A few weeks ago I read and reviewed Ian McEwan‘s most recent novel Lessons. One of the key themes of the novel was how certain major world events affected the main character, a man who was the same age as McEwan, though whose life was very different from McEwan’s. She will have three sons and two of them will have children and THOSE children will have children and, in the meantime, things will inexorably change. Even here in the former colonies, the seven events that shape this novel – VE Day, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the World Cup Final, the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales, the wedding of Charles and Diana, Diana’s funeral, and the 75th anniversary of VE Day – spark emotions.

Mary Lamb, the matriarch at the centre of this bittersweet family saga, a PE and music teacher, is modelled on his mother Janet. The rest of the family are fictional, he says, although the youngest son Peter, a musician, is a familiar Coe figure: “passive, slightly depressed men – often failed writers or composers or both – who show a rather uncommitted sexuality”, as the author himself once observed of his protagonists. Structured around seven national occasions, Bournville opens with a prologue at the onset of the pandemic and ends with the distressing circumstances of his mother’s death. He hadn’t set out to include so many royal landmarks – the coronation, the investiture of Prince Charles, the royal wedding, Princess Diana’s funeral – but as he was writing he realised they are often the triggers for moments of national coming together. It is, he says, both his most personal and political novel.Floppy-haired Boris, who popped up in Middle England, is here, in his early days as a reporter in Brussels, already known only by his first name. As Coe reflects drolly in an author’s note: “Whether he’s a fictional character or not remains hard to determine with any certainty.” This is fine, except Coe clearly hates the monarchy - or at least thinks it's utter nonsense - so all he does is have his characters snark and gripe about it in response...except the insensitive, racist Tory piglets who just love the royals. Oink, oink. Aren't they repulsive! 🙄 The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music. The phrase “all that caper”, a particular corner of a Birmingham pub, a yellow cravat, a line of Latin verse, the sound of laughter in a school playground – all set off chains of associations that ripple throughout the novel. A piece of casual homophobia will be recalled decades later by a son trying to come to terms with his sexual orientation. In fact, a good bit of what takes place in the pandemic chapters are not the experiences of the fictional Lamb family, but of the Coe family.A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships Woman & Home Chocolate is another motif that reappears throughout the novel. At a meeting between the German and English branches of the family, an argument develops about whether British or German chocolate is better. As Mary and Geoffrey’s children grow – we revisit the family for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, then for Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 – the story of Britain’s “chocolate war” with the EU plays out. Martin rises within the corporate structure of Cadbury’s, finally going to Brussels to represent the interests of British chocolate. During this period he crosses paths with Paul Trotter (from The Closed Circle) and also with a bumbling, mendacious journalist called Boris.

It will be another twenty-one years before the next Anglo-German episode occurs. Mary has married Geoffrey, Carl’s grandson, and they have three boys. Their German cousins visit England for the first time that we know of, to attend the World Cup in 1966, played in England. The Germans are confident that Germany will win, the English less confident that England will win. However there are clashes between the two sets of cousins not only over football but over the relative quality of their national chocolate and over the war, resulting in a fight. As the nation changes and the racial makeup of the family alters, it’s not so much that bigotry gives way to tolerance, but that the ambiguities deepen. All along, we are reminded of the contradictory facets of the nation and of each individual character: the snobbishness that coexists with kindness, humour and narrow-mindedness, rationality and unexamined prejudices. Mary grows up in Bournville, and while it is not the only significant locale in the novel -- from unavoidable London to several scenes set in Wales, the novel does more than just visit much of the UK -- it plays a prominent role, reflecting also changing Britain, with the house Mary grew up in in entirely new hands at the novel's end, and the Cadbury factory already becoming more tourist attraction -- with Cadbury World -- than chocolate-producing-center. Coe's interwoven paeans to the lives of those rooted in the very centre of the UK - The Rotter's Club and Middle England among them - blend comedy, tragedy and social commentary in enjoyably memorable fashion, and his latest, Bournville, is no exception . . . Coe's particular gift is to understand how nostalgia, regret and an apprehension of what the future will bring might make us more, not less, empathetic to the frailties of those around us FT, Best Audiobooks of the Year Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft Guardian

I can only guess, but it seems like Coe chose a topic and plot structure he couldn't bring himself to work seriously with in the end. Disappointing stuff. I think this novel was trying to do way too much and as a result didn't end up achieving any of it.

His fiction has always been very successful in Europe. “I don’t present that many challenges to translate because the prose I write is very rarely poetic,” he says. And while it is not true that he has “never written a beautiful line”, as he puts it, he wants his books to be easy to read. “I regard that as a positive.”

Select a format:

Johnson’s resignation wasn’t the only major British event to occur after the novel had been delivered. “I finished the book in April or May and missed the biggest one of all,” he says of the death of the Queen. “Well, it was going to happen sooner rather than later,” he notes drily. But it is striking timing that his novel of personal loss should arrive in the aftermath of a national outpouring of grief.

So Bournbrook, they decided, would not quite do. A variation was chosen. Bournville. The name of a village not just founded upon, and devoted to, but actually dreamed into being by chocolate. From the bestselling, award-winning author of Middle England comes a profoundly moving, brutally funny and brilliantly true portrait of Britain told through four generations of one family There are a few good chapters, especially those talking about Cadbury's, but I was dismayed to read in the author notes that the death of Mary Lamb in the novel was an accurate account of the passing of Coe's own mother during the Covid pandemic. The title of the novel refers to the town that candy-manufacturer Cadbury built (the Hershey, Pennsylvania, of the UK ...):Bournville is also a bit conveniently out of the way and behind at least the most cosmopolitan times: in 1966: "One hundred miles away London, apparently, is swinging. Bournville ? Not so much"; Coe does London well, too, but he's particularly good at capturing that -- as the title of a previous novel had it -- 'Middle England' (as well as, here, also out of the way Wales).) Coe does his ending well enough, but much of it does feel more strained than the easier-flowing other parts of the novel.