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A review by aiffix
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
A couple of years ago I started writing a series of satirical poems under the title Third World Britain. These poems were to talk about the selling off of the country to private interests. Starting with transports (railway and roads) they would go on to cover communication, health, education, security, justice to finish with administration and politics itself. They were to be my 2p effort to denounce our own laziness. We need to stop getting abused by the people in power and their sophistic arguments: the logic of profit, the balance-sheeting of life, the quantification of everything, mathematics, statistics, arithmetic.
My own laziness caught up with me mid-way through the third poem.
This week, looking for documentation about England in the eighties (for another project of mine, bigger, stronger, even more vulnerable to laziness aggressions) I opened What A Carve Up, Jonathan Coe's fourth novel, written twenty years ago and denouncing, among other things, the selling off of the country to private interests. Coe's satirical novel starts with politics then turns to journalism, art, finance, health, arms and food. The caricature sounds forced at times (but such is the nature of satire), it still remains a sharp, clever and funny attack against the world built by Thatcher and her bed buddy Tony Blair. It also puts an interesting perspective on how much has changed twenty years down the line: processed food is now an organised crime, art is a whore, finance has bankrupted the country, arms are free-wheeling, journalism has been starved and politics has promoted health into the list of luxury items.
The plot walks us through the life of Michael Owen, a failed novelist who spent his last three years locked in his flat watching the same movie video over and over again. Michael has been commissioned by a mysterious Mecene to write the story of the Winshaw, a family who is less a family than a collection of the capital sins. His investigations unveil manipulation, corruption, scorn, greed and murder to an international scale and, circling onto themselves in a typical "Angel Heart" way, reveal the reason of his own involvement in the life of the Winshaw.
Under the conventional aspect of the plot thus summarised and the classicism of the style (which, at times, rings with Wodehousian accents), Coe's novel is a weird object. The very marked and unbalanced architecture is more akin to poetry collections than of novels, while the alternating voices (from first to third persons, from narrator to characters) and the shifting topics would range it along Diderot's Jacques Le Fataliste or Sterne's Tristram Shamby (both of which are referenced in Coe’s novel). A satire it is, but a satire of the old style, from before it got formatted by the modern publishing industry.
But what makes it most enjoyable to read to my French eyes is the use Coe makes of the whole cultural spectrum, with a freedom that is still difficult to find in France. Even though today’s industry tends to change on the other side of the Channel, twenty years ago the divide between the classic and the popular was still an iron curtain. It was impossible for a writer to tap into both cultural sources at the same time. English writers are not hampered by such stupid artificial lines. Coe’s title itself, What A Carve Up, is copied from a 1961 comic movie. All of Part II chapter titles are taken from fifties and sixties popular movies. In spite of all these popular references, it is on a quite different piece of work that Coe has based his novel. As hinted by one of the opening dedications, the model to which it constantly refers, in its overall structure as well as in its foreboding theme, is the story of Orpheus and more particularly to Cocteau’s adaptation of the myth. The whole ending is a bittersweet twist on Orpheus's taboo (Never Look Behind!) and on its eventual transgression.
And as Orpheus / Michael, having transgressed, falls to his fate, the novel leaves us exactly where such a baroque piece of work is expected to leave us: suspended between an explosive climax and its inescapable albeit non-described consequence. The world has been sold off, the crash is unavoidable, only a miracle could save us now. But we are not dead yet.
My own laziness caught up with me mid-way through the third poem.
This week, looking for documentation about England in the eighties (for another project of mine, bigger, stronger, even more vulnerable to laziness aggressions) I opened What A Carve Up, Jonathan Coe's fourth novel, written twenty years ago and denouncing, among other things, the selling off of the country to private interests. Coe's satirical novel starts with politics then turns to journalism, art, finance, health, arms and food. The caricature sounds forced at times (but such is the nature of satire), it still remains a sharp, clever and funny attack against the world built by Thatcher and her bed buddy Tony Blair. It also puts an interesting perspective on how much has changed twenty years down the line: processed food is now an organised crime, art is a whore, finance has bankrupted the country, arms are free-wheeling, journalism has been starved and politics has promoted health into the list of luxury items.
The plot walks us through the life of Michael Owen, a failed novelist who spent his last three years locked in his flat watching the same movie video over and over again. Michael has been commissioned by a mysterious Mecene to write the story of the Winshaw, a family who is less a family than a collection of the capital sins. His investigations unveil manipulation, corruption, scorn, greed and murder to an international scale and, circling onto themselves in a typical "Angel Heart" way, reveal the reason of his own involvement in the life of the Winshaw.
Under the conventional aspect of the plot thus summarised and the classicism of the style (which, at times, rings with Wodehousian accents), Coe's novel is a weird object. The very marked and unbalanced architecture is more akin to poetry collections than of novels, while the alternating voices (from first to third persons, from narrator to characters) and the shifting topics would range it along Diderot's Jacques Le Fataliste or Sterne's Tristram Shamby (both of which are referenced in Coe’s novel). A satire it is, but a satire of the old style, from before it got formatted by the modern publishing industry.
But what makes it most enjoyable to read to my French eyes is the use Coe makes of the whole cultural spectrum, with a freedom that is still difficult to find in France. Even though today’s industry tends to change on the other side of the Channel, twenty years ago the divide between the classic and the popular was still an iron curtain. It was impossible for a writer to tap into both cultural sources at the same time. English writers are not hampered by such stupid artificial lines. Coe’s title itself, What A Carve Up, is copied from a 1961 comic movie. All of Part II chapter titles are taken from fifties and sixties popular movies. In spite of all these popular references, it is on a quite different piece of work that Coe has based his novel. As hinted by one of the opening dedications, the model to which it constantly refers, in its overall structure as well as in its foreboding theme, is the story of Orpheus and more particularly to Cocteau’s adaptation of the myth. The whole ending is a bittersweet twist on Orpheus's taboo (Never Look Behind!) and on its eventual transgression.
And as Orpheus / Michael, having transgressed, falls to his fate, the novel leaves us exactly where such a baroque piece of work is expected to leave us: suspended between an explosive climax and its inescapable albeit non-described consequence. The world has been sold off, the crash is unavoidable, only a miracle could save us now. But we are not dead yet.