Book review: Middle England: by Jonathan Coe

Reviewer Alan Taylor

EIGHT long years ago marks the starting point for Jonathan Coe’s atomisation of contemporary England. It begins, tellingly, with a funeral and ends more than four hundred pages later – in September, 2018 – over-optimistically, with an imminent birth. In between, there is a lament in which the England of fond memory and comforting myth, is seen to fall apart, its perceived values of decency, tolerance and civility buried in a miasma of prejudice, bigotry and ignorance. As I read on, the pages of Middle England slipping by like brown signs to National Trust properties on country roads, I kept thinking of John Major and his insistence a quarter of a century ago that, “Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers...”

That country is disappearing faster than familiar names from our high streets. The place in which many of us now live, which Coe describes in dismaying and delicious detail, is pockmarked with pound shops, garden centres and food banks. Birmingham and its unlovely hinterland is the novel’s principal setting. To many of its inhabitants, London is as remote as Laos or Las Vegas. The capital is where decisions are made without knowledge of those they most affect. One character, Nigel, is an adviser to David Cameron, and is as deluded and distanced from reality as his boss. “Dave”, Nigel tells Doug, a political commentator who writes opinion pieces about austerity from his multi-million pound abode in Chelsea, simply allowed there to be a vote on Britain’s membership of the European Union to encourage a “conversation”. “We’re about to embark on an amazing exercise in direct democracy.”

Coe skilfully choreographs his characters like dancers round a maypole. Their soundtrack is Shirley Collins’ haunting folk song ‘Adieu to Old England’, one of whose verses goes: “Adieu to old England, adieu/And adieu to some hundreds of pounds/If the world had been ended when I had been young/My sorrows I’d never have known.” Coe’s England is populated by academics and journalists, novelists and students, clowns – who perform at children’s birthdays – and speed awareness instructors. No one makes anything any more. Factories have closed down and concrete covers a once green and pleasant land. There is rioting in the streets and properties are ransacked.

Just when it looks as if anarchy might take hold the nation is inspired by Danny Boyle’s opening ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics. But not everyone buys Boyle’s vision of an inclusive, eccentric, self-deprecatory, irony-infused, multicultural society. While Colin, who is in his eighties, admires Kenneth Branagh’s recitation of Shakespeare, he is annoyed by reference to the arrival of HMS Windrush, and Britain’s first Jamaican immigrants. “‘Oh, here we go,’ he muttered into his lager, as soon as he saw the actors. ‘The bloody political correctness brigade are at it again.’”

Political correctness is like Dutch elm disease, infecting even those who might espouse it. Another character, Sophie, a right-on academic, is accused by a student of making a “transphobic remark” during a seminar and suspended pending investigation. The air is toxic not only with emissions from traffic but from those determined to take offence at even the most innocuous comments. The Stasi, one feels, could not have been better at snooping. Meanwhile, Brexit looms. Not since the Reformation has England – the rest of the UK barely rates a passing mention – been so starkly divided. Dave’s disastrous decision to allow a referendum in the hope that it might once and for all put the issue of membership of the EU to bed has given licence to those people who feel threatened by foreigners and who want their country back. But back to what? The era of Empire? Of Dickens’s stinking Coketown? Of good Queen Bess and Willy Shakespeare? Of Botham skittling the Aussies?

As we of course know, the result of the referendum resolves nothing. Indeed, if anything it makes matters worse, much worse. Now Tories are at each other’s throats. Relationships falter. Daughters dismiss fathers as class traitors. Husbands and wives separate. Mothers and sons have blazing rows. Poles are told to speak English and go home. “We don’t have to put up with you...people any more,” a man tells a young Polish woman, before spitting in her face. Merrie England has metamorphosed into Misanthropic England. It’s as if a swathe of the population has until the last few years been in a coma from which it has been rescued by the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage. One of the questions this often wickedly funny and timely novel asks is whether this is the real, unvarnished England, the one which decent English people, such as John Major and the murdered MP Jo Cox, knew in their gut was there all the while but preferred to pretend otherwise. Middle England makes for a grim if enthralling read though how it will weather after 11pm on 29 March next year is anyone’s guess.