Early on in Jonathan Coe’s delicious new novel, an Austrian man called Ludwig reflects on how he stayed in London in 1977, and “at the end of it I was in love with everything I found there: British music, British literature, British television, the sense of humour ...” Praising the people’s “energy and inventiveness” and “extraordinary irony”, he concludes, “And now this same generation is doing ... what? Voting for Brexit, and for Boris Johnson? What happened to them?”
What indeed? Bournville, Coe’s fourteenth novel, is a book of things blended together: comedy with tragedy, England’s past with its present, and cocoa solids with vegetable fat. The setting to which the book always returns is Bournville, near Birmingham in England, a model village created by the Cadbury family for the workers in its chocolate factory in the early 20th century.
Living there is the Lamb family, centred on Mary. As the book opens in 1945, Mary is 11 years old, and the neighbourhood is celebrating VE Day, the end of the war in Europe. But Mary’s mother Doll is half-German, and we get ugly glimpses of one side of English sentiment when her grandfather, a naturalised British citizen but still speaking with a German accent, is attacked by an angry local.
Bournville, subtitled “A Novel in Seven Occasions”, structures itself around key events etched in the modern British psyche: others after VE Day include the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (1953), England’s football World Cup victory (1966), the wedding of Charles and Diana (1981), and the funeral of Diana (1997). Through these events wind the various members of the Lamb clan and their friends and acquaintances. For most of the book, Mary and her children are centre stage.
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The writing is light, touching, often funny, but what we see most clearly is that the dark side of English sensibility typically decried as a modern blight — small-mindedness, racism — has always been there in parts. People make casually prejudiced jokes about natives of Tonga. Prime minister Harold Wilson is dismissed by Mary’s husband Geoffrey as a communist, just as modern left-of-centre leaders are today. Even the character of Mary is not spared, agreeing in the 1960s with the spirit of many in her generation that homosexual men are “the lowest of the low”.
Bournville is not the first Covid novel, but by bringing in the virus years plausibly at the end of a longer story with already-established characters, it becomes the best fictional portrayal of lockdown that I’ve read
But this is a book called Bournville, named after the Cadbury village and its iconic dark chocolate bar, and so chocolate features in one long-running storyline which exemplifies some of the culture clashes that got Britain to where it is today: firmly outside Europe both politically and spiritually. Mary’s son Martin works for Cadbury, and is involved in a dispute between the then European Economic Community and Britain, where some EEC member states insist that Cadbury’s products, adulterated with vegetable fat during the war to make the cocoa go further — and kept in that recipe because English taste buds got used to it — cannot really be called chocolate.
Coe illustrates also how we retrofit events to suit our personal — or national — narrative. It’s routine now to say that the British fought in the second World War as a principled stand to combat fascism. But, says one character in the 1950s, “tell my pals in the army that you were fighting against Fascism — or even just fighting for democracy — and they’d think you were barmy. For them, it was all about self-defence: the Germans wanted to invade us, to take us over, and we were bloody well going to stop them. It was just us against them, you see.”
The final special occasion Bournville includes is the 75th anniversary of VE day but by then, in 2020, two things have happened: Britain has left the EU, and Covid has begun to descend. The story begins in comedy, as a woman tries to get a double bass into a car stuffed with panic-bought toilet rolls, but it is comedy borne from tragedy.
Soon we are in territory familiar yet new: Bournville is not the first Covid novel, but by bringing in the virus years plausibly at the end of a longer story with already-established characters, it becomes the best fictional portrayal of lockdown that I’ve read. Mary Lamb is at its centre, and the chapter where her son Peter reports his Skype communications and her loneliness is exceptional. (It shouldn’t, but does, add poignancy to know that Mary’s Covid experience is based closely on that of Coe’s own mother.)
Bournville is so convincing in its account of Britain’s postwar changes that the recent turmoil in the country’s current affairs, from the prime ministerial revolving door to the handover of the monarchy, feel like a hasty appendix to the book. Coe is, as the cover of my copy says, “a writer of uncommon decency,” but even he cannot hide his anger at the current British government and a certain mop-haired former PM who makes several cameo appearances. Was it always so rotten? What happened? As the book’s refrain puts it, “Everything changes, and everything stays the same.”
