No chocolate-box portrait: Bournville, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils. Bournville, his 14th novel, lacks the caustic verve of What a Carve Up! (1994) or the wistful charm of The Rotters’ Club (2001), but it’s an affectionate work of social history in fictional form, tracking four generations of a West Midlands family whose dreams, successes, misadventures and divisions reflect the shifting contours of postwar Britain. 

It’s largely set in a model village on the south-west side of Birmingham. Created by the Cadbury family of Quaker industrialists in the 1890s, Bournville was designed to house workers from their chocolate factory and ‘alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions’. Coe grew up five miles away, and one of the main characters, Mary, is based on his mother.