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
As I said, I had no publisher for What a Carve Up! while I was writing it, so all we had to live off was my wife's money and little bits I was picking up for journalism.
But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.
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.
I was going to say 'my friend Stuart', but I suppose he's not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don't mean that I've fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We've just decided not to stay in touch. And that's what it's been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it's not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, "What's the point?" And then you stop.
You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.
I had no sense of any reputation that What a Carve Up! might acquire - at the time I didnt even have a publisher, so my main worry was whether it was even going to see the light of day or not.
As soon as you start writing about how human beings interact with each other socially, you're into politics, aren't you?
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.
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.
But I have always - ever since The Accidental Woman - written novels about individuals attempting to make choices in the context of situations over which they have no control.
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.
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.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history.