“Repeating myself has always been one of my fears as a writer,” Jonathan Coe tells me, “but I’ve come round to the opinion that a lot of writing is finding new ways of repeating yourself.” We’re talking over Zoom about Coe’s new novel The Proof of My Innocence – but first some admin. Coe, speaking from his home in London, apologises for his cat, “who is going to join the meeting as well, in a very vocal way.”
His observation about repeating himself is in response to my question about how his books have become increasingly political. Four of his last five novels have dealt with British politics either as subject or background material: Number Eleven (2015) covered the period from the Iraq War to the coalition government’s austerity policies; Middle England (2018) had Brexit in the background; and Bournville (2022) features the rise of Boris Johnson.
Now comes The Proof of My Innocence, an intricate, cleverly structured comedy that, as well as affectionately playing with literary genres from cosy crime to autofiction, and incorporating elements from episodes of Friends to a great joke about the word “bishopric”, happens to be set over the turbulent weeks of Liz Truss’s premiership in 2022. So, has he become more political, or have the times simply become more irresistible?
“It’s something I’ve always done, since I was in my 20s,” Coe replies. (His cat mews, either in agreement or protest.) Early novels such as A Touch of Love (1989) and, most famously, What a Carve-Up! (1994) “engaged with recent British politics head-on” and, he suggests, it was his later non-political novels that were the aberrations. “I felt a bit pigeonholed as a political novelist after The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004), and I reacted against that quite dramatically.”
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His next novel, The Rain Before It Falls (2007), was “a totally non-political, introspective, lyrical family saga” and, he adds, “a flop commercially”. But he “dug my heels in” and wrote more non-political novels, until he reread parts of What a Carve-Up! and “there’s a real palpable sense of an author enjoying himself, and I just wanted to get back to that sense of fun in the writing, which seemed entwined with the political subject.”
[ Bournville by Jonathan Coe: Comedy borne from tragedyOpens in new window ]
With Number Eleven, “it felt like a bit of a stylistic homecoming. I felt that was my natural vein, and I should stick with it from then on. So it’s not that I’ve got more political in the last 10 years. It’s just I’ve realised that I write best when there’s a bit of that ticking away in the background.”
Speaking of the background, Coe’s cat has become more and more vocal, distracting the author as he tries to talk. (“Shut up!”) Eventually, we pause while Coe removes him to another room. “Come on, you.”
Our conversation resumes, cat-free. The Proof of My Innocence, he explains, is not just about Truss’s calamitous period in office. “The book is also about the radicalisation of the Conservative Party and how the conservative movement on both sides of the Atlantic has become more and more extreme in the last few years.”
We can’t have an argument about reality because we can’t agree what reality we’re talking about
This has been characterised by what can only be described as a departure from reality by some parts of the right. One character in the novel describes Truss’s rise to the top as “Britain’s final severance from reality”. And this fits into the larger plot of the book, which is about reality and fiction – about books and writers; and that palpable sense of a writer having fun that Coe mentioned earlier is all over it. The Proof of My Innocence is, as well as being political, also one of Coe’s most purely entertaining books, and one of the greatest literary treats I’ve experienced this year.
Back to Truss. (I think I preferred the cat.) “What has interested me more recently,” says Coe, “is the narrative that Liz Truss has evolved in order to make sense of her experience as PM. She’s telling everybody that it was the British ‘deep state’ that thwarted her. It plays into this idea that modern conservatives have, that they’re victims. Even if they have ostensible political power, they’re victims because all the cultural and institutional power has been seized by the left. Because if you’ve been 14 years in power and everything is still going wrong, you have to evolve a story to explain that. It fascinates me as an example of the incompatible stories we’ve started to tell ourselves; we can’t have an argument about reality because we can’t agree what reality we’re talking about.”
Coe enjoyed writing the cosy crime section of the novel, he says, though he’s at pains to add that “it’s not that I’m making fun, it’s more that I’m joining in the fun”. But it was also “tough” to write “because I had to plot it very carefully”. The second genre he plays with is “dark academia” – think of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History – which is the memoir of a man looking back at his university days.
It was “good to write because Brian’s voice in that section is very much mine. His experience is very much mine. I was going back to my own time at Cambridge 40 years ago, which I’ve never written about before, and writing it in a very straightforward, confessional way.”
Another theme in the book is the fleeting nature of literary fame. One character is a long-forgotten novelist, Peter Cockerill, who believes his books were overlooked because of his right-wing politics. But the novel also evokes real-world examples: one young character has never heard of once-prominent literary figures such as Martin Amis (whose novel Money has a key role in Coe’s book) and Beryl Bainbridge.
“As a writer in your 20s or 30s,” Coe says, “you can comfort yourself with the idea that you’ll eventually find your readers, your place in history and so on. But as you inch your way – as I am – into your 60s, you start to realise it’s only a very, very tiny handful of very lucky novelists who get remembered after they die.”
Speaking of Amis, he once said that being read after you die is the only thing that matters. Does Coe think about things like that? “Not any more. Increasingly, my novels are written to the moment, and I used to worry, will this reference be understood in five years’ time, or in France or Italy? But now I think the key thing is to capture the texture of the here and now. And it’s other aspects of the novel that will help the book to travel either geographically or in time. But even if you write much better novels than I do, there is absolutely no guarantee that you won’t be forgotten minutes after your death.”
In The Proof of My Innocence, one character, recent graduate Phyl, decides that she’d like to write a book; we’re told she felt “a growing need to put words on a screen”. Does that describe Coe too? Would he be unhappy not writing?
“Definitely. I’ve realised that writing is a necessity for me. And that’s why I’m getting increasingly prolific, because the interval between finishing a book and itching to start a new one is getting smaller and smaller.” Coe writes from 10am until 6pm every day, “and as I’m sure my family will tell you, I become pretty detached from the world around me when this is happening, toward the end of a book in particular. I’m present, but I’m not present, at the dinner table. ‘You’re talking to your imaginary friends again, aren’t you?’ my wife would say to me.”
To return to the political topic of the book: I wonder, given Coe’s obvious distaste for the British political right – at least some prominent elements of it – how he feels about the new Labour government.
“The morning after the election felt to me like waking up in a safe room, having been in an abusive relationship for 14 years. I’m still in that mode. [Keir] Starmer isn’t perfect, as far as my own personal politics are concerned. But they’ve been left with an almost impossible legacy. And it’s both pathetic to see the kind of things the right-wing press are attacking them over, and also kind of heartening, because some of it is so petty that they’re scrabbling around for points of criticism.”
Before we finish, I observe that Coe is not just popular in Britain and Ireland. He has a strong following in Europe as well, particularly, as he touched on earlier, in France and Italy. Why does he think he appeals to readers in these countries?
“There’s a lot of anglophilia in these countries, a lot of admiration for British – and Irish – writing. It’s never been stressed enough what a great cultural export our novelists have been over the last few decades. You go into any French or German or Italian bookshop and you will see a lot of British writing available there.”
Also, he adds, “a lot of them read my books to get a window into contemporary Britain, which is a slightly alarming thought. I try to put that to the back of my mind when I’m actually writing the books, because what I’m writing is very much my take and my perspective. I do try to impress upon them,” he concludes, “that other narratives about Britain are available.”
The Proof of My Innocence is published by Viking
