Book Review: Number 11 (2015) by Jonathan Coe

There's a Christmas hamper quality to Jonathan Coe's writing--a really superior Christmas hamper, the kind Fortnum & Mason's sells, or the ones Billy Bunter lusted after. In both Number 11 and its prequel, The Winshaw Legacy, or What a Carve Up! (1994), Coe artfully and fluently combines multiple plot lines, a score of characters, elements of tragedy, farce, comedy, social commentary, and a touch of the the polemical. And in Number 11 Coe does all this while also slipping from one literary genre to another without, as it were, grinding the gears. This novel begins with a subtle pastiche of an Enid Blyton-ish story, then adds an epistolary quest tale, a Holmesian mystery, and ends with something that smacks of Dr Who. As a purely literary experience, Number 11 is almost overstuffed with pleasures.

Rachel and Alison are the central characters, and we meet them at age ten when they're staying with Rachel's grandparents while their mothers are on holiday together. The pair aren't really friends at this point, but after an Adventure with a Mysterious Stranger, the two form a bond that lasts, with some major detours, into adulthood. From this point on the narrative resembles a Venn diagram. The centre circle contains a set of Winshaws, a family of media barons, industrialists, and politicians who define themselves by how savagely they can remake Britain into their own avaricious, graceless, cruel and wanton image. The Winshaws were at the centre of the previous novel, but here it's their influence that's being felt--it's now the Winshaws' Britain, and everyone else is trying to eke out a living in it.

Coe uses his wide cast of characters to give us micro and macro views of what modern Britain has become. There's a failed singer who's lured into a dreadful reality show; an Oxford professor whose husband meets with what could be called death by nostalgia; an insufferably wealthy trophy wife whose architectural ambitions lead to disaster; a Katie Hopkins-like columnist who fabricates a story that sends a woman to jail; and a range of more minor characters who all have their role to play in illustrating the decline and fall of the social welfare state.

Although Coe has a lot to say about the state of the UK, Number 11 is not an editorial or opinion piece dressed up in literary finery. His writing is witty, psychologically acute, elegant, and he's not too proud to throw in the broadest of jokes occasionally. Coe is also acutely aware that his kind of comic writing does little or nothing to influence the political climate. In a section of the novel dealing with the murder of some stand-up comedians, he even argues that political satire can actually be counter-productive since it provides the illusion of lively opposition to people like the Winshaws. Another idea explored in the novel is that the speed and variety of modern communication is a poisoned chalice. A simple typo on SnapChat breaks up a friendship, and the cynical editing of a TV show almost ruins a woman's life. But Coe is not a Luddite. A sub-plot detailing a man's search for a lost film that he saw as a child in the 1960s is a warning that retreating into rosy memories of the past is not a healthy option.

The only problem with Coe's fiction is that it doesn't move at the speed of politics. The Winshaw Legacy seemed outrageous until Tony Blair and David Cameron came along, and Number 11, which was published less than a year ago, would undoubtedly be a much different novel if it had been written in a post-Brexit vote world. Fortunately, that means we're almost certain to get a third novel in this series, one in which Coe shows how the vulturous Winshaws plan and profit from Brexit. I look forward to it already. I even have a possible title: Wrexit.

Book Review: Lionel Asbo (2012) by Martin Amis

I have this mental picture of Martin Amis as a boy: he's standing behind the high, secure fence of the family estate, watching the neighbourhood walk by. Whenever a rough-looking boy or a lad who's clearly from a state school goes past, young Martin shouts out things like "oik" or "spiv" or any other insulting terms he's gleaned from reading Enid Blyton books. If any of the boys glower at him he scampers inside with a final cry of "Filthy street arab!" Flash forward fifty odd years and Martin is up to the same old tricks, only now he's making fistfuls of money for being a witless snob.

Lionel Asbo is a shambolic, unfunny attempt to take a Swiftian look at modern Britain. The title character is, first of all, not a character. Asbo is a grotesque caricature of a violent, alcoholic, half-witted thug, the kind who frequently ends up on the front page of the more lunatic British tabloids because of some depraved crime or an epic social benefits fraud. Asbo is so broad and blunt a caricature he belongs in a cartoon: he's like a vile, adult version of Dennis the Menace from The Beano. Come to think of it, the comic sophistication on show in the novel is on a par with that of The Beano. The story is set largely in the fictional London borough of Diston (Diston/dystopia, get it?), and the local school is called Squeers Free School. Wackford Squeers was the famously cane-wielding teacher from Nicholas Nickleby, which means Squeers Free stands for a lack of discipline! What wit!

Lionel Asbo in action

Martin Amis age eleven

Lionel Asbo is pretty much devoid of plot, or at least a plot that needs to be paid attention to. The first section of the story shows Asbo in all his yob glory, with Amis' curdled wit applied with a fire hose: Asbo has a ghastly accent! Shock! Horror! Asbo then wins a colossal amount in the lottery and the remainder of the story is an equally ham-fisted attempt to satirize the outer limits of celebrity culture; think Katie Price and the Kardashians. Amis fires all his satirical guns in the first third of the novel, so reading the rest soon becomes a real slog.

This is an epic failure as a comic novel, but as a piece of hate literature aimed at Britain's working classes you have to give Amis top marks. I mean, if you really want to dehumanize and ridicule an entire class of people this is the way to do it. Amis offers up a blanket sneer at everyone who, well, isn't just like Amis. Upper and middle-class people do make appearances in the story, and they endure some mild ridicule, but their main role is to act as social backdrops to make the awfulness of Asbo and his peers stand out in greater relief. Amis shows us a Britain filled with what he would call chavs, all of them doing their best to ruin everyone's lives, including their own. What makes Lionel Asbo hate literature is that Amis offers no context or explanation for why, in his view, the UK is overrun with louts; he simply lets fly at the underclasses with both barrels. He detests a certain demographic and is using this book to recruit people to his cause. This is all part and parcel of a recent trend in the UK to slag and mock the working classes by painting them as feckless, promiscuous, slope-browed layabouts. And by demeaning these people it becomes all the easier to deny them social benefits and political power. This trend is discussed brilliantly in a book by Owen Jones called Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, which, as it happens, I've reviewed here. If you really want something funny that's set amongst the Brit underclass, check out a rude, violent BBC sitcom called Bottom (my review here). Unlike Lionel Asbo, it's offensive without being truly offensive.

Book Review: Long Lankin (2011) by Lindsey Barraclough

Lindsey Barraclough is a decent writer, and Long Lankin has a setting and concept that should have created a solid, young adult horror novel. What Lindsey didn't have was a good editor. Like so many horror/fantasy writers Barraclough has an almost OCD-like desire to pile on the scene setting and world-building to the exclusion of plot.

In this case the author seems more interested in creating a portrait of a particular place and time than she is in crafting a compelling story. The action is set in a small village on the English coast sometime in the late 1950s. Two young sisters, Cora and Mimi, are sent from London to live with their Aunt Ida in a house outside the village. Naturally enough, Ida lives in a large, rambling, decaying house that doubles down on the spookiness: cobwebs, frightening portraits of ancestors on the wall, strange noises, hidden passages, and locked rooms that YOU MUST NOT GO INTO UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! The immediate neighbourhood isn't much better. There's a gloomy, semi-abandoned church that YOU MUST NEVER GO NEAR! A cemetery that you are FORBIDDEN TO ENTER! filled with ruined, gaping tombs. And the marsh surrounding Ida's house will SUCK DOWN ALL WHO SET FOOT IN IT! THIS MEANS YOU! Add in an ancient family curse and a child-eating creature and the scene is set.

The above sounds like a surfeit of ingredients for a fun, scary read, but it's pretty much ruined by the author's self-indulgence. Most of this novel is a loving, but misguided, attempt to recreate life in England in the 1950s. Barraclough piles on the period detail with a vengeance. Every detail of lower-middle-class life gets a mention, right down to name-branding all kinds of household products. Things reach a nadir when an entire chapter is devoted to a lengthy description of a village cricket match that's both twee and pointless. And there are pages and pages of this kind of cheap nostalgia. Part of it seems to be an attempt to replicate the style of a particular kind of English kids' lit; the type popularized by Enid Blyton and Arthur Ransome in which a gang of kids get together to solve a mystery in between larking about and sitting down to scarf cream teas. Adult readers might find this kind of homage entertaining, but young readers are probably going to be bored witless. I was.

An editor should have noticed that by the halfway mark very little has happened. We've heard a few things go bump in the night, glimpsed things that might be scary, but beyond that it's been a long, uneventful walk down memory lane. That same editor should have asked Barraclough to trim her novel by a third, if only to prevent trees being felled for no purpose. As I said before, she's a decent writer, but a smooth prose style isn't worth much when the plot is spinning its wheels. It's easy to rip a writer for making mistakes, but no novel gets published without an editor's OK, and in this case the editor in question has done an above average writer a great disservice. Two writers of young adult fiction who are masters of  both prose and plotting are Geraldine McCaughrean and Melvin Burgess. My most recent reviews of their novels are here and here.