This week marked the 8th anniversary of the referendum that saw the UK vote to end our membership of the European Union. The vote caused arguments between friends and neighbours; family rifts (especially between young remainers and older relatives who voted leave) and the end of political careers.
In Middle England, Coe uses the Brexit debate as a key element in his state-of-the-nation novel, depicting characters who are on different sides of the Leave/Remain debate. Though the novel doesn’t come down strongly in favour of either camp, the “leavers” with their racist and homophobic tendencies seemed to be less sympathetically drawn than the “remainers” .
Set in the Midlands and London, the novel covers a period of immense change and disruption in Britain. It starts out with the newly elected coalition government in 2010, taking in the riots of 2011, the euphoric national pride around the 2012 Olympics in London and then the vote to leave the EU. Coe also fleshes out the historical context with references to other news events (a protestor disrupts the Boat Race, a woman MP is murdered).
We see these events through the eyes of multiple characters with the chief focus on Sophie — an art history lecturer married to a driving instructor whose views become increasingly right-wing as the narrative progresses — and her uncle Benjamin a writer whose magnum opus has grown so big he has to carry it in two holdalls.
Around them circle characters who represent different strands of society and levels of satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. So we get Doug, a political journalist and his “smash the system” teenage daughter; a mega wealthy business man whose practices only just keep within the law and Charlie, a children’s entertainer who lives in his car and subsists on food banks.
‘Cameron’s only part of the story anyway,’ Charlie continued. ‘The way I see it, everything changed in Britain in May 1979. Forty years on, we’re still dealing with that. You see – me and Benjamin, we’re children of the seventies. We may have been only kids then, but that was the world we grew up in. Welfare state, NHS. Everything that was put in place after the war. Well, all that’s been unravelling since ’79. It’s still being unravelled. That’s the real story.’
The entertainer isn’t the only character who thinks they have their finger on the pulse of Middle England. The journalist Doug Anderton has been observing the ever widening gulf in British society for years, priding himself on his ability to judge the public mood and concluding that there’s “an incredible fault line running right through British society.” His newspaper columns are highly critical of the social inequalities that have become more apparent yet — irony of irony — he enjoys a privileged life himself, married to an heiress and living in a Chelsea home valued at £6million.
It’s just one of the many examples of humour injected into a novel that has a point to make about the levels of disgruntlement and frustration in the 2000s. Is Middle England the definitive “novel of our era?” I doubt it — I would actually have welcome less of the humour and more of an edge. Still, it was an enjoyable read.
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