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"From the acclaimed author of The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle comes the novel for our strange contemporary times. Beginning nine years ago on the outskirts of Birmingham, where car factories have been replaced by chain retail, and London, where both frenzied riots and Olympic fever plague the streets, Middle England tracks a brilliantly vivid cast of characters through the transformation of their society. There are newlyweds Ian and Sophie, who disagree about England's future and, possibly, their relationship; Doug, the political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his Chelsea townhouse while his radical, teenage daughter undertakes a relentless quest for universal justice; Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote LEAVE in the Brexit referendum. Through all these lives we see this very tentatively united kingdom itself: a place of nostalgia and delusion, bewilderment and barely suppressed rage. As acutely alert to the absurdity of the political classes as it is compassionate about those left behind by elites of all sorts, this is a novel only Jonathan Coe could have written"--… (more)
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Jonathan Coe has written what many in Britain are calling its “state-of-the-nation” novel. Middle England begins with the 2008 financial crash and ends in late 2018 with Britain still unable (or perhaps unwilling) to figure out how to make the Brexit vote a reality. Benjamin Trotter, one of the book’s main characters, is a somewhat failed family man who now finds himself living alone and hoping to get his excessively long manuscript published. Ben spends much of his time as caretaker of his elderly father, a man who constantly complains that the England he remembers so well is being ruined by the outrageously high number of newly arrived immigrants to his country. The book’s other main character is Ben’s niece Sophie, a university lecturer who falls in love with a young man who shares many of the views of Ben’s father – despite vigorously disagreeing with those views herself. Most of the book’s more secondary characters appear in the previous Rotters Club books, but their relationships are largely defined in Middle England by their approval or disapproval of the Brexit vote. The “Remainers” and the “Leavers” only communicate by shouting at each other – and neither side is at all interested in what the other has to say. Long-term friendships are ending; parents, children, and siblings are no longer speaking; and marriages are ending in loudly contested divorces. It’s as if Britain had morphed into two separate countries. Sound familiar, America?
The biggest surprise about Middle England, though, is how funny it is. Picture scenes like the one in which two children’s entertainers (one dressed as a clown, the other as a mad professor of sorts) come to blows and throw F-bombs and fists at each other during a little boy’s birthday party. Or what I consider to be the funniest sexual encounter scene I have ever read, during which two nearly-sixty-year-olds decide to recreate a sexual encounter from their high school days inside a cramped wardrobe. (Let’s just say that the results bear little resemblance to those of forty years earlier.)
Another striking thing about Middle England is that its author treats both sides of the Pro-Brexit, Anti-Brexit argument with a measure of respect rather than taking a hardline approach in favor of either. He does the same, in fact, with the issue of immigration and national boundaries. Some of Coe’s main characters feel strongly one way and others feel strongly the other way. Admittedly, the book’s more sympathetic characters all lean in the same liberal direction, but in the end most of them adopt a more moderate approach to those with opposing views than they started with.
Bottom Line: Middle England is a funny and thought-provoking novel in which American readers will see many parallels between life in today’s Britain and today’s America. The novel exposes the absurdity of politics in both countries (and the rest of the world, for that matter) while offering a little hope that more moderate voices will eventually return to some power and influence. Although it will help, an interest in politics is not a prerequisite for reading Middle England because it is an entertaining novel filled with interesting characters for whom the reader will come to care.
Topical, humorous, understanding. In a hundred years time people could read this to understand their country in the early part of the 21st century.
Thank you NetGalley for this advance copy. (less)
There was a sequel, The Closed Circle, which was published a couple of years later and returned to the boys as they now strove to establish themselves in their respective careers, and showed them coming to terms, with varying degrees of success, with life under the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown. I enjoyed the sequel, but did not feel as engaged with it as I had with the original novel.
This new book follows them and their experiences of life as they move into their fifties. Starting in 2010, it tracks their lives under the Coalition Government as they cope with the austerity measures brought in to counteract the banking failure of 2008. This allows Coe to look at the riots of 2011, the preparations for, and delivery of, the Olympic Games, and, especially, the division wreaked across the country by the campaign for the EU referendum, including the murder of Jo Cox, and then, even more so, by the impact of its result. Coe does not seem to take sides, and there are several characters who put forward compelling reasons to support both sides of the Brexit debate.
Of course, this all makes it sound desperately serious. After all, living through the seemingly interminable debates about Brexit, I would be tempted to say that the last thing I want to do is read about it in novels. However, Coe is an accomplished writer, and couches his story with his customary humour.
He is also adept at matching his style to suit the character he is portraying. Benjamin Trotter was certainly the foremost character in The Rotters’ Club, and plays a prominent part here. He is a ponderous man, and Coe captures that in his own prose. Rampantly introspective, Benjamin seems to spend most of his time driving through the West Midlands, and Coe describes some of his journeys in great detail, listing the towns and villages through which he passes in close detail. We don’t actually get to learn what is Ben’s second favourite service station, but I am sure Coe would have identified it in his notes.
There is a marvellous running vignette in which Doug Anderton, a left-leaning political columnist has a series of meetings with Nigel, who works in David Cameron’s communications office in Downing Street. Nigel positively drips callow, hollow buzzwords and mindless slogans.
All very clever, and very amusing - a marked return to top form for Jonathan Coe.
We pick up Benjamin and his friends in
Benjamin becomes a published author at last, his niece Sophie finds the man of her dreams (probably) and experiences the frustrations of academic life in the 21st century, Doug tries to keep the values of liberal journalism alive, and all around them we see dreams being shattered, hatred bubbling over, and the fantasy of nice, safe, moderate, tolerant middle-England coming unravelled.
As with The closed circle, this is an engaging, if somewhat depressing book that seems to have a lot of perceptive things to say about the state of British society - but not many suggestions for how to fix them. Once again, there seemed to be rather too many plot-lines and it felt as if some of the characters didn't get quite as much attention from the writer as they deserved. But the focus on Sophie, Benjamin and Doug worked quite well. And there were some nice bits of comedy, including a ludicrous reprise of the wardrobe scene from The Rotters' Club that looks like a transparent attempt to get nominated for the Bad Sex Awards...
But besides that, the book was really funny. It made me laugh.
The characters are a group of 2010s, mainly middle class, folk- schoolfriends, relatives and acquaintances, and the novel chronicles their various experiences in the era of Brexit.
The decade
The author is patently a passionate Remainer: those advocating a different view are all old, stupid and portrayed as contemptible. I personally took a massive dislike to uber-liberal academic Sophie - not for her opinions, but her inability to remain in the same room as anyone thinking differently to herself. (I'm also unconvinced that the most pro-diversity of us would try to excuse a trouble-making SJW getting her suspended for an out-of-context comment.)
So a very right-on, leftie-luvvie work where the time eclipses the protagonists. It does portray the anger and division in society; and I did enjoy it, but didnt hugely engage with any of those portrayed.
A survey of modern English social issues in novel form…thought-provoking, but often foul, and occasionally funny…
“As [she] listened to the speakers, so different in age, class, gender and ethnicity, all with such different stories to tell, she realized that they were in fact united