Jonathan Coe's Bournville: Plainly about more than chocolate

After catching my first fish species of 2023 on Jan 5th (described here) I was able to read book #2 of the 2023 fishing and reading challenge. Just as there was no doubt about which species I would fish for first, my second book of 2023 (and first novel) was a straightforward choice: Bournville by Jonathan Coe. 

Coe is my favourite living British author and someone had bought me Bournville -- his latest novel -- for Christmas. For me (and most people I suspect), the test of a really good novel is a sense of compulsion: a force formed by a shifting mixture of anticipatory excitement and consummatory pleasure that makes you want to keep reading. Bournville passed that test; it was finished a couple of days later. 

Coe and I are almost exact contemporaries: he is 9 days older than me. We went to the same small college at the same university as undergraduates, although never met as far as I recall. I think this close temporal overlap is a big part of the reason I love his novels. I have a strong resonance with many of the periods during which he sets his characters' lives, and with the background of public events against which they are drawn; and there is a comfortable familiarity with the English/British milieu in which most of the novels are set. It is doubtless a cliche to emphasize the Englishness of Coe's writing, and maybe it is also old hat to compare him with other British satirists like Swift and Fielding. The links are there: Coe adapted Gulliver's Travels into a version for children, and he wrote his PhD on Fielding (and, as a nod to that, a minor character in Bournville is called Fielding). Overworked trope or not, I'll return to this idea below.

Bournville is the latest novel concerning some of the characters depicted in the extended family tree below. The novel focusses mostly on the Lamb-Clarke family, with smaller but important bit parts from the Foleys. The family tree below is published in the French version of Bournville, and I grabbed this screenshot from Coe's twitter page. 

IMO this family tree should be in all his novels about these families. I have been reading his books since falling in love with "What a Carve up?" when it came out in 1994 and, before seeing the above tree, I was still a bit hazy about the exact relationships between everyone. 

Many of Coe's novels are semi-autobiographical, recreating a strong sense of the times and places in which Coe (or his family members) have lived. Bournville is dedicated to Coe's mother, who died during Covid. The central character of the novel, Mary Clarke, is "based closely" on her. I found it touching that Coe was at pains to say, in the Author's note, that the much less agreeable and taciturn Geoffrey Clarke (Mary's husband) bears no resemblance at all to his own father. Naturally, I tried to decide which of Mary's three sons reflected aspects of Coe himself, despite Coe's statement, also in the Author's Note, that all the Clarke-Lamb family members bar Mary "are fictional creations".  I don't think Coe and Mary's oldest son Jack have much in common; there isn't much to like about Jack. It seems important for Coe that the characters who resemble him have some redeeming characteristics. In this Guardian article Coe discusses how he felt a need to make Benjamin Trotter -- central character of the Trotter family novels -- more lovable than he himself was at the same age. I have no idea whether Coe shares Martin Clarke's endearing character flaws and indecisive personality. But I do suspect there is something of Coe in Mary's professional musician son, Peter, the youngest child and the one to whom she is closest. Coe is a gifted songwriter, musician and composer, as is clear from looking at his website and listening to his Bandcamp page. 

Bournville is framed against 7 British public events ("occasions" according to the subtitle of the novel). The first is VE Day in 1945 when Mary Clarke was 10 or 11 years old. Others include the coronation, the 1966 FA cup final and the funeral of Princess Diana, before ending up at the 75th Anniversary of VE day in May 2020, with the UK in the grip of Covid and its first lockdown. The novel unwinds around these familiar time-points, with many key events taking place in or near Bournville, in the West Midlands. Bournville was the town created to house the workforce of the nearby Cadbury's chocolate factory. The early front-runner for the town's name, Bournbrook, was rejected in favour of Bournville. The latter name was chosen as its suffix gave it sufficient continental sophistication to allow Cadbury's chocolate to compete with the more famous output from the chocolatiers of Belgium, France and Switzerland.

Using this sweep of three-quarters of a century, centred on a single place, it seems to me that Coe is considering a paradox: how in terms of the experiences of individuals "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose", while over the decades of this story huge social and cultural changes have taken place. Towards the very end of the novel 86-year old Mary reveals to her youngest son Peter that, when changing TV channels, she accidentally caught sight of Naked Attraction (the game show in which contestants judge potential partners who are completely naked). She says: "you could see all these chaps' dangly bits". Predictably, Peter says to his mum "You've seen some changes, haven't you, over the years?" The book shows how (some) people can change as time moves on. In an earlier conversation with Peter (who is gay), Mary reflects on her attitude to homosexuality. Peter challenges her about a time 30 years earlier when she had said that homosexuals were "the lowest of the low". Mary replies: "We were ignorant, we didn't know what we were talking about. [...] We live in a different world now. Things have moved on." But, on the final page of the book we see Shoreh, an Iranian immigrant who currently lives in the house where Mary grew up, sweeping her front porch and enjoying the mid-morning sounds of Bournville exactly as Mary's mother Doll used to do, 75 years earlier. 

Coe's novels are always funny in an understated way. I chuckle a lot when I'm reading them. Once or twice I even laughed out loud while reading Bournville. In a section of the book from 1981, Bridget (the partner of Mary’s middle son Martin) teases him about being "deliciously sensible" and challenges him to recall the last time he did something really impulsive. Martin reveals that it was earlier the same day but won't say what he did. Bridget runs through a couple of potential, carefree actions before Martin reveals that he had joined the SDP. (For those not old enough to remember: the Social Democratic Party were a new UK political party formed in 1981 by the less radical, centrist figures who broke away from Labour in a bitter split.) I know that Coe is a very popular novelist in Europe and translations of his books in French, Spanish and Italian sell really well. However, this sort of joke is so British, and of its time, that it’s hard for me to imagine a young Frenchwoman even smiling at it. Coe himself says that he finds his books' continental popularity “a total mystery” (see here). As Coe reflects on his relationship with his mother in this novel, this joke resonates with me: my only serious political row with my mother occurred after she confessed she had voted SDP in the 1983 general election.

Another theme of the book for me is Coe's use of surprise. He leads, or sometimes simply enables, you to assume one thing and then much later in the manuscript (perhaps decades later in the arc of the narrative) suddenly reveals something quite different and important. The revelation is surprising enough to give you a slight jolt as you read it. This poses a challenge for a reviewer who doesn't want to write a series of spoilers.  

The biggest of these surprises for me was on page 205 of my hardback edition, when something about Martin's girlfriend Bridget is suddenly made clear. This fact has great implications for the family dynamics, and especially the behaviour of Martin's father, in the rest of the book. Late on in the book something quite extraordinary is suddenly revealed about David Foley's civil servant father, Thomas, after David forms a relationship with a Welsh journalist, Sioned, whom he had first met when on holiday in Wales 50 years earlier.  A couple of pages later David's sister Gill learned another surprising secret about their father which Coe simply leaves stated but unexplored. I think this latter secret might form part of the next novel about the Foley family (Coe is planning one more, according to the Author's Note for Bournville). These teasers make me want to read Expo 58 -- a 2013 Coe novel about the young Thomas Foley that somehow I have yet to read. I sense that the revelations about Foley Sr. in Bournville will make a lot of sense after reading Expo 58. Maybe Expo 58 will be another of the 25 books I'll read and review this year?

Bournville is a really excellent and moving book and, although I maybe didn't quite love it as much as Middle England, I couldn't recommend it more highly.

I foolishly promised myself that for each book I reviewed, or each fish species I wrote about in this blog, I would try to link "seamlessly" to something about statistics or data analysis. In theory, I like this sort of absurd and entirely arbitrary challenge. But, from now on, I will put these linked postings in separate blog entries. Coe's use of surprise, discussed above, gave me an idea. The linked blog entry will be a posting about how psychologists and neuroscientists try to model surprise formally, and how this might relate to the ways in which a Bayesian statistician can capture the influence of prior beliefs (which of course can enhance or diminish the surprisingness of a subsequent event).

Under the rules of my 2023 challenge (described here) finishing my second book of the year allowed me to move on to try to catch a second fish species in 2023. I'll describe that in a later blog entry, too.