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
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.
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.
The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.
The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.
I'm trying to write a nonfiction book at the moment, slot it in between the novels, and it really is like wading through quicksand compared to writing fiction.
I sometimes think that we fiction writers lag behind nonfiction counterparts in adventurousness, willingness to tackle forgotten areas of history but... we get there in the end.
So no, I'm pleased if it's been influential for many readers, but at the time I didn't even know that it was going to have any readers.
I'm shy of comparisons to Dickens because he's one of the absolute greats and it's silly to compare a contemporary novelist with someone.
From our perspective, the session was a success.
So it was primarily a desire to write about that period in one's life rather than that period in history or in British culture or whatever.
Luckily, in my case, I have managed, by writing, to do the one thing that I always wanted to do.