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
It's only a drawback in the States, where most people seem to have no real interest in other countries and the notion of a novel which might offer insight into life in the UK doesn't seem to appeal very widely.
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.
The fact that it was a TV sitcom rather than a literary novel is neither here nor there, as far as I'm concerned.
Someone emailed me and said The Closed Circle reminded them of reading Trollope.
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.
I think it's also the case that I'm not as widely travelled, or as well-educated in history, as most of the other novelists I meet: so I have to write about my own country, at the present time, because it's more or less all I know about!
From our perspective, the session was a success.
Well, mainly it's because I'm not a writer who's comfortable with writing about periods that I can't remember firsthand.
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.
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'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.