IS Jonathan Coe the most prescient novelist working on these islands today? In his new novel, a grandson introduces his girlfriend to his grandmother. The young woman is black and the grandmother makes a racist comment.
We’re told: “His grandmother was almost eighty, after all, and had grown up in a different time, and he knew anything she said – daft or not – would always be well-intentioned.”
The naive grandson is way too apologetic. Coe thus predicts the recent story about Lady Susan Hussey and her resignation after making what Buckingham Palace called “unacceptable and deeply regrettable comments” to the charity worker Ngozi Fulani. Coe gets the here and now.
