Middle England: A Novel (Costa Novel Award)

By Jonathan Coe

A comedy for our times” (The Guardian), Middle England is a piercing and provocative novel about a country in crisis. From the frenzy of the 2012 Olympics to the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, here Jonathan Coe chronicles the story of modern Britain by way of a cast of characters whose world is being upended.

There are newlyweds who disagree about the country’s future and, possibly, their relationship; a political commentator who writes impassioned columns about austerity from his lavish town house while his radical teenage daughter undertakes a relentless quest for universal justice; and Benjamin Trotter, who embarks on an apparently doomed new career in middle age, and his father, whose last wish is to vote to leave the European Union. A sequel to The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle that stands entirely alone, Middle England is a darkly comic look at our strange new world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Aug 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780525656487

Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe (Birmingham, 1961) estudió en las universidades de Cambridge y Warwick. En Anagrama ha publicado las novelas ¡Menudo reparto! (Premio John Llewellyn Rhys y, en Francia, Premio al Mejor Libro Extranjero): «El horror y el humor van de la mano en esta novela, a la que habrá que recurrir en el futuro cuando uno quiera saber qué sucedió en la Inglaterra de los años ochenta» (Ramón de España); La casa del sueño (Premio Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best Novel y, en Francia, Premio Médicis Extranjero): «Si se organizase un festival de escritores verdaderamente originales, habría que invitarlo a él» (Javier Aparicio Maydeu, El Periódico); El Club de los Canallas (Premio Arzobispo Juan de San Clemente y Premio Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse): «La más colorida de las novelas sobre los años más grises» (Rodrigo Fresán); El Círculo Cerrado: «Retrato perfecto de la Inglaterra de finales del siglo XX, lleno de sátira. Un libro altamente devorable» (Kiko Amat); La lluvia antes de caer: «Si buscan novelas que no se lean de un tirón y traten al lector con respeto, si les gusta desentrañarlas y demorarse en ellas, háganse con un ejemplar» (Manuel Rodríguez Rivero, El País); La espantosa intimidad de Maxwell Sim: «¡Genial!... Lo tiene todo. Buenísima, apasionante, divertida, cínica, tierna, única; el final es deslumbrante» (Javier Puebla, Cambio 16); Expo 58: «La novela que habría escrito Graham Greene si hubiera leído más de la cuenta a un Evelyn Waugh poderosamente nostálgico» (Laura Fernández, El Mundo); El número 11: «El mejor retrato imaginable de la Inglaterra actual» (David Morán, Rockdelux); y El corazón de Inglaterra: «La mejor novela para entender el divorcio entre el Reino Unido y Europa» (Juan Cruz, El País).

Reviews for Middle England

[teunduynstee · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

For me, as a continental European, this was the first book that could in a way make me feel what the Brexit state of mind is. It does so by introducing a cast of mostly lovable characters that can't help but play their part. But besides that, the book was really funny. It made me laugh.

[samsattler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I only learned that Jonathan Coe’s Middle England is the third book in a series that began in 2001 with The Rotters Club and continued in 2004 with The Closed Circle after I began reading it. In retrospect, I can see that not being familiar with the backgrounds, relationships, and past experiences of the main characters from the first two books made it considerably more difficult for me to keep all of them straight in Middle England. Although Coe makes a valiant effort to tie the past to the present in Middle England , those readers who have already read the first two Rotters Club books are likely to perceive some of the book’s episodes differently (as in better or more precisely) than those reading Middle England as a standalone. But even as a standalone, this book is brilliant.Jonathan Coe has written what many in Britain are calling its “state-of-the-nation” novel. Middle England begins with the 2008 financial crash and ends in late 2018 with Britain still unable (or perhaps unwilling) to figure out how to make the Brexit vote a reality. Benjamin Trotter, one of the book’s main characters, is a somewhat failed family man who now finds himself living alone and hoping to get his excessively long manuscript published. Ben spends much of his time as caretaker of his elderly father, a man who constantly complains that the England he remembers so well is being ruined by the outrageously high number of newly arrived immigrants to his country. The book’s other main character is Ben’s niece Sophie, a university lecturer who falls in love with a young man who shares many of the views of Ben’s father – despite vigorously disagreeing with those views herself. Most of the book’s more secondary characters appear in the previous Rotters Club books, but their relationships are largely defined in Middle England by their approval or disapproval of the Brexit vote. The “Remainers” and the “Leavers” only communicate by shouting at each other – and neither side is at all interested in what the other has to say. Long-term friendships are ending; parents, children, and siblings are no longer speaking; and marriages are ending in loudly contested divorces. It’s as if Britain had morphed into two separate countries. Sound familiar, America?The biggest surprise about Middle England, though, is how funny it is. Picture scenes like the one in which two children’s entertainers (one dressed as a clown, the other as a mad professor of sorts) come to blows and throw F-bombs and fists at each other during a little boy’s birthday party. Or what I consider to be the funniest sexual encounter scene I have ever read, during which two nearly-sixty-year-olds decide to recreate a sexual encounter from their high school days inside a cramped wardrobe. (Let’s just say that the results bear little resemblance to those of forty years earlier.) Another striking thing about Middle England is that its author treats both sides of the Pro-Brexit, Anti-Brexit argument with a measure of respect rather than taking a hardline approach in favor of either. He does the same, in fact, with the issue of immigration and national boundaries. Some of Coe’s main characters feel strongly one way and others feel strongly the other way. Admittedly, the book’s more sympathetic characters all lean in the same liberal direction, but in the end most of them adopt a more moderate approach to those with opposing views than they started with.Bottom Line: Middle England is a funny and thought-provoking novel in which American readers will see many parallels between life in today’s Britain and today’s America. The novel exposes the absurdity of politics in both countries (and the rest of the world, for that matter) while offering a little hope that more moderate voices will eventually return to some power and influence. Although it will help, an interest in politics is not a prerequisite for reading Middle England because it is an entertaining novel filled with interesting characters for whom the reader will come to care.

[lara335 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I feel I have grown up & matured with Jonathan Coe’s characters, first encountered in The Rotters Club, surveying England in the harsh 1970’s. This novel is bang up to date, analysing the country today through a range of vividly drawn characters of all political persuasions, from the ‘snowflake’ youngsters enjoying being over-sensitive and self-righteous on behalf of others, to the Trotter siblings, leaving England following the Brexit vote. And amongst it all, the importance of garden centres.Topical, humorous, understanding. In a hundred years time people could read this to understand their country in the early part of the 21st century.Thank you NetGalley for this advance copy. (less)

[eyejaybee · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favourite novels of the twenty first century is one of Coe’s earlier books, The Rotters’ Club. That followed a group of teenage boys as they progressed through a prestigious grammar school in Birmingham during the 1970s. It had strong resonances for me. The principal characters were just a couple of years older than me, and I identified very closely with the historical context and, in particular, the music that they followed.There was a sequel, The Closed Circle, which was published a couple of years later and returned to the boys as they now strove to establish themselves in their respective careers, and showed them coming to terms, with varying degrees of success, with life under the New Labour administrations of Tony Blair and then Gordon Brown. I enjoyed the sequel, but did not feel as engaged with it as I had with the original novel.This new book follows them and their experiences of life as they move into their fifties. Starting in 2010, it tracks their lives under the Coalition Government as they cope with the austerity measures brought in to counteract the banking failure of 2008. This allows Coe to look at the riots of 2011, the preparations for, and delivery of, the Olympic Games, and, especially, the division wreaked across the country by the campaign for the EU referendum, including the murder of Jo Cox, and then, even more so, by the impact of its result. Coe does not seem to take sides, and there are several characters who put forward compelling reasons to support both sides of the Brexit debate.Of course, this all makes it sound desperately serious. After all, living through the seemingly interminable debates about Brexit, I would be tempted to say that the last thing I want to do is read about it in novels. However, Coe is an accomplished writer, and couches his story with his customary humour.He is also adept at matching his style to suit the character he is portraying. Benjamin Trotter was certainly the foremost character in The Rotters’ Club, and plays a prominent part here. He is a ponderous man, and Coe captures that in his own prose. Rampantly introspective, Benjamin seems to spend most of his time driving through the West Midlands, and Coe describes some of his journeys in great detail, listing the towns and villages through which he passes in close detail. We don’t actually get to learn what is Ben’s second favourite service station, but I am sure Coe would have identified it in his notes.There is a marvellous running vignette in which Doug Anderton, a left-leaning political columnist has a series of meetings with Nigel, who works in David Cameron’s communications office in Downing Street. Nigel positively drips callow, hollow buzzwords and mindless slogans.All very clever, and very amusing - a marked return to top form for Jonathan Coe.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Coe explains in a note to this book that he had not planned to bring the characters from The Rotters' Club back after The closed circle, but he let himself be talked into it somehow. I wonder if this is going to turn into another Dance to the music of time...?We pick up Benjamin and his friends in 2010, and follow their progress against the unedifying political background of the Old School Tie Coalition, David Cameron's grand gestures of self-harm and the inexplicable rise and even more puzzling survival of the Maybot. And we see the dangers of writing about very recent events - Coe leaves the story in Autumn 2018 with a general feeling that politics can't get much sillier than that. How wrong can you be...?Benjamin becomes a published author at last, his niece Sophie finds the man of her dreams (probably) and experiences the frustrations of academic life in the 21st century, Doug tries to keep the values of liberal journalism alive, and all around them we see dreams being shattered, hatred bubbling over, and the fantasy of nice, safe, moderate, tolerant middle-England coming unravelled. As with The closed circle, this is an engaging, if somewhat depressing book that seems to have a lot of perceptive things to say about the state of British society - but not many suggestions for how to fix them. Once again, there seemed to be rather too many plot-lines and it felt as if some of the characters didn't get quite as much attention from the writer as they deserved. But the focus on Sophie, Benjamin and Doug worked quite well. And there were some nice bits of comedy, including a ludicrous reprise of the wardrobe scene from The Rotters' Club that looks like a transparent attempt to get nominated for the Bad Sex Awards...

[eglinton_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wistful, sympathetic view of the country’s divergent traditions and traits, as they erupted so painfully in the Brexit schism. Much nicer, and neater than the rage of a Will Self, whose contributions reek of the kind of arrogance and scorn that sustain much of the antagonism. Coe’s characters (some of whom we have met before), are not getting off on their own certainties and zeal, but are aging and mucking up in recognisable ways. They act as practical, humane beings, not ideologues, and so their stances and the progression towards the Brexit vote are credible. And so, as the title promises, the condition of England is examined and portrayed.

[starbox_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This, it turns out, is the final volume of a trilogy, but I found that it works fine as a stand alone novel.The characters are a group of 2010s, mainly middle class, folk- schoolfriends, relatives and acquaintances, and the novel chronicles their various experiences in the era of Brexit. The decade is the star of the show, and our cast experience various era-specific events- racism, LBGT associates, social justice warriors, race riots... The author is patently a passionate Remainer: those advocating a different view are all old, stupid and portrayed as contemptible. I personally took a massive dislike to uber-liberal academic Sophie - not for her opinions, but her inability to remain in the same room as anyone thinking differently to herself. (I'm also unconvinced that the most pro-diversity of us would try to excuse a trouble-making SJW getting her suspended for an out-of-context comment.)So a very right-on, leftie-luvvie work where the time eclipses the protagonists. It does portray the anger and division in society; and I did enjoy it, but didnt hugely engage with any of those portrayed.