2023-08-22 12:24:41
It is natural to attribute negative attitudes towards neighboring countries to trade policies, bureaucratic norms and constraints. When cheap oil from olive oil nation A floods the supermarket shelves of olive oil nation X, it is a problem for olive oil nation X. Something like this has already made it into the literature. In Michel Houellebecq’s “Serotonin” (2019), imported peaches are used to intensify resentment in a France whipped up by peasant protests.
To tell the relationship between the former world power Great Britain and the continental mainland after Brexit based on the vegetable fat content of chocolate, and not bitterly in Houellebecq’s manner, but – pardon the pun – full-bodied and bittersweet, requires a special author. He has now found exactly what he is looking for. Because Jonathan Coe is back. And how he’s back! His new novel “Bournville” has the Birmingham suburb of the same name, which one can call the British chocolate capital, in the title. A draft-planned estate used by the Quaker Cadbury family to house the workers of their factory that would become Britain’s No. 1 producer of all things chocolate.
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The fact that Bournville was long excluded from the European market because said fat content did not qualify Cadbury sweets as chocolate in Europe is more than a detail in Coe’s book. The fact that the cocoa butter content of the chocolate, which underperformed the European norm, was due to the constraints of the war economy, but was retained after 1945 because the buyers had gotten used to it, becomes a serious sign in this story. It revolves around Mary Lamb, née Clarke, and five generations of her family and that of her husband Geoffrey – along with German-born grandfather Carl Schmidt; With Coe one can speculate eagerly about the symbolism of names. Mary, Coe reveals in the epilogue to his new novel, is a character “closely based on my late mother, Janet Coe. But that’s about all the similarities to my own family history are there.”
Middlebrow is not midcult
The 62-year-old Coe, born in Birmingham in 1961, probably only really became a household name for the large German readership with “Middle England”, which appeared in English in 2018 and then two years later in German. Which is a pity, since he had previously published a number of novels worth reading. Among other things, “The Rotter’s Club” from 2001 (German: “First Rites” 2002) and “The Closed Circle” from 2004 (German: “Class Reunion” 2006), which form a loose trilogy with “Middle England”. “Bournville” itself is like Coe
With “Middle England” Coe has probably written the best Brexit novel. He managed almost playfully to banish the riddle of a society in which 48.1 percent wanted to remain European and 51.1 percent wanted the exact opposite between two book covers. Also because he didn’t rob the events of the last bit of mystery and thus everything literary. To do this, he did not have to resort to the allegorical or grotesque, as John Lancaster did in 2019 with “The Wall” and Ian McEwan with his Kafka variation “The Cockroach” about Boris Johnson.
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He also appears in “Bourneville” as a Eurosceptic journalist who stirs up Brussels: “The man had a wild mop of blond hair and drove through Brussels in a red Alfa Romeo with heavy metal blaring from his stereo.” had decided to “do the tedious task of reporting for the Daily Telegraph to survive by treating it all as a joke, playing with facts and twisting every story as if the mechanisms of the European Parliament were part of some elaborate conspiracy to thwart the British at every opportunity.” For Mary’s son Martin , who as a Brussels Cadbury lobbyist in the “Chocolate War” tries to achieve the most advantageous truce possible, the person simply called “Boris” remains a ghost.
In “Middle England”, just like now in “Bournville”, Coe didn’t have to resort to old Prague grotesques to illustrate the rifts between Great Britain and the continent that have not only existed since the world war. And in Britain itself. Coe just had to do what he does best – tell family stories that naturally tie and tangle into the country’s history. Or maybe home stories. Birmingham and its environs are the gravitational point of almost everything he writes. That the title “Middle England” had a lot more to it than geography, first of all the more traditional English middle class and then also the talk of the “Little Englander”, those rather pejorative designations for the narrow-minded islanders who have always been more interested in what going on on his doorstep, interested as – dialectic of world power – for global connections: clear.
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What was also somehow resonating, probably not intended by the author, is the term “middlebrow”: “middlebrow”, in the very best sense, you can call Coe’s novels. He tells an accessible, unpretentious story – if it weren’t so worn out, one could speak of “down-to-earth”, as down-to-earth as the characters in his novels. But they, Coe’s books, are anything but “midcult”, never what the literary scholar Moritz Baßler recently identified as a characteristic of large parts of contemporary literature. Coe’s novels never pretend to be the highest level of high literature, while in reality they are – no matter how worn out an adjective – contemporary consumer goods, such as characterize the literary “midcult”.
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That doesn’t mean that Coe writes artlessly. The most furious example is probably that chapter from “Middle England”, in which he lets his characters attend the opening spectacle of the 2012 Olympic Games in London together, but separately, either live or on screen. The mosaic that Coe puts together from quotes from media reports and the subjective thoughts, statements and observations of his characters is great narrative art. At the same time, this patchwork represents a literary illustration of the thesis of the great nationalism researcher Benedict Anderson, developed in his study “Imagined Communities” from 1983: Even the smallest communities are “imagined” or “imagined” communities. What holds them together and creates them are media that make it possible to experience them simultaneously as a village, city community or nation.
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In “Bournville” such montage technique becomes the dominant narrative pattern. Each chapter of this family story builds into a major national event that, while binding Mary and her family to each other and to Britain as a whole, also highlights the cracks in a society where being British isn’t for everyone time means the same thing.
Be it the radio broadcast of Churchill’s speeches in Mary’s parents’ living room or the stuttering king in the pub her father stole into at the end of the war in 1945; be it televising the coronation of Elizabeth II. 1953 – Mary’s parents are now part of the ‘television community’, which attracts neighbors like flies, while she herself witnesses the spectacle via a fiancé-built periscope in London; be it the investiture of today’s king as Prince of Wales in 1969, which was broadcast to all schools, which Sioned, the Welsh holiday love of Mary’s nephew David, perceives as violence: With a stroboscopic view of all this, Coe manages to make something very important tangible that we otherwise would have forgotten: The one great story that nations tell themselves about themselves does not exist.
Jonathan Coe: Bournville, folio, 409 pages, 28 euros
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