And the novel has a surprisingly strong ending also with a passage which echoes one from the start and shows the continuity of societal issues – which is a fundamental theme of the novel (and of course proven by the events since the novel was written - the overdue defenestration of Boris, another Royal death and another Royal coronation … and probably another James Bond film but I do not follow movies). As we travel through seventy-five years of social change, from James Bond to Princess Diana, and from wartime nostalgia to the World Wide Web, one pressing question starts to emerge: will these changing times bring Mary's family—and their country—closer together, or leave them more adrift and divided than ever before? He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.” Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft * Guardian *

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. Coe. Σε τελική ανάλυση, τι ακριβώς είναι σαν βιβλίο; Είναι μια σχετικά ευχάριστη μίνι οικογενειακή σάγκα, με επίκεντρο την αξέχαστη Μαίρη -εμπνευσμένη από την ίδια τη μητέρα του Jonathan Coe- η οποία κάνει την πρώτη της εμφάνιση τη μέρα της νίκης ��το μικρό της χωριό και αντέχει μέχρι… σχεδόν το τέλος του βιβλίου. Τη βλέπουμε σαν 11χρονη, στο τέλος του 2ου Παγκοσμίο Πολέμο, την ακολουθούμε καθώς μεγαλώνει, βρίσκει φλερτ αγάπη και δουλειά, κάνει επιλογή συζύγου (αν και αργότερα της ξεφεύγει πως ίσως ήταν λάθος) και έχει μια… βρετανικά φυσιολογική ζωή. Οι φάσεις της ζωής της που επιλέγει να φωτίσει ο συγγραφέας είναι κάθε περίπου 10 χρόνια, σε ξεχωριστές βρετανικές στιγμές που έχουμε ήδη αναφέρει), δίνοντας χρόνο στην οικογένεια και στη βρετανική κοινωνία κάθε φορά να έχουν αλλάξει τόσο ώστε να αξίζει ν�� επανεκτεθούν στο φακό του Coe. I have previously read two of Jonathan Coe’s novels – his 1994 “What A Carve Up” and 2015 part-sequel “Number 11” – both very readable and enjoyable (if rather didactic and over-preaching to the converted) social satires drawing on English farce and (more oddly) spoof horror movies – the first novel in particular also surprisingly formally inventive. B ournville, we learn from Jonathan Coe’s notes at the end of the novel, is the fourth in a planned quintet he’s writing under the general title of Unrest. This book also overlaps with the trilogy that began with The Rotter s’ Club and continued with The Closed Circleand the Costa award-winning Middle England. All these interweaving plotlines, all the reappearing names, events and, above all, places give the impression of an author whose work is driven by an almost obsessive need to take new perspectives on the past (and its role in shaping the present), to rehearse and re-rehearse foundation myths both personal and national. He has written a short children's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, and a children's story called The Broken Mirror. Both titles are published in Italy only, as La storia di Gulliver (2011) and Lo specchio dei desideri (2012).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! A beautiful, and often very funny, tribute to an underexamined place and also a truly moving story of how a country discovered tolerance' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland Writers have to believe their stories or they won't be able to write them well, or at all. It looks like Coe simply couldn't believe Bournville enough, so he hashed together some odds and ends he had already laying about, filled in the holes with some silicon and called it a novel. The name of a village not just founded upon, and devoted to, but actually dreamed into being by chocolate.

One of the better choices in the book is to have one candidate as a lobbyist for Cadbury in the long-running Chocolate Wars as some other European countries refuse for years to allow English chocolate (with its fat content) to be sold as chocolate – the character’s wife ultimately becoming an MEP based on the strong working knowledge of Brussels they gain. The book’s assertion is that the fat was first added due to wartime shortages and that the British love of UK-style milk-chocolate is effectively a form of post war nostalgia (as an aside there is also the small fact that it tastes delicious). While in Brussels and around the lobby and press group, the character first encounters the tousle haired Boris – and cleverly he re-appears later as a part is set in Cllywd South in Boris’s unsuccessful 1997 general election candidacy (the switch of that very red seat to Conservatives in 2019 when Boris is now party leader also being featured). The treatment of Boris is I felt nuanced – in both Brussels and Wales there is a sneaking admiration for his ability to get people onside through not acting seriously. Later though the Brussels lobbyist despairs that such a character is in charge during COVID times. The author’s note amusingly after the usual disclaimers about resemblances to real people says of his Boris character: “he might, of course, seem familiar to some readers, whether he’s a fictional character or not remains hard to determine with any certainty”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. I can only guess, but it seems like Coe chose a topic and plot structure he couldn't bring himself to work seriously with in the end.

Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them * New Statesman * Bournville is Jonathan Coe's most ambitious novel yet . . . a novel about people and place. Entertaining and often poignant, it presents a captivating portrait of how Britons lived then and the way they live now * Economist * What a Carve Up! (1994); The House of Sleep (1997); The Rotters' Club (2001); Middle England (2019)

His heart sank slightly when he heard about Ian McEwan’s new novel Lessons, published in September, which follows a similar timespan and also offsets personal and historical events. “It just shows that we’re very different kinds of writers,” he says now, having read the novel (he considers McEwan to be one of our finest writers in terms of style). Bournville is written with Coe’s mix of gentle nostalgia and astute social observation, and fans will recognise characters from previous novels (nearly all his characters are connected in some way). If it is less comic than usual, that is hardly a surprise. The other nationality that plays a role is the Welsh. The families visit Wales for a holiday and two of the cousins – Peter Lamb and David Foley – become friendly with Sioned, daughter of the owner of the farm where they are staying. That too ends badly when Sioned shows her bitterness (and that of her family) regarding the English treatment of the Welsh including the Investiture of the Prince of Wales and flooding Welsh villages for a reservoir for water for England. Welsh nationalism will appear again. There is much to enjoy here, as in all Coe's novels . . . an intelligent criticism of our shared history since 1945 Scotsman

Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. It is the story of a woman, of a nation's love affair with chocolate, of Britain itself. From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family. The novel closes with Covid keeping everyone apart, which perhaps still sits and hits too close to home to be entirely satisfactorily fictionally treated -- but then bringing a novel such as this, covering such a long time and with a large cast of characters, to a close was always going to be difficult. T)he loving, funny, clear-sighted and ruminative examination of recent British history (.....) As ever, prizing clarity over verbal fireworks, Coe’s writing draws the reader into the family dramas as they unfold over the decades. He has the great gift of combining plausible and engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft. (...) Bittersweet as the eponymous bar of plain chocolate, the book ranges over a huge span of time, includes a large cast of characters, yet never flags nor confuses. (...) The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music." - Marcel Theroux, The GuardianCoe's 2019 book Middle England won the European Book Prize [5] [6] and also won the Costa Book Award in the Novel category. [7] Film and TV adaptations [ edit ] 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 Coe has long been interested in both music and literature. In the mid-1980s he played with a band (The Peer Group) and tried to get a recording of his music. He also wrote songs and played keyboards for a short-lived feminist cabaret group, Wanda and the Willy Warmers. [2]