Guest review by Dennis Hamley: THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE by Jonathan Coe

 

"A superb book. You’ll have to work hard at it. But the rewards are intensely satisfying." 

Dennis Hamley's first novel, Pageants of Despair, was published in 1974. He read English at Jesus College, Cambridge, and has a PhD from Leicester. After teaching, lecturing and acting as County English Advisor for Hertfordshire, he retired to write full-time. He has written widely for children and young adults; one of his best-known books, The War and Freddy, was shortlisted for the Smarties Prize. His recent adult novel, The Second Person from Porlock, is a fantasy riff on the chaotic life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and was published in 2021. His highly-acclaimed novel Spirit of the Place will be reissued by Writers Review Publishing later this year. He lives in Oxford with his wife Kay, an artist.

Yes, Jonathan Coe is indeed a brilliant author. Acerbic about society and especially its politics, profound understanding of human, especially sexual, relationships, sometimes a bit of cosy crime, very funny – no wonder Bob Mortimer, himself a cosy crime author, says ‘My comfort read is anything by Jonathan Coe.’ But I think The Proof of my Innocence is anything but comfortable. Funny but alarming.

How many of us have been irritated by that persistent cry of 'See it, say it, sorted' which assaults our ears on train journeys? Well, it certainly annoys the first character, as yet unidentified, who we meet in the short, intriguing prologue. But the book has three parts. Guess what each of the three parts is called. A typical Coe joke. So why is Proof different in kind from its predecessors?

Phyl has come down from university. The only job she can find is preparing sushi at Heathrow airport. Back home, her mother Joanna, vicar of a small parish, is expecting an old university friend to call in on his way to a conference. Christopher Swann writes a much-read left-wing political blog and the conference he is bound for is the first of a group which calls itself British TrueCon. He knows he will not be welcome. He brings with him Rashida, his adopted daughter. She and Phyl will later make a formidable partnership.

Christopher and Joanna first met at St Stephen’s College, Cambridge, to which all the main characters went. I presume that the fictional St Stephen’s is based on Trinity College, the college of treachery, to which Burgess, Maclean and Philby went and of which Blunt was a fellow. Coe was at Trinity himself so he knows what he is talking about. The implication seems to me to be that the TrueCon gathering is not just a Reform-lite party conference but something sinister, treacherous and dangerous. Emeric Coutts, fellow of St Stephens, is the eminence grise. He runs salons in the college for like-minded students. This reminds me of the Apostles, a real subversive Cambridge secret society. When a Coutts salon is over and students leave, a few stay behind and disappear with Coutts into an adjoining room in which, presumably, really secret - and dangerous - discussions ensue.

These people are not playing politics. They are murderous. During the Truecon conference, Swann is murdered. Or is he? The strange ending of the book suggests otherwise. It parallels an odd incident on the notorious Fish Hill, three miles east of Evesham, during Swann’s drive to the conference. If the ending is ‘true’, perhaps he never got there.

The story continues teasingly obliquely. Odd footfalls in the memory. What is the significance of the old ballad, Oh you have been poisoned, oh Randall my son? Who has poisoned him? His sweetheart. What will he leave her? A rope from hell to hang her.

A Rope from Hell. The title of a novel by Peter Cockerill, a famous writer who commits suicide. Or does he? Somebody does. The trouble is, we can never be sure who we are talking to. Nothing is ever what it seems. This tightly constructed novel seemingly moves with the inconsequentiality of dream. Or nightmare.

As a final joke, the story begins on the first day of Liz Truss’s doomed premiership and ends on the day of its ignominious conclusion.

 
A superb book. You’ll have to work hard at it. But the rewards are intensely satisfying. The clue is in the title.

The Proof of my Innocence is published by Viking.

See also Dennis's feature on his novel The Second Person from Porlock.

EIGHTH BIRTHDAY SPECIAL FEATURE: our best reads of 2024 so far, by Adèle Geras, Linda Newbery and Celia Rees

 

Part two of our 8th birthday celebration!

Adèle:

Lionel Shriver's new novel Mania is about the near future where cleverness has been forbidden and it's a crime to be clever. There is no distinction between intelligence and stupidity, but no one is to be called stupid or dumb or thick or any synonym for these words. This conceit is taken to the extreme: our protagonist, Pearson, almost loses her job as a college lecturer because she dares to teach The Idiot by Dostoevsky in one of her courses. She was born a Jehovah's Witness but has escaped from her background and now has a husband who's a tree surgeon and three children. She has a son and a daughter, (born with the use of a donor) who are very clever indeed. Her second daughter, born to Pearson and her husband after the introduction of the new laws, becomes a danger to the household by her adherence to the rules. The results of such a law play out in disasters. Bridges collapse. Planes fall out of the sky. Doctors are no longer required to study medicine. There is no such thing as intellectual rigour or careful science. So far, so Swiftian. It's written with all the sharpness and brio we associate with the author of We need to talk about Kevin but it's also about the importance of close friendship and love (of your spouse and your children) and personal betrayal and forgiveness. It's about the way we navigate our lives in the face of horrendous goings on in the wider world. It's quite a short book and very fast moving and even if you don't agree with Shriver's take on things, you will never not want to turn the page.

I haven't yet watched the Netflix version of One Day by David Nicholls but I was very upset by the book because (no spoilers!) it didn't end in the way I was expecting. His latest novel You are Here is a joy from start to finish. And starting and finishing is relevant. It's about a walk undertaken by a group of people: the Coast to Coast walk. Maps are provided throughout and many details about this walk are included seamlessly in the story. The main narrative is about two people: Michael, a Geography teacher with problems and an editor, Marnie, who is also far from happy in her private life. She has made the mistake of bringing some work along with her for the walk and her descriptions of the book she's editing and her remarks about editing in general are a really hilarious highlight. The fact that Michael teaches Geography is a short cut to having the landscape and natural surroundings described for us with enormous skill and subtlety. We learn things without knowing we're learning them. I try to say as little as possible about the plots of novels but this is the perfect book to take on holiday. It's truly engaging and engrossing and totally satisfying. Read it before it's on Netflix.

My final choice is a poetry book. Nic Aubury writes short, rhyming poems in the Wendy Cope tradition and I guarantee that even if you think poetry is not your thing, you will find something here to make you laugh and think at the same time. The collection is called Things my Children Think I'm Wrong About. Instead of telling you about it, I will quote two poems in full. They're that short!

No Right Turn

We'd rather go on suffering the pain of our mistakes,
pretending this was really what we wanted all along,
and promising to see it through, no matter what it takes,
than face the mild discomfort of admitting we were wrong.

Polonian

If I were more convincing and
my children more convincible
then this would be the wisdom I'd impart:
be ready to abandon an
opinion, not a principle,
and learn to tell those different things apart.

Linda: 

All Among the Barley by Melissa Harrison is set in rural Suffolk in 1933, narrated (with hindsight) by fourteen-year-old Edith. The First World War is still a recent memory, the farm affected by the loss of Doble's son and the emotional scarring of horseman John, while there are also foreshadowings of the war to come, brought into focus by the arrival of Constance, a young journalist from London. At first Constance seems to offer Edith an escape route from the inevitability of marriage to a local lad, childbearing and farm work; but her obsession with rural traditions soon reveals a disturbing affinity with Nazi ideals of nationalism and racial 'purity'. Melissa Harrison's beautiful observations of countryside, weather and routines give the novel a real grounding in time and place, with a sense of wistfulness - the corncrakes, nightjars and turtle doves are part of Edith's experience but largely lost from ours.

Middle England by Jonathan Coe moves from 2010 through general elections, the Brexit referendum and London Olympics and on to 2018 (in the future at the time of publication). Known as a chronicler of our times and the various attitudes, biases and aspirations of the public, Coe looks at this turbulent time from the perspectives of characters including political journalist Doug, Ben Trotter who finds unexpected success as a novelist, and lecturer Sophie who deplores her mother-in-law’s casual racism, finds herself at serious odds with her new husband over Brexit and is suspended from her university post over a casual remark to a transgender student. In this larger-than-life, still topical, left-leaning but not one-sided novel, Coe blends pathos, seriousness and comedy with a deft touch. I especially enjoyed the snippy conversations between socialist Doug and a Downing Street press apologist for ‘Dave’ (i.e. Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton). 

Lauren Bravo's How to Break Up with Fast Fashion may seem a peculiar choice for someone too old and certainly not enough interested in fashion to be the target audience. But a friend lent it to me because I was organising a Clothes Swap for Great Big Green Week, and I found it both entertaining and a source of information and advice. Knowing nothing of Lauren Bravo, I immediately warmed to her humour and empathy. Once a self-confessed fashion victim, she challenged herself to a year of nothing new, and realised how addicted she'd become to the thrill of seeking out and buying new garments - something the fashion industry is adept at encouraging, with temptations and 'must-haves' flaunted everywhere. Alongside shocking facts about the waste and pollution of fast fashion and the abysmal working conditions and pay for many textile workers, she suggests ways to do better: seeking out charity shop bargains or vintage clothes; swapping with friends; hiring outfits for special occasions like weddings instead of buying something that will spend the rest of its life in a wardrobe; and of course simply buying less and making the most of what we already have. She looks too at ethical fashion and how to avoid 'greenwashing'; most brands now make some kind of sustainability claim, but how can we be sure we're not paying for worker exploitation, use of hazardous chemicals in the dyeing process, or animal abuse? There are websites such as Good On You and Ethical Consumer where fashion brands are assessed and compared. An irresistible read that looks beneath the surface of new-new-new.

Celia Rees

I first read George Orwell's 1984 in the sixties but I was seeing so much that is relevant to our world now, that I really had to re-read it. The year, 1984, is never mentioned in the novel. Clearly, the writer's deliberate choice. One neat theory is that Orwell reversed the numbers of the year in which he was writing his dystopian future, arriving at 1984. Sufficiently distant, but unsettlingly close. When 1984, the actual year, arrived, Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister. I remember her crowing that Orwell had got it wrong and I remember thinking, 'No, you're wrong, Maggie. He was spot on.' 1984 is a novel of no time and all time. Orwell was writing when television was in its infancy. Now his tele screens are everywhere. I'm looking at one now and have another beside me on my desk, another downstairs in the living room and still others scattered round the house. We carry the means of our own surveillance in our homes and outside it we have CCTV and Facial Recognition. The slogan Orwell coined, Big Brother Is Watching You, is universally recognised. He might be, might not be, we don't know, not for sure, but we've made sure that he can. So much of the novel has uncomfortable modern resonance. The world has changed in ways he could not have imagined but the underlying impulse towards totalitarian power and control that he foresaw remain the same. The destruction of language and thought complexity, which he calls Newspeak, is present in the deliberate limitations of X (ex Twitter) and TikTok and in the Gifs, text language and emojis of WhatsApp, social media posting and messaging. The inversions of meaning: Ministry of Truth for Lies,  Love for Hate, Peace for War, and so on, are present in Alternative Facts, False Truths, Fake News and are part of of our everyday lives. Technology has brought Orwell's dystopia that much closer. He might not have got it all right, but he gave use fair warning. Let's hope we heed it.     

The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. I first came to Jon Ronson through his podcast series, Things Fell Apart. The title is taken from the W. B. Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. In the first series, Ronson looked at the plethora of conspiracy theories swirling on the internet and traced them back to their sometimes surprising origins. The second series, explored the culture wars and did pretty much the same thing. Ronson is an engaging journalist but beneath his informal, gonzo, faux naive cover he is a serious and meticulous investigator. The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with the disclaimer: This is a true story. It then goes on to describe how a man hurls himself at his office wall convinced that he has the power to pass through it into the office next door by mind and will power alone. He doesn't, of course. He ends up with a bruised nose. All a little bit weird and quirky, except that he is a Major General,  the U.S. Army's Chief of Intelligence with 16,000 soldiers under his command.  From this starting point, Ronson tracks backwards to the Vietnam War and 1960's alternative culture, forwards through the U.S. Military top secret psyops goat staring operations to the chilling application of torture techniques developed during the Bush Administration's war on terror. 

Empire of Pain by Patrick Redden Keefe is the story of the Sackler family, one of the richest families in the world, best known, until relevantly recently, for their patronage of the arts, museums and academia. Their name adorned the walls of the National Gallery, the Tate, the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, Harvard and Oxford Universities but a visitor to any of those institutions today, would find that name removed. Empire of Pain tells us why. Extraordinarily secretive, three generations of Sacklers deliberately obscured the source of their immense fortune.  It lay in the manufacture and marketing of two highly addictive drugs that they made ubiquitous, first the tranquillizer, Vallium (Mother's Little Helper) and then the powerful, opioid painkiller, OxyContin. The relentless, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, particularly the claims that the drug was virtually non addictive, generated thirty billion dollars of income for the Sackler family and triggered an opiate epidemic in America that has brought misery to millions of Americans and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The story of how this happened, the unmasking of the family behind the crisis and the extraordinarily challenging task of bringing them to account is unputdownable. A real life thriller.  

Don't miss the guest post by our birthday guest, award-winning crime writer Simon Mason!

Guest review by Graeme Fife: WHAT A CARVE UP! by Jonathan Coe

"This exceptional novel is funny, shocking, merciless. But there is great tenderness in it, too ... "

Graeme Fife has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is now a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography and works of history. Great Cycling Climbs, which brings together his books on the French Alps, is published by Thames and Hudson. He says, 'I urge everyone to buy from their independent bookshop, if they're lucky enough - as I am - to have one nearby. If not, by any means possible to counter the sprawl of the online consumer graball.'

Some reflections on satire.

The acidulous Roman poet Juvenal, a satirist of ferocious bile, no great smiler, described the subject matter of his work as a farrago of all human activity – wishes, fears, anger, pleasures, joys – and the Latin word satura, meaning a hodge podge stew, seems to have some radical links with satire itself. Jonathan Swift spoke of the driving force of his own satire as saeva indignatio, savage, as in wild beast, indignation as in rage at the unworthy. Imagine the satirist’s tools as medical instruments: the scalpel of intelligence, the lancet of insight, the defibrillating pads of indignation and the saline drip of laughter, denounced by the tyrant King John – ‘that idiot, laughter…a passion hateful to my purposes’. O, how the swaggering, dimwit bully hates to be scoffed at. (White House: copy.)

To this design of scrutiny, the investigation of human corruption, enter Jonathan Coe, a writer of formidable skill, brio and intelligence. This exceptional novel is funny, shocking, merciless. But there is great tenderness in it, too, a tenderness expressed in the lives of certain of the characters who are unwittingly caught up in the main action of the story which centres on the activities, sinister and deeply immoral, of the members of two generations of the Winshaw family. Landed not-quite toffs, rich, unprincipled, influential and without a single Brownie point for decency among them.

You know, by now, that it is never my policy to outline the plot or substance of the narrative of a book. No spoilers. Simply, this is a glorious treat. The Winshaws form a gallery of grotesques, in the best tradition of all blistering satire from Aristophanes on. Coe holds nothing back in his dissection of grubby motive, calculating greed, shallow flamboyance, cynical exploitation, misuse and abuse of those whom they might call necessary victims of their manipulation, and if this begins to sound rather too bitter, be assured, the aloe of Coe’s fury is most adroitly sweetened with a generous frosting of riotous humour. It’s almost beyond me to restrain myself from quoting a particular example of that humour which packed such a jolt, a full volley of outrageous self-absorption, in one of the Winshaw nasties. No, you must find it yourself and enjoy the delicious moment, the shattered glass, as it were.

It’s not often that a novelist cites such an extended list of books – of reference and description – in the acknowledgements, but it’s very clear from the text itself, that Coe has carried out meticulous research into various areas which demand a high level of precision in the matter of the narrative and in the cruel detail of what is being perpetrated by the villains on whom the focus rests. The sale of arms, the corruption of the food chain, the lies, falsehoods and blatant contradictions of popular journalism, the contamination of morals, an undercurrent of mystery about the death of one of the Winshaw sons, all overlaid with the bilious sheen of hypocrisy, the ruthless profiteering…

The title comes from a film whose storyline frames the plot of the novel. It’s a trope of a connection but one with which Coe plays a mischievous game of hide and seek. Secret doors, labyrinthine subterranean passages, mirroring the devious miscreance of the family, in a Gothic pile stuck on a windswept moorland in Yorkshire, a decrepit butler who’s served the family for years, his crumbling physique pointing up their moral decadence, and an ageing maiden aunt, who may not be as daft as the family claim her to be, banged up in an institution by a malevolent brother.

Into the picture come innocents drawn in for various reasons, hapless, but not stupid, participants in the drama that clutches at them with grasping and fraudulent purpose, reckless criminality cocooned in the PPE of privilege and money, but insulated by their innocence. If the villainy doesn’t quite brush off them, it doesn’t cling and their very contrasting humdrum existence stands as a relieving foil to the dark antics of their would-be tormentors. It’s part of Coe’s deft brilliance that he avoids all sentimentality, that his characterisation is considered, rounded, truthful. Grotesques, I say, yes, but all entirely credible, if written large, as satire must always be to deliver the full force of dismay. Can people be so depraved? Is it really true that fortunes are made out of the misery of many by a grasping few? Do tyrants actually think along the lines of never missing the opportunity presented by a disaster? Is lapis lazulis blue?

Coe’s novel is a cracking story, a novel of great humanity, a perfect exemplar of the true satirist’s propulsion: saeva indignatio.

What a Carve Up! is published by Penguin.

More reviews by Graeme Fife:

A Telling of Stones by Neil Rackham
West of Sunset by Stuart O'Nan
Adolfo Kaminsky: a Forger's Life by Sarah Kaminsky
Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu
Beside the Ocean of Time by George Mackay Brown
Moby Dick by Herman Melville