[I’m reading this 2024 satire in sections. I write about what I’ve read before reading on, and so far I have finished two sections of the novel’s five. Spoiler alert: If you read this running commentary, you will find out everything that happens in the book as I read it.]
24 October 2025
Prologue and Part 1
This is clever in so many ways I’m not going to try to list them. I’m sure its cleverness will keep coming up in the things I write…. The Prologue might lead us to think we’re in for a satirical state of the nation novel, and we’re not wrong. But in Part 1 it’s as though Jonathan Coe has changed horses. Suddenly we’re in the kind of ‘cosy crime’ novel that two of the characters mock in the Prologue. There’s a twist—what else would you expect in a crime novel?—because this new section continues the story of one of these characters. It’s a jokey metafictional device that confirms for the reader, if we hadn’t cottoned on already, that any hard realities Coe deals with are going to be wrapped up in an entertaining pastiche. What is this, cosy political satire? Or hard truths masquerading as comedy? We’ll see…
…but I need to rewind. The Prologue is really a long chapter in a conventional-seeming Jonathan Coe novel. We’re immediately in a 2020s world, in which a university English graduate wonders what on earth she’s going to do with her life. 68 days after leaving a non-Oxbridge university—she knows it’s 68 days, because that’s her Wordle streak—she is in her middle-class parents’ garden on a day off from her fill-in job on the food assembly-line at a fast sushi joint. It’s mindless, and fifteen miles away by erratic public transport at Heathrow’s Terminal 5.
How many 2020s tropes has Coe already nodded to in the first few pages? I’ve mentioned at least three, and soon another one comes along. Phyl—this can only be short for Phyllis, a preposterous name to have been saddled with in the year 2000—is irritated by the man in the airport lift who thinks she’s too lazy to press the door-close button. He presses it, the doors close—as Phyl knows it always does after a delay that can’t be overridden—and silently congratulates himself, she assumes, by this proof of his can-do maleness. Good old Jonathan Coe, making a dig not only at male attitudes, but at the predictability of a young woman’s reaction. Is nobody safe? Certainly not Gen Z—not only Phyl, but also Rashida, the adopted, Americanised African daughter of the friend who is staying with them. Rashida, just arrived at Heathrow from the States, makes exactly the same point about a different man in the same lift… and pretty soon she and Phyl discover, like all Gen Z-ers in Coe-land, a shared addiction to Friends re-runs. How we laughed.
Who (and what) else does Coe have a dig at? Comfortable semi-rural living on the edge of the Cotswolds. Oxbridge friends who can’t talk about anything else when they’re together, even in company. Parents who know nothing about their children’s lives, and vice versa—and don’t really care anyway. Sixty-something Oxbridge graduates who think they still know more than anybody else—except, this time, with a twist. As time goes on it seems that Christopher Swann, the university friend of Phyl’s mother Joanna, might not merely be another boring leftie conspiracy theorist. Because the really big thing that is happening is the election of Liz Truss as leader of the Tories and, therefore, the Prime Minister who will automatically replace the hated (or loved) Boris Johnson.
Ah, this is the big one, the thing people always mention about this novel. Christopher has paid what is no doubt a lot of money for a ticket to attend the upcoming conference of a corporate-funded ultra-right splinter-group of the Tory party. It’s to take place in a nearby Cotswolds hotel, the huge former stately home of an aristocratic fellow-traveller. OK. Joanna has told Phyl and the others that Christopher is something of a fantasist, that nobody takes his political blog seriously—and especially to ignore his fears for his life from the ultra-right. But later, in Part 1, we discover—not to our surprise as liberal readers of Jonathan Coe novels—that she’s probably wrong. Or she might be, how should I know? There are almost exclusively right-wing Tories attending the conference—and that’s where he later becomes the victim of murder. Red herring? Or is he dead because he knew too much? This novel definitely isn’t only a bit of knockabout fun. The ultra-right is a dangerous thing in Coe-land—as it is in Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road, 2024’s other scathing State of the Nation satire. Until Reform came along in 2024, these extremist Tories were the obvious target.
But I’m not telling you the plot. Swann is staying a few days at the vicarage—I forgot to mention Joanna is a vicar—before the conference is to open. He’s super-bright, easy to dismiss as a political dilettante, and separated from his successful (and no doubt rich) American wife. He gets on well with Rashida, who is doing a master’s in business management, sharing a joke with Phyl early on about how ridiculous it is to do useless degrees like English. Phyl tells he she’s an English graduate, Rashida apologises… but, really what is she going to do? How about—come on Jonathan, let us have it—becoming a writer? It would help if she had any experience, either of life or of the writing process. And on a stroll through the town—2020s trope alert—now run-down and full of charity shops, they see in the window of one of them a display of cosy crime novels. Ah, she thinks, that’s it. She’ll learn the craft of writing by practising with a crime novel…
…which is what we think we’re reading when Part 1 opens. If Ian McEwan can do it in Atonement, wrong-footing the reader with some clever narrative games, why can’t Jonathan Coe? Whatever, we realise it’s far too knowing for the wet-behind-the ears Phyl to manage, but Coe goes with a new set of tropes, right down to a ‘locked room’ mystery that turns out to be no such thing. The about-to-retire detective is as quirky as any that the amateurish Phyl was coming up with in her desultory preliminary plans, and she’s the one given the task of providing the feed for Coe’s punchline. She’s already mentioned the hackneyed ‘locked room’ device, and goes on: ‘Now, a mediocre writer … will invent some unlikely contrivance such as a secret passage. Obviously, we must approach the problem without resorting to fantasies like that.’ We know there’s definitely going to be one. And guess what—most of the main suspects definitley know about it.
These are Roger Wagstaff, a guru of the Right (and once a student at Oxford with Joanne and Christopher Swann); his PA Rebecca Wood (ditto), his biggest fan and almost certainly his long-time lover; Lord Wetherby, the owner of the hotel-cum-stately home; and a literary professor who seems to have nothing to do with any of it, called in at the last minute to give a talk on Peter Cockerill, an unusually right-wing novelist mysteriously killed years ago. Before dying from multiple stab wounds, Swann had managed to scrawl ‘8/2’—Rebecca’s room number, but also, if Swann was still using the American form of writing dates, the code of a sensitive document outlining Wagstaff and his cronies’ big-money/big pharma plans for carving up the NHS. Maybe it also refers to Lord Wetherby in some way too, not that it particularly matters. It’s all fluff anyway.
Because the whole whodunit framing device is mostly just an entertaining McGuffin. Coe has Phyl highlight this even before we get to the story: ‘how hard could it be? Take an idyllic rural setting, “quintessentially English”, whatever that meant, throw in a cast of clergymen and pub landlords and cricket umpires, devise a cursory murder plot. There would have to be a detective, she supposed, someone quirky and unusual – maybe give them a wooden leg or a weird hobby like collecting butterflies or riding a penny-farthing. It would be like writing a student essay: all you had to do was to make sure that you structured it properly and followed the agreed formula….’ We expect Coe will give his detective her moment in the sun—or in the drawing room, with the suspects all there, looking nervous—but the real subject, right from page 1, is Britain in 2022. Quintessentially English? Definitely—but not in the way the ‘agreed formula’ usually pans out.
Roger Wagstaff is a suspect because Swann has a copy of his ‘Second of August’ plot to turn the NHS into a cash cow. It’s on a memory stick that Wagstaff has had Rebecca take, then return, in a cloak-and-dagger episode the detective easily uncovers. Having checked Swann isn’t bluffing, why wouldn’t Wagstaff have him bumped off? But that scrawled ‘8/2’ is specifically Rebecca’s room number. And here’s a coincidence. Rebecca was investigated in connection with the accident that killed Peter Cockerill—the young right-wing novelist—all those years ago, and is keen to remind everyone that she was cleared…. Meanwhile, Lord Wetherby has a motive because Swann had noticed that in a painting celebrating an ancestor’s wealth and enterprise, the ship portrayed in it had been notorious for the part it played in the slave trade. So what? So, this is 2022, and if you want to get a big restoration grant from the bodies that might give it to you, you don’t want it out in the open that the property involved was built on the profits from slavery. And getting things out in the open is what Swann is good at. Or was, before he was stabbed to death.
Are there any other unsacred cows that Coe goes after? There seems to be something on every page, not that I can call them to mind just now. You get the idea—but I need to mention somebody else of interest to the little Oxford coterie behind the Tory Right splinter-group holding the conference—i.e. Roger Wagstaff and his emeritus professor mentor. This is, or was, Brian Collier, Joanna and Chistopher’s best friend at university. He had studied medicine and had lived his own useful life, but before his death from cancer (I think) he had written a memoir and sent a copy of the manuscript to Joanna. Swann is really interested in reading it in the Prologue and asks to borrow it. But she says she’ll keep hold of it—and, at the end of Part 1, the detective is just about to read it for herself. And reader, the memoir is what becomes Part 2.
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