Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coeis an English novelist and writer. His work has an underlying preoccupation with political issues, although this serious engagement is often expressed comically in the form of satire. For example, What a Carve Up! reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same name. It is set within the "carve up" of the UK's resources which some feel was carried out by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s. One claim to fame that Coe...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 August 1961
Someone emailed me and said The Closed Circle reminded them of reading Trollope.
I have to constantly rein in my nostalgia for the 1970s, in case it takes me over and I become one of those grumpy old men who just talks about how much better life was when he was a kid.
I don't know if England lags behind the States or is ahead of the States. We've finished with the '70s retro chic revival, we've done the '80s retro-chic revival and on to the '90s.
I don't know, I don't really have a view about what my contemporaries are doing, except that I enjoy individual writers and so on.
But we are entitled to look for continuity in politics.
Well, I like the rain before it falls.
Revisionist historians are about to get their hands on the Thatcher years, shes probably going to be looked at again because she feels far enough away now, and we dont see her much on the political landscape in this country, shes kind of disappeared and she doesnt speak out much anymore.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.
I was mainly in a state of nervousness while I wrote it - nervousness that it was far bigger and more complicated than anything Id attempted before, and that maybe my talent just wasnt up to it and the book would have to be abandoned, or would turn out not to work at all when it was finished.
Contemporary Britain seems an endlessly fascinating place to me - but if I knew a little bit more about other places, and other times, maybe it wouldn't.
But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.
As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
Ah, well, I have no talent for nonfiction, that's my problem.