Middle England (Rotters' Club, 3)Jonathan Coe
Penguin, 8 November 2018
HB, 421pp
I'm grateful to the publisher for an advance e-copy of this book via NetGalley
Middle England is a return to characters Coe introduced in The Rotters' Club (which followed their lives as teenagers in 70s Birmingham) and returned to in The Closed Circle (focussing on the years of Blairite pomp at the beginning of the century). Opening in 2010 with the run-up to the General Election and continuing to Autumn 2018 (i.e. now!) this is very much Coe's Brexit novel, suitably titled as an enquiry into England's (not Britain's) character and ghosts - literally, a "condition of England novel".
That makes the book very contemporary (except where, I imagine due to publishing deadlines, it's not able to take in the latest developments in the unfolding story - such as the criminal investigation into the Leave campaign which would have fitted very well with the final third of the book). Thankfully, it's not a moment-by-monent account and the accent is very much on the response and behaviour of Coe's usual wide cast of characters, muddling along with their lives as they always have.
Revisiting the world of those earlier books also means a return to what are for me some beloved characters, people I really feel I've got to know. Central here is Benjamin Trotter, with his love of music, and his sister Lois, still - forty years on - haunted by her experience of one of the Birmingham pub bombings. We also meet Lois's daughter Sophie, and Doug, the radical journalist who married a wealthy heiress and has a daughter, Coriander, who despises him. And many more. Coe has a very good technique for handling his characters - we dip in and out of lives, sometimes skipping months or a year, sometimes following a particular incident or series of events (Sophie's cruise to the Baltic, delivering lectures on the history of art to a boatload of pensioners; Doug's meetings with Nigel, the baffling Assistant Deputy Director of Government Communications under the Cameron government). It's a bit like throwing a handful of leaves into the stream to help picture the flow - in their encounters with students, friends, enemies, family and workmates we get a cross section of, well, Middle England.
There's Colin, Benjamin and Lois's father. At the start of the book, their mum Sheila has just dies and it's clear that Colin will never recover from that. But as the years pass, he does;t just mourn, he broods, over how the country has changed - whether it's immigration ('I don't think I heard a word of English spoken on the way here'), loss of industry or "political correctness" (a common complaint of characters here, at least those of a Brexitish turn of mind).
There's Helen, Sophie's mother-in-law, who astounds and shocks Sophie by harking back to Enoch Powell (but of course Sophie doesn't challenge this: a long and awkward pause on the car journey ensures).
There's Charlie, a long-lost friend of Benjamin's, who's trying to make a living as a children's entertainer while supporting his girlfriend Yasmin and her daughter Aneeqa.
Through the comings and goings, crossed paths and life events, Coe weaves a picture of a deeply uneasy country taking a long look at itself and deciding it doesn't like what it sees. There is a degree of rage, perhaps the realisation of loss of privilege and the frustration is pushed this way and that, finally to be vented on 23 June 2016. There is also - through the subplot with Nigel - the story of vain and stupid politicians who didn't realise, or chose not to see, what they were unleashing. There is nostalgia (a golf club that seems fixed in the 50s) and - Coe has a gift for portraying this - the little nuances of English racism played out in (mainly) everyday moments, almost gone before they're spotted and rarely or never the occasion of any rebuke.
Wrapping round the book are the words of a folk song, credited to Shirley Collins, a haunting ballad telling of lost good times and diminished circumstances ("Adieu to old England, adieu/ And adieu to some hundreds of pounds/ If the world had been ended when I had been young/ My sorrows I'd never have known") . Combined with Benjamin's taste for the elegiac in music and some wistful passages towards the end looking back to his and Lois's childhood ("Beacon Hill. The landscape of his own childhood. Tobogganing in the winter...") and of course the part of the country - the east Midlands - where much of the story is set, there is an almost Housman-like sense of nostalgia and of a lost world. Coe punctures this by having Benjamin point to this as, in a sense, nostalgia for a world that never was but he also cannily uses it to show the very real sense of loss and bewilderment felt by so many at their place in the modern world (Colin, literally lost when he visits the side of the old Longbridge car works). More ominously, Coe shows how that sense of loss - not in itself a malign thing - is worked upon and manipulated by those with an agenda.
Throughout this the theme of different Englands emerges, of a lack of comprehension and shared experience. ("Just as Doug had told him, 'People are getting angry, really angry' even if they could not have explained why, or with whom.") Whether causing a malicious complaint against an academic for their treatment of a student, a violent, racist assault in a small English village or the breakup of a marriage, Coe seems to be saying that we just can't live with each other any longer - an ironic reversal of something he has a French celebrity author say towards the start of this book: 'The French are an intolerant, judgemental people. Not like the British, I think". Perhaps that reputation for tolerance - whether deserved or not - is another aspect of the lost "old England" to which we have sadly bid Adieu.
So this is in many ways a mournful novel, even if often funny. Coe isn't, I think, pointing out anything that hasn't been said or debated in the aftermath of the 2016 Referendum, but he does the subject the courtesy of a scrutiny from all angles (even if it's clear where his sympathies lie). He does suggest that, in the end, some of the divisions may be healed. I think though that if there is to be a fourth book in the Rotters sequence, bringing things to a real reconciliation, it will have to be another few decades in the making - and I'm unlikely to see it written.
Strongly recommended, even if uncomfortable reading at times.
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