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Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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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 Spectator Coe's interwoven paeans to the lives of those rooted in the very centre of the UK - The Rotter's Club and Middle England among them - blend comedy, tragedy and social commentary in enjoyably memorable fashion, and his latest, Bournville, is no exception . . . Coe's particular gift is to understand how nostalgia, regret and an apprehension of what the future will bring might make us more, not less, empathetic to the frailties of those around us FT, Best Audiobooks of the Year British author Jonathan Coe, European Book Prize 2019 winner". France24. 9 December 2019 . Retrieved 28 November 2021. Honorary degrees: DLitt, University of Birmingham (2006); [17] DLitt, University of Wolverhampton (2006); [18] DUniv, Birmingham City University. [19]

This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely * Big Issue *With it's overlap with these novels, as well as others by Coe, Bournville is another piece of the large tapestry presenting modern Britain that Coe's work can be seen as, and certainly a solid and entertaining one. In fact, a good bit of what takes place in the pandemic chapters are not the experiences of the fictional Lamb family, but of the Coe family. He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.” The novel closes with Covid keeping everyone apart, which perhaps still sits and hits too close to home to be entirely satisfactorily fictionally treated -- but then bringing a novel such as this, covering such a long time and with a large cast of characters, to a close was always going to be difficult.

Coe does his ending well enough, but much of it does feel more strained than the easier-flowing other parts of the novel. As the nation changes and the racial makeup of the family alters, it’s not so much that bigotry gives way to tolerance, but that the ambiguities deepen. All along, we are reminded of the contradictory facets of the nation and of each individual character: the snobbishness that coexists with kindness, humour and narrow-mindedness, rationality and unexamined prejudices. You get the feeling Coe even disliked Princess Diana, given the sex scene he places during Tony Blair's speech at her funeral. The sex scene itself is great...but the timing is utterly disturbing. Repugnant, too, when you think how many thousands of people were genuinely hurting that day. Talk about deliberately pissing on a national memory! We drop in on her every 10 years or so, at the big moments in the British century; The Queen's coronation, the '66 World Cup final, Diana's marriage and death. As well as Mary, we get to see her family and the country as a whole change. Or not. Concluding with the recent (current?) pandemic, Bournville paints a picture of a Britain surging with progress, leaning from optimism to pessimism, from acceptance to rejection. Coe's 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize [5] [6] and also won the Costa Book Award in the Novel category. [7] Film and TV adaptations [ edit ]Four of the occasions are monarchy-related, from the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II to the funeral of Princess Diana, while the novel is bookended by VE day and the seventy-fifth anniversary of VE Day, coming full circle (also with the Prologue); the other one is the 1966 World Cup final. Oxfam books blog: Jonathan Coe and William Sutcliffe create window displays for the Oxfam Bloomsbury Bookshop". Archived from the original on 8 June 2011. A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships Woman & Home

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