Bournville, by Jonathan Coe

Bournville, by Jonathan Coe (2022)

I requested this from the LL months ago, expecting to like it but with no expectations as to how much I would like it, and therefore content to wait for as long as it took. Well, dear reader, not to keep you in suspense a moment longer: I loved it. It is, I think, the first Brexit/covid novel I have read that seems to actually answer the brief, to be attempting to engage with the political, national and international situation of Britain today without too much cuteness, overt allegory, or partisanship. (Coe is politically liberal, but his characters are not uniformly so, and we are encouraged to like and sympathise with people whose behaviours and principles don’t fall neatly into either half of the divide.) Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t start with Brexit and covid; it ends with them. Most of Bournville is an attempt to work out how we got here, and Coe is too honest and historically savvy not to recognise that a) the roots lie deep in the past, and b) there was no lost Golden Age. Even in his 1945 Britain, there are murmurs of cruelty against foreigners, homosexuals, anyone “different”. But the past isn’t a repository for dead bigotry: it’s there in 1953, too, and in 1966, and 1989, and 1997, and in every chapter of the book. A repeated line sums it up: “Everything changes, and everything stays the same.”

Coe’s most fascinating character, and one written with a lot of love (she’s based on his mother), is Mary Lamb, née Clarke, who is eleven years old on VE Day and living in Bournville, the suburb of Birmingham founded as a “model village” by Quaker chocolatier Richard Cadbury in order to house workers at his factory. Every chapter of the novel centers around Mary’s family and what they’re doing on signally important days in post-war British history: the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the England-Germany World Cup final, the investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales, his marriage to Diana, Diana’s funeral. Interestingly, the actual day of the Brexit vote is not included (perhaps Coe felt it was too soon to be able to contemplate it with proper historical context?), although Brexit’s repercussions are felt and explicitly discussed. Though we see through Mary’s eyes for the first few chapters, the point-of-view baton quickly shifts to her children and then to her grandchildren, sometimes even brief flashes from an in-law or neighbour. To Coe’s immense credit, these perspective changes are always accomplished seamlessly and with obvious intent (he doesn’t add viewpoints just because he can, a practice to which contemporary crime writers in particular seem to be addicted). In some ways, it’s a bit like Jacob’s Room or Mrs. Dalloway; that plethora of perspective gives us many, many facets not only of Britain but of Mary Lamb herself. She is a fascinating creation precisely because she would probably describe herself as so ordinary: intelligent but incurious and unintellectual, yet lacking the racial prejudice of her husband, Geoffrey, yet also capable of referring to a gay man as “the lowest of the low” in the 1960s, yet equally capable of embracing her youngest son Peter, when he comes out and tremulously asks her if that’s still her opinion of homosexuals, with the enjoinment not to ask her about something she said thirty years ago because times have changed and she can’t remember it anyway. Mary’s shifting capabilities—loving her mixed-race grandchildren unreservedly, yet also remarking on “what a nice colour” they are and failing to protest Geoffrey’s thirty-two years of being unable to meet his Black daughter-in-law’s gaze—make her feel extraordinarily human. (So, too, does the demonstrated cost of that shiftiness: the daughter-in-law in question, Bridget, finally explodes at the end of the book, with a single speech that both encompasses her love for Mary and painfully reveals just how alien she has been made to feel by her husband’s studiedly neutral family.)

There are, perhaps, occasional moments that feel a bit broad, a bit on-the-nose. Virtually every scene featuring Mary’s eldest son, Jack, an unreconstructed Thatcherite Brexiteer businessman, and his wife Angela—who is noisily weepy over the death of Princess Diana, and whose last appearance in the novel is made “popping into a newsagents” for a copy of a tabloid running a scurrilous story about Meghan Markle—is of this nature. But then, quite frankly, there are times when Britain itself feels a bit broad and on-the-nose to me. Having moved to the furthest reaches of it’s-really-not-London-it’s-Kent in the past two years, I have met wonderful human beings and am happy to have such good neighbours, but I have also had conversations that would have seemed unreal to me when I still rarely left Zones 1 and 2, conversations that have involved people having vehemently racialised opinions about Meghan Markle, suggesting to me that British colonialism in India was an overall good because it led to the development of railways, and wondering aloud whether parents forced into using food banks due to the cost of living crisis were “just making it all up”. (Not all in the same conversation, thank Christ.) So if Coe sometimes seems to be painting in primary colours, well… there’s something about contemporary Britain that seems to express itself in primary colours.

And yet Bournville is still beautiful, funny, and sad, a brilliant example of how individual human lives are woven into the collective life of a nation, how you can’t have one without the other. Nostalgia, regret, wondering about the road not traveled: all of this suffuses a person’s life as they get older, all of this is significant to the legacy of families, and all of this forms the story of a nation. Coe has done a magnificent thing here. Bournville is a love letter to Britain that is also an intervention that is also a passionate plea: to remember each other as people, to connect on that level, to memorialise both our failings and our triumphs. I’m so glad to have read it.