary of sorts



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purportedly by Roger, which also renders a self-reflexive, sly critique for Number 11 itself and its relationship to its predecessor, What a Carve Up!: Rachel turned to the ‘W’ section and soon found What a Whopper. Lame British comedy, she read, about a bunch of beatniks who travel to Loch Ness to build a model of the monster. 1962. Sequel to What a Carve Up! (1961)? Not really. Two of the same actors. *Sequels which are not really sequels. Sequels where the relationship to the original is oblique, slippery. (152)

Similarly, his two novels are related only very loosely by sharing characters and similar satirical targets, both vilifying the Winshaws and the class they represent. Although they have very different self-reflexive styles, crucially both embrace an aspect of narrative found commonly in the lifeworld, narrative exchanges that are efficacious in persuading each other who we are or might be, and what we might believe about others (for better or worse). Appropriately enough the penultimate fourth section involves the newly instituted ‘Winshaw Prize’ which annually rewards the best of other prizes, irrespective of size or focus. Distortion of reality is once again at its core, especially the gutter journalism and blogging undertaken by Josephine Winshaw-Eaves. Even as a student running her blog, ‘Josephine began to campaign against what she called Britain’s “benefit culture”, which handed rewards to idlers, scroungers, loafers and cheats while “ordinary, hardworking people” (of whose silent, victimized existence it suited her to appear convinced) picked up the tab’ (194). More recently, much to the fury of her father, newspaper magnate Sir Peter Eaves, Josephine has been attacked by two stand-up comedians, Michael Parr and Raymond Turnbull, both subsequently murdered. These crimes are investigated by an aspiring intellectual policeman, Nathan Pilbeam, who advocates using a combination of ‘psychogeography’ (184) and analysing ‘the condition of England itself ’ (185) for criminal investigation. Pilbeam identifies a blog by ChristieMalry2 (making reference to one of B. S. Johnson’s characters, a mass-murdering sole terrorist seeking to avenge the injustices inflicted by capitalist society) who berates a specific and to ChristieMalry2 smug cultural threat of dissipating people’s genuine anger at rampant capitalist inequality with humour: That’s why it isn’t Josephine Winshaw-Eaves and her tiresome ilk who provide the greatest threat to social justice in Britain today. It’s the like of Mickey Parr, Ray Turnbull and Ryan Quirky, with their oh-so-predictable jibes in her direction which the fucking Radio 4-listening, guardian reading, Pinot-Grigiot swilling

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middleclass wankers who pay to see them in stadiums and tune in to their radio shows lap up and laugh at and then feel they have to do NOTHING except sit back with their arms folded and wait for the next crappy one-liner. (205)

The object of Coe’s satire might be ChristieMalry2’s ire, but equally targets the complacent subjects of that invective. Pilbeam tracks Ryan Quirky’s next gig to the Winshaw Prize award in Birmingham, where he invites Lucinda, a neighbour indifferent to his unrequited passion, the pair seated predictably enough at table eleven. In the final section of ‘What a Whopper!’, its title with obvious connotations to the film that so drew Roger’s attention, and according to Walton originally the ‘working title’ for the novel, one document reaffirms the perfidious nature of Josephine. In a vindictive and exploitative fashion she ruins the life of Alison through her provocative and aggressive gutter journalism, the young artist subsequently serving a prison sentence as a consequence of Josephine’s attack upon her as a one-legged, black, lesbian revealed as a ‘benefit cheat’. Such a quasimythic figure not only serves in popular parlance as the epitome of political correctness, which Coe parodies, but has already been revealed as the target in 1990 of Josephine’s mother, Hilary Winshaw, as epitomizing ‘the left-liberal establishment’s skewed value system’ (195), which she decried in a journalistic piece. Following in her mother’s footsteps Josephine works on a story defending ‘the Bedroom Tax’ (195) perceived by many as an outright and partisan attack on the poor. After meeting Alison’s girlfriend by chance at the Winshaw Prize Award Presentation, where the latter works as a waitress, Josephine deceives the artist by arranging an exhibition for her work, engineering an unexpected sale of several of her anti-austerity artworks. Subsequently Josephine incorporates Alison’s failure to notify the authorities about her minor windfall in her national newspaper column, which account is printed in full in Coe’s text, following a damning headline: THE ART OF DECEPTION BLACK DISABLED LESBIAN ON BENEFITS IS ACTUALLY BLACK, DISABLED LESBIAN BENEFITS CHEAT (291)

Comically, through this curious coincidence she has managed to refute her habitually foul-mouthed, dismissive father (her prime motivation in her public revelation which so affects Alison), a newspaper editor who had warned regarding an earlier draft: ‘You fucked up your argument in the last few paragraphs’ he told her. ‘A black one-legged lesbian on benefits? Even our readers know there is no such thing.



Neo-Gothic Minutiae and Mundanity in Jonathan Coe’s Satire, Number 11 197 They’re only worried about Muslims these days. Put your little straw woman in a niqab and then you’ve given them something to worry about.’ (195)

Such details are telling in several ways. As in Coe’s earlier sociopolitical satire, the author might well satirize such views, but in doing so he still acknowledges his acute awareness that such stories when told are believed and are efficacious, whether distorted, true or otherwise configured. He thereby reconfirms both the nature and potential power of narrative, for as Berger and Luckmann comment regarding everyday life, ‘Put simply, through language an entire world can be actualized at any moment’ (54), especially when fed into people’s expectations. After Rachel’s trip to South Africa to coach the Gunns’ Eton-educated son, so ironically he might appear less privileged and more normal for his interview at Oxford, she works as a tutor for their twin girls. Much of the final section concerns this super-rich family’s excavation for a huge mega-basement beneath their Chelsea mansion. A monetary divide is self-evident, evocative of a widening of class privilege that Coe indicates characterizes contemporary Britain. Wife and mother Madiana informs Rachel on her arrival as a new member of staff: ‘The staff side of the house and the family side of the house are quite separate’ (256). As Walton indicates in his review of the book, the building’s location on Turngreet Road is based on the actual Tregunter Road, a site of vast actual wealth and privilege. Her husband, Sir Gilbert, spends time abroad, and returns only occasionally. The extension work has been suspended after a worker was killed and Rachel ‘felt distinctly uneasy at the thought that, beneath the elegant, comfortable rooms of the Gunns’ house, a matter of mere feet from the kitchen she used every day, there yawned this pit, this fathomless void’ (257), which reinforces the earlier sense of Gothic dread. She watches Laura on television, interviewed about her book that quantifies ‘things that have traditionally been thought of as unquantifiable. Feelings, in other words. A sense of awe, a sense of wonder, even fear – in fact, fear in particular’ (259). In essence Laura enumerates key aspects of the sublime, an essential part of Gothic culture. Later in the final scenes with decidedly neo-Gothic overtones it appears that digging down eleven levels has unleashed a monstrous arachnid beast, the creature a mirror image of that on the curious card found during Alison and Rachel’s original stay with the latter’s grandparents. For those consumed by the beast perhaps Coe implies that Nietzsche’s aphorism found in Beyond Good and Evil might well be appropriate: ‘He who fights the monsters should watch it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze for too long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’

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(102). Ironically, as Beth Lau indicates, early Gothic satires warn of ‘the danger of an over-active imagination’ although ‘the terrifying scenes are so skilfully drawn and their [rational] explanations so feeble and long delayed, that the effect of horrors remains stronger than that of rational order’ (46, n39). At the end, faced by an appalling reality, Rachel escapes with the twins, which crescendo represents a return to Gothic terror, echoing the denouement of What a Carve Up!. Ironically that earlier novel’s key text, ‘The Winshaw Legacy, by Michael Owen’ (314) (edited posthumously by Hortensia Tonks), has been bought second-hand by Livia, Rachel’s dogwalking friend in an attempt to understand how Britain functions. Finally those killed by the monster in Number 11 are all morally reprehensible, again mirroring early Gothic fictions. The fate of those devoured offers an answer to Olson’s question: ‘Is then our terror of the uncanny actually our shock over witnessing the distorted image of our own desire …?’ (xxiii), since their own greed condemns them. As Andrew Smith explains, a ‘key aspect in any analysis of a Gothic text concerns its representation of “evil”. The demonization of particular types of behavior makes visible the covert political views of the text’ (3), although in Coe’s case such attitudinal responses appear to be explicit enough (although one wonders if another layer lurks beneath the surface, a doubt about the very liberal humanism he appears to avow, but which always remains so utterly powerless). When Rachel, for instance, encounters the odious Freddie, he admits his father attended the same prep school as the Chancellor, insisting this system of patronage ought not to alter. ‘Rachel raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Oh my God. This country really hasn’t changed at all in the last hundred years, has it?”’ (301). Smith also comments: ‘In Kristeva’s terms, what a society chooses to abject or jettison tells us a lot about how that society sees itself, and this process can also be read archeologically to make sense of the historically and culturally specific manifestations of “terror” that are central to the Gothic’ (8). In Number 11 Coe’s warning about the real world that he critiques concerns not only the rampant individualistic greed that has already punished so many in the twenty-first century, but the naturalization of the privileged existence of a ruling class and avowal of its interests (with economic or political sway). Such power can only be breached by a new form of terror, which the monstrous spider symbolizes, concerning which horror we should perhaps be terrified for posterity. Of the earlier work What a Carve Up! Pamela Thurschwell claims: ‘Coe’s farce is designed to enrage’ (29), yet this book is far more sober, and any residual farce culminates in trepidation and dread. That Coe departs from his obsessive minutiae of the quotidian at the end of Number 11, descending into



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the nightmarish, the apparently unbelievable, is highly apt. Such ambivalence derives from the very form with which he concludes the text, for as Smith states, ‘The very unreality of the Gothic text becomes, paradoxically, the special place for the uncanny’ (15).

Works cited Aslama, Minna, and Pantti Mervi. ‘Talking Alone.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 9 (2) 2006: 167–84; http://10.1177/1367549406063162.hal-00571504. Berger, Arthur Asa. Narratives in Popular Culture, Media, and Everyday Life. Thousand Oaks and London: Sage, 1997. Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1971 [1966]. Clark, Alex. ‘Number 11 by Jonathan Coe: Review – A Sequel to What a Carve Up!’ The Guardian. 11 November 2015: N.Pag.; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ nov/11/number-11-jonathan-coe-review-what-a-carve-up. Coe, Jonathan. ‘Is Martin Amis Right? Or Will Jeremy Corbyn Have the Last Laugh?’ The Guardian. 30 October 2015: N.Pag.; http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/ oct/30/martin-amis-jeremy-corbyn-humour-jonathan-coe. ——. Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness. London: Viking, 2015. ——. What a Carve Up! London: Viking, 1994. Dumitrache, Silvia. ‘It Becomes Harder To Make Jokes About Political Injustice. Interview with Jonathan Coe.’ Bookaholic.ro. 26 August 2013: N.Pag.; http:// www.bookaholic.ro/it-becomes-harder-to-make-jokes-about-political-injusticeinterview-with-jonathan-coe.html. Gilligan, Andrew. ‘The Betrayal of Dr David Kelly, 10 Years On.’ The Telegraph. 21 July 2013: N.Pag.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10192271/The-betrayal-ofDr-David-Kelly-10-years-on.html. Guignery, Vanessa. Jonathan Coe. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2002. Hogle, Jerrold E. ‘Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture’. In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 1–20. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Howard, Jacqueline. Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Lau, Beth. ‘Madeline at Northanger Abbey: Keats’s Antiromances and Gothic Satire.’ Journal of English and Germanic Philology 84 (1) January 1985: 30–50. Mengham, Rod, and Philip Tew. ‘General Introduction.’ In British Fiction Today, edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham, xiv–xxi. London and New York: Continuum, 2006.

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Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Jonathan Coe. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2016. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin Books, 1990 [1886]. ——. Dawn: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality; Volume 5. Translated by Brittain Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Olson, Danel. ‘Introduction’. In 21st-Century Gothic: Great Gothic Novels since 2000, edited by Danel Olson, xxi–xxxiii. London and Toronto: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Richardson, Nick. ‘Nate of the Station’. London Review of Books 38(5) 3 March 2016: 25–26; https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/nick-richardson/nate-of-the-station. Smith, Andrew. Gothic Literature, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013 [2007]. Tew, Philip. ‘Jonathan Coe.’ In Writers Talk, edited by Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson, 35–55. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Thurschwell, Pamela. ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe.’ In British Fiction Today, edited by Philip Tew and Rod Mengham, 28–39. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: MIT Press, 2012. ——. Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000. Wagner, Erica. ‘Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 is a Bitingly Dark Portrait of Society.’ New Statesman. 30 November 2015: N.Pag.; http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/ books/2015/11/jonathan-coes-number-11-bitingly-dark-portrait-society. Walton, James. ‘Jonathan Coe: Poking Fun at Broken Britain.’ The Telegraph. 1 November 2015: N.Pag.; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/jonathan-coeinterview-number-eleven/ Webb, Kate. ‘A Poke in the Eye.’ Times Literary Supplement. 27 November 2015: N.Pag.; https://katewebb.wordpress.com/2015/12/06/jonathan-coe-number-11-tls/

Afterword: An Interview with Philip Tew on Number 11 Jonathan Coe

The following is an interview conducted by email between Jonathan Coe and Philip Tew in March/April 2017. Tew: What made you return to the Winshaw family as the focal point for Number 11? Coe: In my head, the Winshaw family never went away – nor could they. After all, they’re a metaphor for the ruling elite of neo-liberal Britain, and so it looks like they’ll always be with us from now on. Because the satirical focus of Number 11 was always going to be similar to the one in What a Carve Up!, I couldn’t have imagined writing the book without resurrecting them. Tew: You include several strands concerned with celebrity culture and reality television. Do you think these are critical in shaping the contemporary British zeitgeist, especially among the young? Coe: There was an element of that at the back of my mind, but the real theme of the second story, ‘The Comeback’, is how reality is distorted and reframed by the most irresponsible sections of the media. The very phrase ‘reality TV’ is dishonest because these shows, of course, offer such a heavily edited narrative while pretending to show real life – making them much more dishonest, in my opinion, than a work of fiction. Like many of the elements of Number 11, ‘The Comeback’ now looks slightly different in the light of the dramatic events of 2016. Trumpism, in particular, has alerted us to just what a powerful weapon it can be when those in power wilfully distort reality to suit their own ends, and brush off the truth as ‘fake news’. Authoritarianism rests on an existential programme – an assault on truth itself – and that’s the real concern behind this part of the novel.

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Tew: There are many neo-Gothic elements in the novel, which I presume this was a conscious aesthetic decision. If so, how does this work in such as satire? And does it function differently from the Gothic setting at the end of  What a Carve Up!? Coe: I re-read What a Carve Up! before embarking upon Number 11 (or at least skimmed through it) and one of the things that struck me was the comic energy behind the last 80 pages or so – the sequence where Michael shows up at Winshaw Towers and the Winshaw family members get bumped off one by one. It brought back memories of the time when I wrote that section, in a fever of enjoyment, in just two or three weeks in the reading room of the old British Library in Bloomsbury, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t really written anything in that vein since. Parody-Gothic was the end-point of What a Carve Up! – it’s the genre Michael finds himself inhabiting when he finally enters the world of the Winshaw family – and since we are now all citizens of that world, it seemed appropriate that the same genre should be the starting-point of Number 11. Only this time, in the fifth story, ‘What a Whopper’, I push it to a further extreme, with even more fantasy elements and references to British B-movies of the 60s and 70s. Tew: Number 11 considers the huge disparities in wealth in contemporary Britain, represented by those such as the Gunns. Do you think the mega-wealthy are really so divorced from everyday life as your characters? Coe: The world of the super-rich is very opaque to most of us. One of the themes of Number 11 is invisibility – Rachel’s boyfriend is writing his thesis on H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, after all – and while we are used to thinking of some people in society as ‘invisible’ (undocumented migrants, people who have fallen through the cracks of the welfare system, etc.) we talk less about the ways in which the super-rich are adept at shielding themselves from the public gaze. The Gunn family in Number 11 travel by private jet, have chauffeur-driven cars with tinted one-way windows, and live in a walled enclave which requires a security code to gain entry. Not to mention their eleven-storey basement extension, which will render their lives literally subterranean. They live in their own private world – they live amongst us, but they are not really members of society at all. I was curious about what it might be like to be a child brought up in that world. I remember reading a newspaper article about a young boy, seven or eight years old, sitting in the first class cabin of a plane with his father, watching the other passengers taking their seats and saying to his father, ‘Why are all these people getting on our plane?’ Every other flight he’d taken had been on a private jet, he



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didn’t understand the concept of a commercial flight. This was what inspired my description of the relationship between Rachel and the two young Gunn children she has been hired to teach. She takes them to a theme park for the day but the thing they find really mind-blowing is travelling home on the train afterwards, surrounded by members of the ordinary public they never usually see. Tew: It seems to me that Number 11 incorporates an understanding of how important narratives are in shaping our lives and opinions. Do you think they are? Coe: Yes, I think this has always been important – but what is new, in the last few years, is that it’s becoming obvious how difficult we now find it to deal with narratives that are at all nuanced, or complex. Perhaps under the pressure of so many different narratives coming at us from different media, all competing for our attention, we are developing an addiction to narratives that are simple and unambiguous, with resolutions that are easy to digest. Thus in the ‘Comeback’ section of Number 11, the programme makers are not interested in the true, complicated story (‘older woman shows herself as she really is, sometimes nice, sometimes a bit impatient, and develops an unsteady friendship with a younger woman’) which they jettison in favour of a false but compelling one (‘old witch torments and bullies a beautiful young princess’). We’ve seen the consequence of this preference for simple narratives over complicated ones recently in the victory for Brexit. A complicated but true story about the EU (‘flawed, arrogant organisation, badly in need of reform, makes international trade and co-operation easier’) was rejected in favour of a much simpler one (‘meddling, tyrannical bureaucrats rob a once proud nation of its independence and selfesteem’). It’s but one step from this to denouncing any story which seems too complex or too uncomfortable as ‘fake news’ a la Trump. Tew: You use the death of Dr David Kelly as a key moment in the ideological relationship of our government to the nation and the people’s mistrust of the people in power. Do you think such politicians are still quite so manipulative and untrustworthy? Coe: I wasn’t trying to make a generic point about the untrustworthiness of politicians (which I think is exaggerated, on the whole) – I wanted, instead, to try and choose a recent historical moment at which the bonds of trust between politicians and the public had been decisively weakened. The death of Dr Kelly seemed to fit the bill: remembering that I was writing from the point of view of two eight-year-old girls, who were not likely to be reading the newspapers

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or following the unfolding war in Iraq, but would probably remember a TV news story focusing on a single, dramatic event. I think Dr Kelly’s death was the moment at which many people decided that something rotten had entered the state of the UK. The comment about Tony Blair made by Rachel’s (Conservativesupporting) grandfather – ‘He’s got blood on his hands, now’ – was one which I heard expressed by quite a few people at the time. From that point on, the British public were even less inclined to trust their politicians than they had been before (the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009 was another watershed moment, not mentioned in the novel) and gradually this has led to a debilitating cynicism which again influenced the national mood when it came to the Brexit referendum. A sort of ‘plague on everybody’s house’ attitude. Tew: Was the extended focus on young women a conscious choice? If so, why? And, does Alison represent a contemporary everywoman? Coe: I prefer to write from the point of view of women because I find it easier. I don’t know why that is: perhaps it’s because women are more rational and less emotional than men, so they feel like more reliable carriers of a story.

Index Abraham, Nicolas  173 Abramović, Marina  178 agency  42, 55, 73, 104, 151, 152–3 lack of  11, 25, 152 agribusiness  3, 60, 62, 70, 82 Airplane! (film)  35 alchemists Faustian myth/tradition  144–6, 153 America  75, 91, 120, 130 attack on Libya  10, 11, 23, 24 military adventurism  23, 134 American Dream  148, 153 Amis, Martin  192 Money  68 Anglo-American novel  2 anti-hero  11, 24–8, 138, 153 anxiety  73, 88, 128, 151–2, 189 apathy  14–15, 72, 127–30, 132–5, 137–8 Armageddon, financial  144 arms dealing  3–4, 9, 19, 24, 71, 75, 82 Al Yamamah deal  4 Phythian, Mark  3–4 Thatcher, Mark  3–4, 19 n.2 United Nations arms embargoes  4 Aslama, Minna  193 Auden, W. H.  132 ‘Notes on the Comic’  132 authoritarianism  201 austerity  153, 169, 192, 196. See also banking crisis (2008) Bakhtin, Mikhail  69 Ballard, J. G.  88, 92 n.16 Crash  88, 92 n.16 banking crisis (2008)  141–4, 153, 187, 192 Barthes, Roland  117 Bauman, Zygmunt  148, 151–2 Liquid Modernity  148, 151–2 Bell, Steve  68

Benjamin, Walter  87, 92 n.13, 156–7, 163–4 ‘The Storyteller. Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’  156–7, 163–4 Bennett, Alan  46 Berger, Arthur Asa  190 Berger, Peter L  190, 191, 197 Bergson, Henri  118 Berthin, Christine, Gothic Hauntings. Melancholy Crypts and Textual Ghosts  173 Beverley Minster  172, 188 Bewes, Rodney  98 Big Bang (1986 UK financial market deregulation)  127, 143–5 Billy Liar (film)  98 Blanchot, Maurice, The Space of Literature  173 bio-power  149, 151, 152, 153 Birmingham  1, 22, 96, 109, 111–12, 115–16, 143, 192, 196. See also British Leyland, Longbridge plant IRA pub bombings  96, 111, 135 King Edward’s School  111 Yardley  192 Birmingham School, the  14, 110, 115–16 Blair, Tony  5, 101, 125–7, 128, 132, 171, 204 election victory (1997)  128 inaugural ‘Leader’s Speech’  128 New Labour ‘Third Way’  14, 125–7, 128, 129 Bolam, James  98 Bond, James  162–3 Bond archetype  16, 162–3 classic plot  163 Booker Prize  12 Bourdieu, Pierre  113, 151 Bourmeau, Sylvain  171, 180 Bradford, Richard  110, 120

206

Index

Brexit. See EU referendum (2016) Britain  xiii, 3, 5, 6, 11, 13–15, 49, 52, 77, 82, 90, 95–9, 100–2, 107, 111–13, 116, 121–2, 125–9, 135, 142–4, 153, 165, 171, 172–5, 185, 191, 194–5, 197, 198, 201–2 British Leyland, Longbridge plant  111–12, 143 British Library, Bloomsbury  202 British Library, Euston, Manuscripts Reading Room  xi Bromsgrove  xiii Brooker, Joseph  xii, 11–12, 68 Broomfield, Nick, Ghosts  173 Burke, Edmund  186 Bush, George H. W. (US president)  18, 23–4, 76 Butler, Judith Bodies that Matter  14 construct  6, 21 gender fluidity  4, 5 Campbell, Alistair  190 Canary Wharf  144–5 capitalism  101–3, 141–4, 146–9, 151–2, 153 global  15, 70, 141, 143, 149, 151–2, 153 Carroll, Lewis, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass  176 Carroll, Noël  73–4 Carry On films  70 Caruth, Cathy, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History  172 Cavalcanti, Alberto  180 n.1 Dead of Night  17, 176, 177, 180 n.1 Cavallaro, Dani, The Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear  175, 176 Central Cinema, Weston-super-Mare  26, 83 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies  115–16. See also Birmingham School Chelsea, London  171, 179, 192, 197 Tregunter Road  171, 197 Chinese migrant workers  173–4, 178, 190 deaths of, Morecambe Bay  173

Christie, Agatha  7–8 Hercule Poirot  7–8 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd  7–8 City of London  144–5 Clark, Alex  187, 194 Clark, John R., The Modern Satiric Grotesque and its Traditions  138 Clarke, Dylan  121 Clarke, John  110 The Clash  109, 121 ‘White Riot’  109 claustrophobia  193 Clement, Dick and Ian La Frenais  13, 95, 98, 100, 105–6 The Likely Lads (sitcom, 1964–6)  97–9, 102, 103, 105–6 Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (sitcom, 1973–75)  95, 97, 99–100, 101, 102, 103, 104–6 Cocteau, Jean, Orpheus  176 Coe, Jonathan 1980s  2, 6, 10, 12, 39, 59, 63, 67–8, 70, 75, 85, 95, 99, 102–4, 110, 116, 122, 141–3, 170 The Accidental Woman  1, 11, 22-23, 24, 31, 33, 34, 36-38, 40-41, 42, 46, 48-49 Duckworth  1 anti-Thatcherism  xiii, 6, 10, 12, 52–4, 56–8, 69, 72, 74–6 The Closed Circle  11, 14–15, 24, 135–8, 142–3, 169 coincidence, neo-Dickensian  187 comedy  7, 8, 11, 12–13, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 35, 59, 67–71, 74, 75–7, 95–102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 114–15, 126, 129, 132, 133–4, 137–8, 159, 160, 161–2, 167 n.1, 169, 170, 174–6, 177–9, 180, 186, 195, 196–7, 202 ‘“Comic” Novels’  77‘ Diary of an Obsession’  170 domestic violence, theme  11, 22–3, 32–3, 36–7 The Dwarves of Death  11, 22–7, 34 ‘Eleven Sources of Inspiration’  178–9, 180 Expo 58  8, 11, 16, 17, 35, 41, 45, 155–7, 167 n.1, 170, 174, 176

Index farce  7, 15, 24, 68, 129, 133, 163, 178, 187, 198 father  7, 10, 191 Conservative supporter  10, 191 Gothic  2, 9, 16–17, 70, 77, 169–77, 179–80, 186–90, 197–9, 202 Parody-Gothic  202 terror  132, 152, 173, 188, 198 The House of Sleep  xi, 1, 13–14, 17, 21, 27, 29, 86–7, 95, 97, 99, 102–4, 105, 106–7, 110, 141, 170 Prix Médicis Étranger (1998)  1 ‘I am Less Convinced that Satire is Good for Democracy’  177 interviews  xiii, 2, 7, 10, 18, 77, 132, 155, 169, 170–1, 175, 180, 191–2, 201–4 ‘Is Martin Amis Right? Or Will Jeremy Corbyn Have the Last Laugh?’  192 on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels  68, 159 King Edward’s School, Birmingham  111 ‘Laughing Out Loud with Jonathan Coe: A Conversation’  xiii, 10, 169 Lickey, south-west Birmingham  1, 22 Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson  xi, xii, 1, 3, 117 Samuel Johnson Non-fiction Prize (2005)  xi, 1 The Lion, comic strip  2 madness, theme  xiii, 6, 18, 52, 75–6, 161, 171, 177, 180 Marginal Notes, Doubtful Statements  68, 75, 76, 77, 156, 159, 170, 174 Moscow  52–3 Mother  7 nostalgia  10, 13, 16–17, 44, 45, 72, 82-83, 89–90, 104, 107, 170, 177, 193–4 limits of  180 Number 11, or Tales That Witness Madness  5, 9, 12, 16–18, 34 n.1, 46–7, 77, 82, 153, 169–80, 185–99, 201–4 ‘The Paradox of Satire’  75, 76, 156 ‘Pentatonic’  158, 164, 165–6

207 The Peer Group  2, 25 ‘Perhaps Margaret Thatcher’s Death Will Bring Us Clarity’  10, 51 prizes  xi, 21, 31 The Rain Before it Falls  12, 47, 48, 169, 170 ‘A Return to Grassroots’  xiii The Rotters’ Club  1, 11, 12, 13, 14–15, 21, 25, 30, 38–9, 46, 52, 95, 96–7, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 109–19, 120–2, 125–9, 132–6, 141, 142–3, 169 Premio Literario Arcebispo Juan de San Clemente (2004)  1 sadness, theme  xii, 11–12, 35–49 satire  xii, 1, 6–7, 12, 14–16, 35, 49, 52, 68–9, 75–6, 77, 105–6, 110, 114, 125–38, 156–7, 163, 177, 178, 180, 185, 186, 187–8, 191, 193–8, 201, 202 satiric collusion  14, 127 ‘Satire and Sympathy: Some Consequences of Intrusive Narrative in Tom Jones and Other Comic Novels’  129 ‘Sinking Giggling into the Sea’  76, 130–1, 177 The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim  11, 14–15, 30, 141–53, 160, 169 Terry Eagleton, ‘Theydunnit’  82 Thatcherism (see Thatcher, Margaret) A Touch of Love  11, 22–4, 27–31, 32, 34, 39–40, 46, 141, 169 Trinity College, Cambridge University, English student  1 Wanda and the Willy Warmers, feminist cabaret group  2 Warwick University, studying for doctorate  1, 10, 22, 27 thesis on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones  28 Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson, with Philip Tew and Jordan, Julia  xi What a Carve Up! or The Winshaw Legacy  xi, xiii, 1–13, 18, 19 n.1, 19 n.2, 21–4, 26, 29, 33–4, 34 n.1, 35, 39, 41, 52–3, 55, 57–63,

208

Index

67–77, 81–8, 90, 95, 102, 104, 107, 110, 125, 129, 133, 141–2, 170–2, 177, 178, 180, 185, 187, 188, 189, 191, 195, 198, 202 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (1996)  21, 26, 27, 28, 33–4, 76, 133 Cohen, Nick  52 Cohen, Phil  110, 115 comedy  7, 8, 11, 12–13, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27, 35, 59, 67–71, 74, 75–7, 95–102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 114–15, 126, 129, 132, 133–4, 137–8, 159, 160, 161–2, 167 n.1, 169, 170, 174–6, 177–9, 180, 186, 195, 196–7, 202 Connor, Kenneth  39, 70, 73, 86, 110 Conservative Party election rallies 1983  6 2001  70 Corbyn, Jeremy  192 Corbynism  193–4 Countdown (television programme)  45–6 counterculture  114, 118, 119–20 Courtenay, Tom  98 Crichton, Charles, Dead of Night  17, 176–7 Currie, Mark, The Unexpected: Narrative Temporality and the Philosophy of Surprise  151 Davis, Colin, ‘État présent. Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms’  173 Dearden, Basil, Dead of Night (British horror film)  180 n.1 debt  145–6, 151, 171, 192 defamiliarization (ostranenie)  186 derivatives  145 Derrida, Jacques, Spectres de Marx  173–4 detective fiction  7–8, 74, 169, 187 Di Bernardo, Francesco  15–16 ‘The Impossibility of Precarity’  147 Dickens, Charles  25, 28 neo-Dickensian coincidence  187 Downing Street  190 Number 11  176 Dumitrache, Silvia  77, 191–2 East End, London  115–16 Eaton, Shirley  39, 62, 73, 75, 84, 85, 86, 110

Eco, Umberto, ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’  155–6 Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets  30 ‘The Waste Land’  118 Elton, Ben  68 entomophobia  193 Eton (public school)  197 EU referendum (2016)  203, 204 Expo 58 exhibition (1958 Brussels World’s Fair)  16, 17, 157 Facebook  149 ‘fake news’  201, 203. See also Trump, Donald The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (television series)  7, 100–1 farce  7, 9, 24, 68, 129, 133–4, 178, 187, 198–9 Faust Faustian myth  15, 144, 145–6, 153 Mephistophelean figure  15, 145–6 Feinstein, Andrew ‘Through the Barrel of a Gun: Can information from the Global Arms Trade Contribute to Genocide Prevention?’  4, 5 Fielding, Henry  1, 28, 31, 129 Fielding, Steven, ‘Comedy and Politics: The Great Debate’  131 Financial Crisis. See banking crisis (2008) financialization  15, 151 Finger, Barry, ‘Financialization and Profitability’  151 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  25 Flahault, François, Malice  5, 6, 9, 18 flexible accumulation  141, 142 flexible production  147 Fordism  147 Fordist production/economy  15, 141, 142, 147 Forster, E. M.  119 Foreign Affairs Select Committee  190 Foucault, Michel, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979  151 Francis, Freddie  175–6, 179 Tales from the Crypt  175 Tales That Witness Madness  169, 175, 185

Index Franju, Georges, Le Sang des Bêtes  12, 71 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’  39 Friedman, Milton  122 Frith, Simon  120 futility  10, 25, 30, 138, 151–2, 153 Galford, Ellen, Queendom Come  68 Gammon, Earl and Wigan, Duncan, ‘Libidinal Political Economy: A Psycho-Social Analysis of Financial Violence’  145, 146 Ganteau, Jean-Michel, ‘Trauma and the Ethics of Vulnerability: Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs’  174 Gekko, Gordon  143 gender  12, 23, 52–64, 69, 104, 105, 106 ambiguity and performativity  27, 53–60, 64 n.2 construct  53, 58, 60 fluidity  12, 53–60, 63–4 n.1, 106 general election/s  53 1979  97 1987  144 2010  xiii 2015  144 Genesis (rock band)  120 Gentle Giant (rock band)  120 ghosts  161, 171, 173, 188, 198. See also spectral Gothic  198 Gibson, William  90 n.1 Neuromancer  82–3 Giddens, Anthony, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy  125 Gilbert, Jeremy, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism  147 Gilligan, Andrew  190, 194 Gilroy, Paul, ‘The Closed Circle of Britain’s Postcolonial Melancholia’  127–8 global capitalism  15, 141, 145, 149, 151, 153 rise of  15 global elite  147 The Good Life (television series)  97 Gothic horror  16–17, 77, 169–71, 174–7

209

Gray, Alasdair, 1982 Janine  42, 68 Greene, Graham  8, 161 Our Man in Havana  158, 167 n.1 Greer, Germaine  56–7 Guignery, Vanessa ‘“Colonel Mustard, in the Billiard Room, with the Revolver”: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! as a Postmodern Whodunit’  7, 8 interviews with  xii–xiii, 136, 186 Jonathan Coe  xii–xiii, 69, 102, 102, 127, 187 Gulf Wars First  18, 23–4, 40, 73, 76 Second  11, 24 Gunn, Gilbert, What a Whopper!  175, 178, 180 n.2, 195, 196, 202 Gutkowski, Emanuela, ‘An “Investigation in Pragmatics”: Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’  7–8 Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time  38 Hadley, Louisa and Elizabeth Ho, Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture  142 Haley, Arthur  7 Hamer, Robert, Dead of Night  17, 176, 177 Hancock, Tony  101 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, Empire  152 Harpham, Geoffrey, ‘The Grotesque: First Principles’  179 Harrowdown Hill. See Kelly, David Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism  141, 142, 147 haunting  144, 158, 169–80 Have I Got News for You (television series)  131 Head, Dominic  110 Hebdige, Dick  110, 120–1 Hebrus  189 Heldreth, Leonard G., ‘Variations On The Double Motif in Ventriloquist Films: The Great Gabbo, Dead of Night and Magic’  177

210

Index

Highmore, Ben  186 Hitchcock, Alfred The Lady Vanishes  167 n.1, 176 Psycho  174, 189 Ho, Elizabeth. See Hadley, Louisa Hogle, Jerrold E.  186 Honneth, Axel, ‘Recognition as Ideology’  152 Horner, Avril and Sue Zlosnik, Gothic and the Comic Turn  175 horror  12, 63, 67–74, 76–7, 132, 170–2, 175–80, 198–9 films  3, 12–13, 16–17, 69, 70–1, 76, 89, 91 n.8, 169–71, 173, 174–5, 179–80 Howard, Jacqueline  187–8 Hunt, Leon  100, 105 Hussein, Saddam  3, 71, 72, 76–7 Hurricane Mark 1 (aircraft)  9 Hutcheon, Linda A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction  171 The Politics of Postmodernism  157 Hutchison, Colin Reaganism, Thatcherism and the Social Novel  2, 5, 6, 11, 18 social fiction  2, 54 hyper-individualism  149, 150 hyper-reality  150 I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here!  192 Springbrook National Park  192 immateriality  143, 146, 147 immaterial labour  143 industrialization  15, 142 de-industrialization  142 Fordist  142 internet  192 intertextuality  163 IRA (Irish Republican Army)  111, 116, 134 Iraq  70, 71, 172, 190–1, 203–4 invasion of  5, 11, 18, 24, 76, 129, 169 Wars  5, 11, 23–4, 129, 134, 135 Jackson, Pat The Ghoul (film)  70, 87, 92 What a Carve Up! (film, 1961)  170

James, Sid  70, 75, 110 Jameson, Fredric Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism  70 The Antinomies of Realism  88 John, Elton  96 Johnson, Boris  131 Johnson, B. S.  xi, xii, 16, 31, 117, 136, 177, 195 Albert Angelo  31 Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry  16, 31, 177, 195 Jordan, Julia  11, 169. See also Coe, Jonathan ‘Andrew O’Hagan & Jonathan Coe on the State-of-the-Nation Novel’  169 Joyce, James  11, 169 Dubliners  118 Ulysses  119 Kansas (rock band)  120 Kaplan, E. Ann, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature  173 Kelly, David  5, 16–17, 169, 172–3, 190–1, 195–5, 203–4 British Ministry of Defence  5 death of (apparent suicide)  172–3, 190–1, 194, 203 former weapons inspector, United Nations Special Commission in Iraq  5, 172 Harrowdown Hill  5, 173 Hutton Report (2010)  5 King, Frank, The Ghoul  70, 87, 92 n.12, 170 King Edward’s School, Birmingham  111 Kittler, Friedrich, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter  86 Kneale, Nigel The Abominable Snowman  179 Quatermass and the Pit  179 Kristeva, Julia  198 Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia  116 La Frenais, Ian. See Clement, Dick Lane, Richard  151–3, 160, 173

Index

211

labour  15, 142–3, 146–8, 151–3, 173 labour relations  143, 146–8 Labour Party  xiii, 60, 75, 101, 102, 121 New Labour  14, 101, 102, 125–7, 128, 142 Lagrange, Joseph-Louis  151 Laing, David  115 Lanchester, John, ‘Bankocracy: Lehman brothers’  144 Larkin, Philip  12, 41–2, 45, 48 ‘Afternoons’  41–2, 45 ‘Church Going’  48 Lau, Beth  188, 198 Lawrence, D. H.  119 Lewis, Matthew  172 Libya, American bombing raid on (15 April 1986)  10, 11, 23–4 RAF Lakenheath  10 The Likely Lads (film)  100 The Likely Lads (television series, 1964–6)  97–9, 102–3, 105–6 liquid society  148 Livingstone, Ken, You Can’t Say That: Memoirs  19 n.2 Loach, Ken  175 Loch Ness (film, sequel to What a Carve Up!)  178–9, 195 Loch Ness Monster  179 London  1–2, 22, 24, 25, 43, 44, 51–2, 81, 109, 115, 116, 121, 144–5, 150, 157, 169, 176, 179 literary establishment  2 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (film)  98 Longbridge. See British Leyland Love Thy Neighbour (television series)  101 Luckhurst, Roger  134 and John Marks  90 n.1 The Trauma Question  39 Luckmann, Thomas  190, 191, 197

May, Will  122 Mengham, Rod and Philip Tew, ‘General Introduction’  188 Mephistopheles  15, 145–6 metafiction  17, 28–9, 31, 34, 166, 169, 178–9 migrants, undocumented  173, 202 Miller, Arthur, Death of a Salesman  148, 153 Minder (television series)  101 money-economy  15, 144, 146, 147 Morecambe, Eric and Ernie Wise  35, 95–7 Morecambe and Wise Show, The  95, 96–7, 98, 107 Moseley, Merritt  11 Understanding Jonathan Coe  12, 13, 106–7, 180, 186 Mullan, John  21 music  2, 14, 24, 25–6, 33, 96, 109–22, 135–6, 145, 163, 164 Muslims  197 niqabs  197

Macan, Edward  118–20 McGregor, Jon, Even the Dogs  174 McNay, Lois, The Misguided Search for the Political  151 Mann, Thomas, Dr Faustus  145 Marx, Karl  173 Capital  12, 70

O'Brien, Flann, At Swim-two-Birds  32–3 The Office (television series)  101 Olson, Daniel  189–90, 198 Only Fools and Horses (television series)  101 On the Buses (television series)  101 Orpheus  176, 189

narrativity  16, 157 National Front  114, 128 Negri, Antonio. See Hardt, Michael New Labour. See Labour Party NHS (National Health Service)  71, 73, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich  185–6 Beyond Good and Evil  197–8 Dawn  185 Nietzschean monstrosity  185, 197–8 9/11  132, 134, 135, 137 NME (New Musical Express)  109 Nobbs, David  7, 100 The Death of Reginald Perrin  7 Not the Nine O’Clock News (television series)  114 nouveau roman  37 nyctophobia  193

212

Index

Orton, Joe  12, 68 Ostranenie. See defamiliarization Oxford University  36, 58, 60, 150, 178, 179, 187, 194, 197 Pantti, Mervi  193 Parker, Emma  8, 10, 12–13, 19 parody  15, 114, 116, 134, 137, 155, 159, 161–3, 165–6, 174, 202 parody-Gothic  202 Pelmanism  189 people-traffickers  190 Petit, Chris, Robinson  87, 88, 89 Phythian, Mark, ‘“Batting for Britain”: British arms sales in the Thatcher years’  3–4. See also arms dealing Pink Floyd (rock band)  113, 120 Poe, Edgar Allen, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’  72 popular culture  9, 14, 17, 110, 170, 171, 175, 178, 180 American  130 portmanteau films  17, 170, 175, 176 post-industrial era  15, 119, 142, 143–4, 148–9 casualization of labour  15, 146–7, 148 post-millennial context/period  14–15, 125, 128–9, 133, 134, 138, 188 postmodernism  70, 88, 171 post-war consensus  3 Powell, Michael, Gone to Earth  170 Prado-Pérez, José Ramón  16 ‘‘There’s a Lot to Be Said for Making People Laugh’: The Grotesque as Political Subversion in Jonathan Coe’s Fiction’  179–80 precariat  15–16, 141–53 precarity  15–16, 102, 107, 142, 146–7, 151 progressive (prog) rock  14, 109–10, 114–17, 118–20, 122 Psycho (film). See Hitchcock, Alfred psychogeography  195 PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder)  111 punk rock  96, 121 Punter, David, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day  174

Radcliffe, Ann  171 Radford, Basil  176 Reagan, Ronald  3, 4, 5, 23, 40 Reaganite economic policies  2 reality television  16–17, 169, 186, 192, 201. See also I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! Reynolds, Simon  90 Richardson, Dorothy  118 Richardson, Nick  191, 192 Robbins, Harold  7 Roos, Jerome, ‘Where is the Protest? A Reply to Graeber and Lapavitsas’  151 Rush (rock band)  120 Sabin, Roger  121 salariat  147 satire  xii, 1, 6–7, 12, 14–16, 35, 49, 52, 68–9, 75–6, 77, 105–6, 110, 114, 125–38, 156–7, 163, 177, 178, 180, 185, 186, 187–8, 191, 193–8, 201, 202 satiric collusion  14, 127 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (film)  98 Saudi royal family  4 Sayle, Alexei  68 Scala Cinema, London  85 Second World War  6, 15, 75, 142 Seed, David, ‘Spy Fiction’  163 Self, Will, Dorian  68 self-blame  152 self-policing  152 self-reflexivity  162, 166 Shakespeare, William Comedy of Errors  68 Othello  112 Sherman, Gary, Death Line  179 Sinclair, Richard  109 Smith, Andrew  198–9 Smith, Jacqui (Labour MP, Redditch)  xiii social exclusion  152 social suffering  151, 153 Soviet Union fall of  147 propaganda  159 Soviet bloc  163 South Africa  19 n.2, 197

Index The Spectator  122 spectral/spectrality  3, 17, 90, 170, 171, 172, 173–4, 177, 179, 180, 189, 191 Spitting Image (television series)  52, 58, 68, 75 spy/spies  16, 158–9, 163 spy fiction  16, 157–8, 160–3, 167 n.1 Standing, Guy, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class  146–7 state-of-the-nation novel  137, 138, 169 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), The Red and the Black  25 St Mary’s Church, Islington  11 Stoke-on-Trent  120 storytelling  16, 99, 156–7, 166, 203 Strummer, Joe  109, 121 Styx (rock band)  120 Swift, Jonathan  68, 129, 160 Gulliver’s Travels  68, 159 Sydney  149, 150 Szifrón, Damián, Wild Tales  175 Teicher, Howard (member of President Reagan’s National Security Council)  4 Tew, Philip xi–xii, 5, 17–18, 110, 132, 134, 160, 175, 188, 201–4 The Contemporary British Novel  110, 175 and Richard Lane  160 and Rod Mengham  188 Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists (with Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson)  7, 132, 134, 155 Thatcher, Margaret  xii, 3–6, 10–13, 23, 51–63, 64 n.2, 64 n.3, 67–71, 74, 97, 100, 111, 126, 127, 142, 191 aberrant femininity  54, 55 death of  10, 12, 18, 51, 52 feminism  52–3 gender fluidity  12, 53–5, 58, 63 gender sterility  54, 58 ‘Milk Snatcher’  54, 64 n.3 phallic representations of  55–6 premiership/Thatcher Years  3, 6, 13–14, 52, 96, 116, 129, 135

213

resignation  18, 63 Thatcherism  xii–xiii, 3–6, 10–13, 15, 51–63, 70–5, 76–7, 95–6, 100–3, 107, 110–11, 116–17, 122, 125–7, 137, 142, 171, 187 Thatcherite economic policies  2–3, 127–8, 141, 153 Thatcher, Sir Mark  4, 19 n.2. See also arms dealing; Teicher, Howard Cardoen, Dr Carlos (Chilean associate)  19 n.2 Equatorial Guinea coup d’état attempt (Wonga coup, March 2004)  4, 19 n.2 arrest in South Africa  19 n.2 President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo  19 n.2 Iraqi-Chilean arms deal  19 n.2 murder of Jonathan Moyle (Santiago, March 1990)  19 n.2 Thompson, E. P.  97–8 Thornton, Sarah  113, 114 Thurschwell, Pamela  74, 102, 104, 105, 107, 125, 133–4, 187, 198 Torok, Maria. See Abraham, Nicolas Transport and General Workers’ Union  121 trauma  13–14, 15, 38–9, 46, 86, 95, 103–4,  105, 111, 116, 128, 129, 132, 134–5, 137, 141, 164, 172–3, 180 post-9/11 traumatological culture  134–5, 137 PTSD  111 Trimm, Ryan, ‘Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe’  3–4, 69 Twitter  192 Trocchi, Alexander, Cain’s Book  88 Trump, Donald ‘fake news’  203 Trumpism  201 United Nations  76. See also arms dealing Special Commission in Iraq  5 video art inspired by  89–90 Betamax  82, 83, 84

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Index

camcorders  88 dead media, status as  83, 89 discontinued, 2008  89 DVD  86, 91 n.4, 91–2 n.11, 178 market dominance  84, 86 Phillips videodisc  85–6 Ritz Video  92 n.15 Rumbelows  91 n.7 Scotch  87 VCR  84–6, 91 n.4, 91 n.7, 91 n.10 VHS  67, 82–6, 88, 89–90, 91 n.4, 91 n.5 Video Recordings Act (1984)  84, 91 n.7 Vidler, Anthony The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely  186 Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture  189, 193 vulnerability  12, 26, 27–8, 75, 147, 151, 173, 174, 188 Wagner, Erica  192 Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again  130 Walton, James, ‘Jonathan Coe: Poking Fun at Broken Britain’  178, 193, 196, 197 Warwick University  1, 10, 22, 27 Waterstones, Hampstead High Street  xi Watt, Ian P., Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe  144

Wayne, Naunton  176 Webb, Kate, ‘A Poke in the Eye’  187, 193 Webber, Richard  100 Wells, H. G. The Door in the Wall and Other Stories  176 Invisible Man  174, 202 Welsh, Irvine  88–9 Trainspotting  88–9 What a Whopper (film). See Gunn, Gilbert Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (television series)  13, 95, 97, 99–105, 107 Wickham, Phil  98, 99 Wigan, Duncan. See Gammon, Earl Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray  145 Wilder, Billy, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes  170 Willis, Paul, Profane Culture  110, 112 Wilson, Elizabeth  121 Wilson, Harold  115 Wodehouse, P. G.  178 Woolf, Virginia  118, 119 Yes (rock band)  120 Yorke, Thom  173 ‘Harrowdown Hill’ (song)  173, 194 The Young Ones (television series)  114 zero-hour employment  150 Žižek, Slavoj, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates  149 Zlosnik, Sue. See Horner, Avril

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