Jonathan Coe is surprised by his eminence. ‘I’m just a comic Agatha Christie,’ he says. Coe was at the Guardian last night in King’s Cross – the newspaper’s book club has been reading What A Carve Up, Coe’s satire of the Thatcher years.
Coe understands the book’s continued popularity and relevance. ‘The political mood has not changed in that time, arguably it’s got worse.’ He welcomes the book’s success; but regrets that society has not rejected the apostles of greed and laments that even the Labour party now dallies with the filthy rich.
Coe conceived of writing a political-satire-cum-social-panorama in the mid-eighties, but took several years to complete the project. What A Carve Up was finally published in 1994. Without meaning to give too much away, it is the story of the Winshaw clan, a family of unutterable rapacity. Each member represents a vice within the sphere of politics, culture, finance, arms dealing, food production and the media. Each in turn succumbs to a death that befits their respective sins.
The central character is Michael Owen, a struggling novelist contracted to write a history of the family. He is a pathetic beacon of empathy, too ineffectual and paranoid to be virtuous in the heroic sense. Michael’s decency is subsumed by the Winshaws’ all conquering philosophy. As Coe put it, ‘Winshawism triumphs despite the eradication of the family’.
Owen is connected to the Winshaws by dint of his father being killed in a Lancaster bomber with Godfrey Winshaw during the war. This is one of many plot devices that have led critics to pooh-pooh Coe’s approach to narrative as being overly reliant on coincidence. Coe contests this, arguing that his ‘tricksy’ book wouldn’t work without artifice.
In many ways, What A Carve Up is a novel about novelists and literary fashion. One memorable scene has Michael writing unedifying reviews of ‘impenetrable literary fiction’, a swipe at the Granta-inspired trends of the time. Coe plays games, but not in a strictly post-modern sense. The book follows the form of a detective novel, albeit played for savage laughs. Contrivance and conceit drive the plot and Coe shares Agatha Christie’s panache for the submerged clue. Eventually, everything is pulled together in the most unnatural way.
Coe inherited his love of incidence from Henry Fielding, on whom he wrote a doctoral thesis many years ago. He sees Fielding’s influence in popular culture and film, citing the scene in The Apartment when Jack Lemmon asks to use Shirley MacLaine’s pocket mirror and he realises that it was the one he saw in his flat earlier that morning, meaning that MacLaine is Fred MacMurray’s mystery mistress. Coe describes this as an ‘elegantly worked’ reveal.
Popular culture takes a starring role in What A Carve Up. The melodramatically moral demise of the Winshaws is pinched from Hammer Horror; the Vincent Price classic, Theatre of Blood, is referenced in the book. The novel’s headlong descent into farce owes much to Monty Python and some of the blacker Ealing comedies, again all overtly referenced by Coe. And the Winshaws’ comic strip monstrosity is redolent of Viz and Spitting Image. Finally, the book’s title is stolen from the 1961 Pat Jackson film of the same name, and Coe uses much of the film’s content in his narrative.
Coe’s bald show of low culture, at a time when many literary novelists were seasoning their books with elaborate displays of the arcane, was as revolutionary as it was satirical. Authors such as David Nichols owe much to Coe, who allowed University Challenge and puerile angst to be included in the social panorama of broadly political novels like Starter for Ten and One Day.
Academia has recognised Coe: What A Carve Up is taught on undergraduate courses, under the suitably absurd heading of ‘Paranoid Fiction’. Coe, however, remains the model of self-effacement. A reader asked Coe if he considered himself to be a ‘Comic Novelist’, a ‘Political Novelist’, or a ‘Literary Novelist’? Coe replied, ‘I’d be quiet happy just to be a bestselling novelist.’
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