From his childhood, Jonathan Coe remembers his grandfather who, like his aunts and great-aunts, worked at the Cadbury factory in Bournville – a British flagship which is at the heart of his new novel. Every Friday afternoon, he brought him whole bags of unsaleable chocolates, he says by videoconference from London, where he lives.
“I like to say that my Proust madeleines are a bar of Cadbury chocolate”, says the author of English Will, smirk.
An unwrapped bar of chocolate recalling Victory Day in May 1945, a memorable World Cup played at Wembley in 1966, a few James Bond films, a coronation, a royal wedding… so many young and old events that see the members of the Lamb family from the novel come together to celebrate together the moments that have marked their lives over the decades.
“Most of my books are set in the here and now or the recent past, and it’s quite unusual for me to go all the way back to the Second World War, over 75 years of British life,” he remarks. -he.
But the circumstances of his mother’s death, in June 2020, isolated from her loved ones and without treatment to relieve the pain, leave him sad and angry. A feeling that the writing could not reduce. “The pain is still there,” he said simply.
When my mother died, I wanted to write about her, but I wanted to write something that would encompass most of her life.
jonathan coe
There was also this desire to write a novel about the “state of the nation”, which would go back to the end of the war and would focus on this English identity (“Englishness”) which led the country to the “situation particular policy” in which he finds himself today. “The chemical reaction between these two impulses gave birth to this book,” he adds. Most of the details in the book are personal and autobiographical. »
A personal… and political novel
Like his, the family in the novel could very well have as its motto, according to him, “everything for a quiet life”.
“We never faced each other; delicate issues were never openly discussed – a way of doing things that many people say is quintessentially English. We’ve always swept everything under the rug, preferring to maintain a polished facade, and that’s still the way I prefer to act. But the time comes when this is no longer enough, in several respects. »
Whether The disunited kingdom is his most personal novel to date, it is also the most political book by the writer who notably tackled the socio-political crisis of the country in The heart of England. In his opinion, this way of avoiding delicate family matters is a reflection – on a larger scale – of what is happening at the moment in the United Kingdom, in relation to Brexit: “We are pretending, in somehow, that it never really happened and we don’t assume the consequences – good or bad. »
I think we’ve reached that point where, whether it’s climate change, the war in Ukraine, or whatever, you have to show your colors, express what you believe in, and take a stand.
jonathan coe
Boris Johnson even occupies a fleeting place in the novel, making his appearance in the story as early as the late 1990s. Prime Minister of a post-Brexit UK; but in fact, when you take a closer look, it makes perfect sense and could even have been predictable. »
So what lessons can we draw from the past, when we look at the path traveled over these seven decades? “The more it changes, the more it stays the same”, says Jonathan Coe, quoting the adage that comes up repeatedly in The disunited kingdom.
The disunited kingdom
Jonathan Coe (translated from English by Marguerite Capelle)
Gallimard
496 pages