Back in 2017, comic novelist and chronicler of Englishness Jonathan Coe met Liz Truss at a dinner at the French embassy. The event was also attended by Coe’s good friend Kazuo Ishiguro, who had recently been awarded the Nobel prize for literature. “Books didn’t seem to be her thing,” he says of the encounter. “We didn’t hit it off, put it like that.” Though we are speaking before she announced she was standing down as prime minister, Coe tells me he feels more uneasy now about the state of the UK than he did after the Brexit referendum. “I think power has been handed over to a very extreme cabal of people who, on the basis of their first few weeks, seem to combine a kind of ideological extremism with incompetence. That’s a pretty worrying combination.”
From What a Carve Up!, the novel that made Coe’s name in 1994, to his prize-winning novel Middle England in 2018, the Tories have often been the target of the author’s particular brand of political satire and national scrutiny. His new novel, Bournville, which takes its title from the village built by Cadbury outside Birmingham where many of the author’s family lived and worked, is no exception – except this time it is personal.
The first thing Coe’s mother did when he met her after lockdown restrictions eased in June 2020 was give him a small Cadbury’s chocolate bar, as she had done every day when he got home from school as a boy. They hadn’t seen each other for three months. It was a fine day so they sat in his mother’s garden, in Bromsgrove where she still lived, and chatted about her childhood for a novel he was thinking of writing. Shortly after he returned to London that evening, his mother called to say she was feeling unwell. Coe’s brother and sister-in-law, who lived nearby, went straight round, but were not allowed to enter the house because of Covid rules. The paramedics gave her some paracetamol with instructions to get something stronger from the pharmacy the next day. She died that night of a ruptured aortic aneurysm that had been growing near to her heart for years. “I don’t like to think about it, but it wouldn’t have been a nice death,” Coe says now. “And she was alone. That was the horrible thing. It was just a terrible way to end.”
We are having coffee in the same restaurant in Earl’s Court, near to Coe’s home in west London, where we met almost two years ago – socially distanced and rather chilly in the courtyard garden – to discuss his novel Mr Wilder & Me, which he had finished just before his mother’s death. It is easy to discern the quiet grammar-school boy Coe once was (and which he wrote about in his autobiographical novel The Rotters’ Club) in the softly spoken novelist, with his silver crop and earnest manner, whose passions include 1970s sitcoms, Hollywood classics, prog rock, jazz and 20th-century French classical music. The day we meet is the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ first hit, and of the release of Dr No (James Bond, in his various incarnations, looms large in the new novel) – and also the date of the first Monty Python and Last Goon Show, he tells me with uncharacteristic excitement: “Today is the day! So many significant British cultural moments happen on October the 5th.” He worries that a recent bout of Covid, or turning 60 – “it’s hard to distinguish the symptoms” – have left him less sharp, but as he rattles off dates and titles, this seems to be far from the case.
With three novels in four years, Coe is on a roll. Middle England was a further instalment in his Benjamin Trotter books, which includes The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle (he is planning one more). It was quickly followed by Mr Wilder & Me, about the autumn days of director Billy Wilder, which he “banged out” in six months, helped along by lockdown. Then Bournville arrived “fully formed” with “a pressing emotional need” to write it as soon as possible, he says. “There’s a big element of personal exorcism in the book.”
Mary Lamb, the matriarch at the centre of this bittersweet family saga, a PE and music teacher, is modelled on his mother Janet. The rest of the family are fictional, he says, although the youngest son Peter, a musician, is a familiar Coe figure: “passive, slightly depressed men – often failed writers or composers or both – who show a rather uncommitted sexuality”, as the author himself once observed of his protagonists. Structured around seven national occasions, Bournville opens with a prologue at the onset of the pandemic and ends with the distressing circumstances of his mother’s death. He hadn’t set out to include so many royal landmarks – the coronation, the investiture of Prince Charles, the royal wedding, Princess Diana’s funeral – but as he was writing he realised they are often the triggers for moments of national coming together. It is, he says, both his most personal and political novel.Floppy-haired Boris, who popped up in Middle England, is here, in his early days as a reporter in Brussels, already known only by his first name. As Coe reflects drolly in an author’s note: “Whether he’s a fictional character or not remains hard to determine with any certainty.”
His heart sank slightly when he heard about Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons, published in September, which follows a similar timespan and also offsets personal and historical events. “It just shows that we’re very different kinds of writers,” he says now, having read the novel (he considers McEwan to be one of our finest writers in terms of style). Bournville is written with Coe’s mix of gentle nostalgia and astute social observation, and fans will recognise characters from previous novels (nearly all his characters are connected in some way). If it is less comic than usual, that is hardly a surprise.
He was well into writing by the time the revelations of Partygate began to emerge. “Of course, they don’t play by the same rules that we do,” he says. “It’s shocking, but it’s not really news.” Yet he is still sad and angry. Far from the big occasion the family had envisaged for his mother’s funeral, there were only 12 or 14 people, all sitting apart, with most of her friends watching on Zoom. “It was a very strange event,” he says. “These rules involved a huge sacrifice and people paid a massive emotional cost for them. Then to discover that the people who’d drawn them up were playing fast and loose with them, it’s unforgivable,” he says in his usual measured way. “Those Tory party members who were saying: ‘Why did we have to get rid of Boris? He would have been a better leader to take us to the next election.’ That’s the reason and it’s a very good reason.”
Johnson’s resignation wasn’t the only major British event to occur after the novel had been delivered. “I finished the book in April or May and missed the biggest one of all,” he says of the death of the Queen. “Well, it was going to happen sooner rather than later,” he notes drily. But it is striking timing that his novel of personal loss should arrive in the aftermath of a national outpouring of grief.
He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.”
Both Coe’s grandparents worked in the Cadbury factory and his mother, like Mary in the novel, spent her earliest years in Bournville: “Chocolate is very much bound up with my family history.” During a visit to the factory in the late 90s he was outraged to learn that they had difficulty exporting to the EU because “the French and the Belgians and Italians didn’t consider our chocolate up to scratch”. They didn’t, in fact, regard it as chocolate at all: it was “too greasy”, apparently. Years later he was approached by Julie Gavras, a French film director and writer, to collaborate on a screenplay about these so-called “chocolate wars”.
The film was never made (a romcom about EU trade negotiations failed to convince backers), but the experience made him realise that chocolate was also part of the identity of the nation: nostalgia for childhood, for wartime (the Dairy Milk recipe as we know it was a result of changes made because of rationing) are all wrapped up in those shiny purple rectangles, associations that held no truck with the bureaucrats in Brussels. He found the idea of people in committee rooms talking very seriously about rival chocolate brands both comic and heroic. “There’s something kind of wonderful about it. Instead of fighting each other, we were sitting around and having these rather difficult, valuable conversations.” What better metaphor for the absurdities and deep-rooted attachments at the heart of Brexit? And it all began at Bournville, an emblematic place not only for his family but also as a model of responsible capitalism, “a profit-making enterprise that looked after its workforce, which is not ideal, but under the present administration looks like a totally utopian situation”.
Then there’s that other uniquely British export that so many of us grew up on – 007 – who appears throughout the novel as a tuxedo-clad marker of the changing decades. Going to see the new Bond film was a family ritual in the Coe household when he was growing up, often coinciding with their annual caravan holiday in Wales. He recalls the audience erupting with cheers when Bond (Roger Moore; it was 1977) jumped off the cliff and a parachute opened to reveal a union jack in The Spy Who Loved Me, a scene which now symbolises for him our two defining characteristics: “nationalism and facetiousness”, he says. “A combination of exceptionalism and not taking things seriously. It’s very potent. And it really appeals to something in the British psyche.”
As with Johnson, Coe wanted to try to understand the appeal of a man with so many clearly questionable qualities: “Bond is racist, misogynist, egotistical.” Coe recently persuaded his two daughters, both in their early 20s and familiar only with Daniel Craig’s Bond, to watch For Your Eyes Only. They didn’t get past the opening credits: “Is this what you used to watch in the 70s?” they asked.
After his recent work sprint, he is ready for “a breather”, but, as he points out, he may have said that the last time we met. He did. He is only happy when he is working on something: “I’m very edgy and difficult to be around when I’m not writing.” Fortunately, he has a new outlet for his “creative itchiness”: he has teamed up with a jazz orchestra in Italy called the Artchipel Orchestra to perform pieces he has composed, with the novelist on the keyboard. “I’m playing live in front of an audience for the first time since the 1980s, which is absolutely terrifying, because I’m not really a very good musician,” he says modestly. “But I’m on stage with 20 people who are very good musicians and who make a lot of noise.” He is looking forward to performing with them in Milan in December.
In terms of writing, he thinks “cosy crime is the way to go”. Surprisingly, given its high-profile adopters, such as Richard Osman and Reverend Richard Coles, who are making a tidy killing from this most English of genres, Coe discovered it in a bookshop in France, where a whole shelf was labelled “cosy crime”. “It’s another of those British cultural phenomena which people don’t realise is so popular in other countries.” It seems the perfect match for Coe’s nostalgic Englishness and neat storytelling.
His fiction has always been very successful in Europe. “I don’t present that many challenges to translate because the prose I write is very rarely poetic,” he says. And while it is not true that he has “never written a beautiful line”, as he puts it, he wants his books to be easy to read. “I regard that as a positive.”
Bournville will be published in France as Le Royaume Désuni (The Disunited Kingdom) because his French editor didn’t think the brand name would have much resonance for readers outside the UK, while the idea of an ununited kingdom is all too recognisable right now. Cadbury’s may be in his DNA, but, he confesses even more quietly than usual: “The chocolate I really like, from a taste point of view, is European.”
• Bournville is published by Viking on 3 November. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
