My favourite joke in Jonathan Coe’s new novel is hardly a side-splitter, more what someone of my acquaintance would label “Radio 4 funny, not funny-funny”. In fact, it might not even be intended as a joke at all, though longtime fans of the author of What a Carve Up! will have their suspicions. A memoirist called Brian is recalling a mesmerisingly beautiful young woman he encountered as a student at Cambridge. “‘I heard her described variously as ‘elfin’, as ‘eldritch’,” he tells us, adding that “eldritch” is the word used by a minor character in the book, Tommy Cope, who is “always reaching for the slightly more recondite adjective”. The subtle joke being that “recondite” is itself pretty, well, recondite.
Cope himself features rarely, though his comic purpose as a Coe stand-in is clear. “He came from the Midlands and he was studying English literature and he was another grammar-school boy,” explains Brian of Cope/Coe (in a novel containing numerous word games, the author has literally taken the “p”); and he is also strikingly quiet and nondescript. Brian continues: “However, it turned out that he had also been writing short stories and even novels, which he began to publish in the years after we’d graduated. Much to the surprise of us all, some of them turned out to be mildly satirical in nature, and furthermore to suggest an interest in politics, something of which he’d never given any of us the least inkling when he was a student. I don’t really follow these things, but I was told that one of them – a sophomore effort under the title Quite the Mash-Up – achieved what in literary circles is known as a ‘modest success’. Who knew.”
