Bournville, we learn from Jonathan Coe’s notes at the end of the novel, is the fourth in a planned quintet he’s writing under the general title of Unrest. This book also overlaps with the trilogy that began with The Rotters’ Club and continued with The Closed Circle and the Costa award-winning Middle England. All these interweaving plotlines, all the reappearing names, events and, above all, places give the impression of an author whose work is driven by an almost obsessive need to take new perspectives on the past (and its role in shaping the present), to rehearse and re-rehearse foundation myths both personal and national.
This is also a novel that makes clear the evolution of Coe’s oeuvre, from the experimental fireworks of his early work, through the quiet, slightly bitter satire of his mid-period titles, to the succession of hugely impressive books that he’s produced since 2016. If Brexit has brought us little else of value, it has at least reanimated the career of the arch-Europhile. Bournville, like Middle England, is a state-of-the-nation novel that seeks to respond to a question asked by a German musician early in the book: “This new path you’ve taken in the last few years – why exactly did you choose it? And why did you choose this man, of all people, to lead you down it?”
Bournville opens in Germany just as the first waves of the coronavirus panic hit. Lorna Simes, a Birmingham office worker, is in Leipzig to pursue her musical career. Between concerts, she calls her grandmother, Mary, who’s at home in Birmingham, and they discuss the pandemic. Mary has an inoperable aneurysm that she calls her “ticking timebomb”, but seems more sanguine about the outbreak than her granddaughter. From here, the novel spools back 70 years to VE day, to Mary as a child.
Bournville, a village and a factory, was built by the Quaker Cadbury family in the 19th century, “a village not just founded upon, and devoted to, but actually dreamed into being by chocolate”. It seemed to hold out a different model of capitalism to the one that came to dominate Britain, a vision of “industry and nature existing in harmony, symbiotic, co-dependent”. We first meet Mary with her parents, Sam and Doll, on VE Day. Amid the celebrations, there is a dark moment when Carl, an elderly German man who has lived in England for decades, is struck by a thug. Bournville is a novel about Anglo-German relations, the good and the bad.
It’s also, as with Middle England, a novel about the intersection of public and private life, with the public world often represented by the royal family. Coe couldn’t have known how closely the publication of his novel would follow the death of the Queen, but it gives added poignancy to the way the book is structured. We have the King’s speech on VE Day; the next time we visit the family in Bournville is for the coronation in 1953. Mary is older and being courted by the stuck-up classicist Geoffrey (grandson of Carl).
Coe steps through time, dropping in on the 1966 World Cup, where he proves that, like his hero BSJohnson (in passing, a very good nickname for our former PM), he can write brilliantly about football. We meet Geoffrey’s cousin, Sylvia, and her husband, Thomas, whom we recognise from Coe’s earlier novels Expo 58 and The Rain Before It Falls. Their house – unlike the home of Geoffrey and Mary – is sleek and minimalist, with Scandinavian furniture, a Bang & Olufsen stereo and a “gleaming silvery model of the Atomium from the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958”. Everywhere there are messages about the interrelatedness of British and European life.
Chocolate is another motif that reappears throughout the novel. At a meeting between the German and English branches of the family, an argument develops about whether British or German chocolate is better. As Mary and Geoffrey’s children grow – we revisit the family for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, then for Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 – the story of Britain’s “chocolate war” with the EU plays out. Martin rises within the corporate structure of Cadbury’s, finally going to Brussels to represent the interests of British chocolate. During this period he crosses paths with Paul Trotter (from The Closed Circle) and also with a bumbling, mendacious journalist called Boris.
The novel ends with a return to its beginning. We visit the Bournville family – now dispersed across the country – as they react to the death of Diana and then in May 2020, deep in the Covid crisis, with Mary self-isolating and her children and grandchildren (including Lorna) worrying about her. There’s such warmth and generosity to these later passages, which are particularly moving when you know that they are drawn from Coe’s experience of his own mother’s death during the pandemic. It’s difficult (but not impossible) to draw a line between the complex energy of Coe’s early work and these gentler, more sedate later novels. You get the sense of an author more at ease with himself, one better able to channel his anger and frustration at the direction his country has taken, as well as his abiding love for it, into prose of enduring beauty, into characters who come to glorious, redemptive life on the page.
• Bournville by Jonathan Coe is published by Viking (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
