If we are to believe the results of a poll carried out last December by The Independent, the British would be 65% to want to decide on rejoining the European Union, while they are 54% to believe that “Brexit was a bad idea”. When is there a return to the future?
In The heart of England (Gallimard, 2019), by Jonathan Coe, this crucial political moment of 2020 served as a horizon and a backdrop. But for his fourteenth novel, The disunited kingdom (more soberly titled Bournville in its original version), the British novelist offers us a family fresco as vast as telescoped, in which the author of welcome to the club and of English will revisits 75 years of UK history through seven major moments.
From the end of the war in May 1945 to the onset of the COVID crisis, including the coronation of Elizabeth II, the 1969 investiture of the Prince of Wales (now Charles III), the marriage of Charles and Diana in 1981 and Lady Diana’s funeral in 1997, Jonathan Coe paints the portrait of an “ordinary” family from Bournville, near Birmingham, in this fine and ambitious novel.
Small model town of the West Midlands, created in the heart of England by the Cadbury chocolate company for the workers of its factory, the well-chosen Bournville thus has, for the novelist, it will be understood, something ‘copy.
It was during the festivities organized to mark the victory of May 1945 that the young Mary Clarke – a character who was partly inspired, reveals the writer, by her own mother – will meet the one who will become her husband. From this moment, through many ellipses and a whole gallery of characters, the novel will tumble.
And in a few hundred pages where the emergence of the middle class, the increasingly multicultural character of Great Britain – a subtle reality that is not always expressed without tension in the novel – will emerge, casually — or the rise of Welsh nationalism, Coe, in his own way, skilfully mixes the small story with the big one.
In the early 1990s, one of Mary’s three sons, Martin, was a lobbyist in Brussels with the European Union on behalf of Cadbury. A “chocolate war” had been raging for 20 years, a gastronomic conflict which crystallized in a way the antagonism between French and English.
Because since the Second World War, Cadbury had diluted the cocoa present in its chocolate with a small amount of vegetable fat: an unacceptable compromise in the eyes of several EU member countries, “which was nothing more than a business of racketeeringfomented by bureaucrats to gain power”.
A novel that is difficult to sum up, but in which the monarchy and “English-style” milk chocolate serve as a social binder, all wrapped in the deadpan humor of Jonathan Coe. Like in this hilarious scene where, while Tony Blair delivers his speech on television during Lady Di’s funeral, a character will live his first homosexual experience. Joyfully subversive and full of humanity.