Jonathan Coe’s latest novel is his eleventh — hence its title and recurring number 11 trope. Yet he is still best known for What a Carve Up!, his 1994 satire of Margaret Thatcher’s aftermath. In that novel, the repellent Winshaw family represent the worst of the Tory ruling class — arms dealers, privatisers and Right-wing newspaper columnists — and come to a sticky end.
Number 11 is Coe’s most explicit return to such spirit-of-the-age bile, featuring several of the Winshaws’ ghastly relatives. But might the parameters of satire have changed in the intervening two decades?
The novel opens with its central character, Rachel, and her loss of innocence — most importantly at age 10, in 2003, when she sees news of weapons inspector Dr David Kelly’s death.
This, her mentor concludes, marked a whole generation’s loss of innocence. It is a recurring theme — especially in the story told by this mentor, an Oxford lecturer, of her husband’s obsessive search for a film called The Crystal Garden. His nostalgia for this symbolic fragment of a mundane but secure Birmingham childhood — the time and place of Coe’s own youth, as fictionalised in The Rotters’ Club (2001) — eventually gets him killed.
Coe is hinting that such nostalgia is misplaced — yet also clearly remains ambivalent. After all, the Britain satirised in What a Carve Up! had apparently been robbed of any innocence a decade or so before David Kelly. Indeed the villains of Number 11 look disconcertingly like those of Coe’s earlier novel — only richer and more entrenched.
The targets here are the Right-wing media, the Conservative rulers of austerity Britain and, above all, the London super-rich — whom Rachel ends up serving — extending their Chelsea basements while the poor rely on food banks. “Money itself has begun to drain the life out of this great city,” mourns one character.
This may strike a chord with many Londoners and yet it somehow seems laboured. Not content with ridiculing George Osborne’s certainly ludicrous mantra that “we’re all in this together”, Coe ticks off the evils of austerity Britain. Cuts in library hours? Check. Paying to use a hospital car park while visiting a terminally ill relative? Check. Students forced to pay large sums for garrets? Check. As a satirical novelist you can of course ensure that your Right-wing targets come to a satisfyingly unpleasant end. As in Coe’s 1994 novel, his anti-heroes meet a terrible fate — though it’s not entirely clear whether Rachel has indeed witnessed the culminating horror or succumbed to delusion.
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Or you can just make the bad guys look ridiculous. As ever, Coe is at his most entertaining with his trademark bizarre coincidences and twists of fate. The funniest section of this novel is also the silliest. In The Winshaw Prize, PC Nathan Pilbeam solves the murder of two comedians with the help of psychogeography and Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.
Yet there is some bite to the critique of political comedy of the killer he tracks down: “The ANGER which we should feel towards these people… is released and dissipated in the form of laughter… down with comedy, for fuck’s sake!” Is Coe acknowledging the bluntedness of his own satire? He still has a fine ear for dialogue and mastery of comic plot: this is first-class entertainment. But it never quite draws blood as truly dangerous satire should.
