Jonathan Coe, who has just published his ninth novel, is a respected and much-loved figure on the literary scene, best known for What a Carve Up!, his gothic satire on Thatcherism, and The Rotters Club, his exploration of 1970s boyhood, dramatised by the BBC. But his face is not often in the papers. When he is described, it is as "gentle" and "unassuming"; he is not an actual celebrity.
At least not in the United Kingdom. The only time he has been stopped on the street there, he says, was by an Italian tourist. It may be surprising of a novelist whose books and inspirations (from Robert Wyatt to Rosamond Lehmann to The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) are so English that his biggest audience is on the continent — in France, Italy and Greece.
"I compared my latest French and British royalty statements and was shocked: French sales outstrip British by about four to one. It's the same in Italy." When he writes a book now, he can't help but think how his translators will cope with it: "I don't put in as much punning and wordplay as I used to. I remember getting the Portuguese edition of What a Carve Up! and noticing that not only was it full of footnotes but every footnote said the same thing: ‘This joke cannot easily be translated into Portuguese.'
"There is a great curiosity in continental countries about Britain that we don't reciprocate," Coe points out. "My books give them a window on how British people talk and think and what's been going on politically. I'm regarded as an archetype of a certain kind of English writer."
Essence of Britain
He wanted the context of his latest novel, The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim, "to be, among other things, a sort of British road film, finding narrative interest in a journey along the M40, the A5192 and the A74(M) — names which always sound so prosaic alongside their glamorous American counterparts". One character maintains that England has always been "a more complicated place than people would have us believe".
The book is in part an attempt to find "strangeness at the heart of the deeply ordinary". "If you look hard enough, you can find romance and mystery and dark undercurrents everywhere in life — even in the most unprepossessing places, the Park Inn Hotel, Watford, or the café at Knutsford services. I suppose doing that has, to put it rather grandly, become one of my mission statements as a writer."
Maxwell Sim is, Coe says, "somebody who you wouldn't give a second glance to". Lonely and depressed, he takes a job as a travelling salesman, selling toothbrushes, and sets out on an ill-fated journey to the Shetlands. So bereft is he of a genuine relationship that he develops a strong attachment to his satnav. It is a life that easily provides the rich mixture of comedy and sadness and social observation that is Coe's trademark. As the book progresses, Max's inner life is gradually revealed and it turns out to be, like the country of his birth, much more complicated than we first think.
Coe was born near Bromsgrove, southwest Birmingham, in 1961. His father, a research physicist, and his mother, a music teacher, still live in the house they bought in 1956. Coe had "a very happy and very uneventful childhood". "A lot of novelists write out of trauma," he has said. "I don't. My childhood was almost unnaturally untraumatic." Perhaps this is one source of his fascination with ordinariness. His older brother is a regional sales manager in Worcestershire, a profile that perhaps has a hint of Reginald Perrin or Maxwell Sim about it.
One's own master
At the age of 8, he wrote The Castle of Mystery, episodes from the casebook of a Victorian detective (the first few pages of which appear in What a Carve Up!) and by the age of 15, he had sent off a full-length comic novel to a publisher. Coe went to King Edward's School in Birmingham: "It was a high-pressure environment and because I was anyway quite shy and introverted, I withdrew. I don't thrive on competition, which is one of the reasons novel-writing suits me — you're master of your own territory and no one interferes." Coe admits he looks back on his teenage self "with a kind of despair, which is partly why I satirised myself as much as I could in the character of Benjamin Trotter in The Rotters Club".
Despite his feats of literary precocity, "there was no heavy literary pressure in the background", though Coe was close to his grandfather James Kay, "a warm, funny man, slightly to the Left, politically, a great reader and a fan [like me] of good comedy". TV comedy, especially. "It was the sound of laughter that always drew me ... Of all the reactions your books can get, laughter is the most visible and the most physical. I remember once being on the Tube, watching someone reading Fielding's Tom Jones — one of my favourite novels — and they were laughing. I thought: That's incredible, a man sat in his room 250 years ago, making marks on a piece of paper, and it's producing physical convulsions across the centuries."
In one sense, fiction is Coe's life. Finishing one book "just feels like a natural break in an ongoing process; there'll be another along in a year or two's time". Coe is quietly confident, it is clear, that he will keep producing funny/sad/popular/experimental novels treasured on the continent. Yet "in the back of your mind", he admits, "you have a notion of what a masterpiece would look like and you know you've missed again. So you just pick yourself up, dust yourself down and go back to page 1 with the next."
