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Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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Everything changes, and everything stays the same. That is the overriding mantra of John Coe’s latest book, which tells a nation’s story through generations of the same family. It’s ambitious, it’s clever, and it works! Our first stop is 1945, where we meet Lorna’s grandmother, Mary, as a child, on the eve of the VE Day celebrations. Mary’s parents, Doll and Sam, live in the chocolate-manufacturing suburb of Birmingham that gives the book its title. There is warmth and humour in the portrait of lower middle-class life presented, but it’s not sanitised. A strain of xenophobia bubbles up throughout the episode and climaxes in an act of violence that will echo throughout the book. Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft There are a few good chapters, especially those talking about Cadbury's, but I was dismayed to read in the author notes that the death of Mary Lamb in the novel was an accurate account of the passing of Coe's own mother during the Covid pandemic.

At heart Bournville is a novel designed to make you think by making you laugh, and the seriousness of the subject matter is tempered throughout by the author's piercing eye for the more ludicrous elements of human nature New Statesman I've only read one other Coe novel - Middle England - and from that limited experience it seems that Coe has a tried-and-tested formula: state of the nation novels focusing on a specific (or a number of specific) events in recent(ish) history, and a tight cast of characters who spend a fair chunk of the narrative ruminating on politics and current affairs in said moment in history.When Mary and Geoffrey get engaged, Geoffrey still feels some anxiety, knowing: "he would never quite feel sure of her until the vows were spoken and the wedding ring was on her finger", and she does, in fact, have another suitor; this possibility of how everything could have been different in just slightly different circumstances also hangs nicely over the novel. Unlike most such family sagas, Coe's seven-occasion timeline means that the novel often doesn't cover what are generally significant events in the lives of the characters: from one section to the next, for example, we find family members married or now with kids, while the actual weddings and births happen off-screen. Told with compassion, steadiness, decency and always a glint in the eye, this is a novel that both challenges and delights. For anyone who has felt lost in the past six years, it is like meeting an ally Rachel Joyce, author of Miss Benson's Beetle A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger Evening Standard

During the next three-quarters of a century, Mary will have children and grandchildren and great-children. She will live through the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the 1966 World Cup final (the last time England won), royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, and Bournville itself will gradually disappear into the sprawl of the growing city of Birmingham. Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them * New Statesman * British author Jonathan Coe, European Book Prize 2019 winner". France24. 9 December 2019 . Retrieved 28 November 2021.Jonathan Coe FRSL ( / k oʊ/; born 19 August 1961) is an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! (1994) reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources that was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. Chocolate is another motif that reappears throughout the novel. At a meeting between the German and English branches of the family, an argument develops about whether British or German chocolate is better. As Mary and Geoffrey’s children grow – we revisit the family for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, then for Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 – the story of Britain’s “chocolate war” with the EU plays out. Martin rises within the corporate structure of Cadbury’s, finally going to Brussels to represent the interests of British chocolate. During this period he crosses paths with Paul Trotter (from The Closed Circle) and also with a bumbling, mendacious journalist called Boris. For me a closer comparison would be to Francis Spufford’s Booker longlisted/RSL Encore Prize winning “Light Perpetual” although without the oddly redundant meta-fictional conceit, the welcome exploration of faith and the almost transcendent ending (although see below). Covid και του Brexit, περνώντας από την ενθρόνιση της Ελισσάβετ, το Μουντιάλ της Αγγλίας του 1966, το χρίσμα του Καρόλου ως πρίγκιπα της Ουαλίας (κάποιοι διαμαρτυρήθηκαν ότι ο πρίγκιπας της Ουαλίας θα έπρεπε να είναι Ουαλός), ο γάμος Καρόλου-Νταίάνας, το θάνατο της πριγκίπισσας Νταιϊάνα και "τη μάχη της σοκολάτας" στο ευρωκοινοβούλιο και με αρκετό τρυφερό σαρκασμό για τον Μπόρις Τζόνσον.

Jonathan Coe is chronicler of contemporary events. It’s a style of writing from which he does not waver. If I was to be critical there’s a sense of his writing by numbers; If I'm being positive its apparent that the course of history is endlessly fascinating and so there is a pipeline of lived life for Coe to draw on. You get the feeling Coe even disliked Princess Diana, given the sex scene he places during Tony Blair's speech at her funeral. The sex scene itself is great...but the timing is utterly disturbing. Repugnant, too, when you think how many thousands of people were genuinely hurting that day. Talk about deliberately pissing on a national memory! Coe's interwoven paeans to the lives of those rooted in the very centre of the UK - The Rotter's Club and Middle England among them - blend comedy, tragedy and social commentary in enjoyably memorable fashion, and his latest, Bournville, is no exception . . . Coe's particular gift is to understand how nostalgia, regret and an apprehension of what the future will bring might make us more, not less, empathetic to the frailties of those around us FT, Best Audiobooks of the Year Honorary Graduates of Birmingham City University". Birmingham City University. Archived from the original on 27 August 2018 . Retrieved 28 January 2015.

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As with Johnson, Coe wanted to try to understand the appeal of a man with so many clearly questionable qualities: “Bond is racist, misogynist, egotistical.” Coe recently persuaded his two daughters, both in their early 20s and familiar only with Daniel Craig’s Bond, to watch For Your Eyes Only. They didn’t get past the opening credits: “Is this what you used to watch in the 70s?” they asked.

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