The most chilling aspect of Middle England...lies in how so many of Coe’s characters display their blatant racism whenever they feel thwarted ... Each character is so credible and so vile that the question is not why it took England so long to leave the EU, but why the EU didn’t kick them out years ago ... But it’s not all politics. Coe is a deft comic writer, probably Britain’s finest, and there are dozens of laughs along the way ... Millions of words have been and will be written on Brexit but few will get to the heart of why it is happening as incisively as Middle England.
Politics are thorny in the novel, but Coe still makes space for playful humor ... Sometimes Coe is a bit more wacky than he’s been in the past...But on the whole, his touch retains its delicacy. Creating this of-the-moment milieu requires some believable set pieces, and Coe is good at them ... Middle England, which hews most closely to the perspectives of Benjamin and Doug, two men more or less at Coe’s stage of life, can certainly be read with pleasure as a novel about middle age...But its ambitions to encapsulate the political moment are obvious, and central to any assessment of it ... novels about the Way We Live Now aspire to recreate the feeling of their times, the vibe, as well as the details. And Coe — to his credit, in many ways — doesn’t feel like our particular Now. If his novels are anything to go by, he is wry, compassionate, curious and forgiving. Middle England contains great charms, but its very construction and tradition can also make it feel discordant for the moment it hopes to capture; at times it seems like a wrought-iron street lamp trying to represent a bonfire.
...an excellent writer making an enjoyable, absorbing and less than completely successful attempt to find the sweet spot of [a] sore point ... In its politics, just as in its gripes about public transport, this is a great big Centrist Dad of a novel ... And yet it’s never stronger or more convincing than when it’s furthest from political events ... One problem is that the historical scaffolding is so familiar, and yet will date so fast; this means that certain passages of exposition feel clunky ... And it is when the political discussion is out of the way that the novel becomes richer and less schematic ... Coe’s writing is as smoothly accomplished as ever. His comic set pieces...and scenes...are very funny. Yet this is also a surprisingly sentimental book ... It is an autumnal novel, and a sad one: poignant about the passing of time, the wishing for what has vanished, the decades lost to obscure hatreds, misplaced loves and unsatisfactory marriages – and about what, washing up on the brink of old age, we’re left with and what we can or can’t make of it. That a river, or two, runs through it is no accident.
[Coe's] affectionately witty attitude to our human foibles is always uplifting, even when the politically divisive subject matter is morbidly depressing ... It’s not until everything starts to wind up that he eases off on the chronological box-ticking and gives himself over to the interior lives of the Trotters. And he’s superb at that — at developing slow-burning love stories, observing the strange modulations of a personality reaching old age, showing us what grief does. That’s what Middle England is really about: the losses of middle age. It’s about being in your fifties...and realising that you’re leaving the country of your youth behind because that world simply doesn’t exist any more. Coe’s unflagging commitment to recording British life as it really is combines with his sensitive evocation of middle-aged angst, to make this an absorbing homage to things that change and things that stay the same.
Jonathan Coe, in his expansive and often very funny Middle England, is the first author to address our current crisis of national identity using the form that feels most suited to the task. This is a state-of-the-nation novel that moves gallopingly from the election of the coalition government in 2010, through the riots of 2011 ...ending in 2018 ...this end point feels somewhat arbitrary, and the novel’s conclusion slightly cobbled together as a result, but there’s no questioning the impact of Coe’s sweeping and multilayered portrait of a country bent on self-immolation ... This is not a novel that comes down hard on one side or other of the Brexit debate ... While we want everything we read at the moment to speak with the voice of our own particular echo chamber, Coe – a writer of uncommon decency – reminds us that the way out of this mess is through moderation, through compromise, through that age-old English ability to laugh at ourselves.
Coe covers a lot of ground, tracing messy fictional lives but also restaging elections, riots, the London Olympics and, of course, the game-changing, nation-dividing European referendum ... It is here that Coe is at his sharpest but also his most strident. However, when he adopts a more measured tone, his characters breathe and their reactions and predicaments convince and delight ... He has scrutinized his countrymen and produced an incisive and often scabrously funny satire and a compelling portrait of the way we live now.
Once again Mr Coe artfully blends fiction with fact ... At times Mr Coe delivers hammer-blows instead of his trademark satirical swipes, and soapbox speechifying instead of dialogue. His brilliantly funny set pieces are more subtle and successful; similarly, he is more incisive when tracing gradual decline rather than convulsive change. Although the narrative flits between Birmingham and London, this is no tale of two cities. Middle England is a compelling state-of-the-nation novel, full of light and shade, which vividly charts modern Britain’s tragicomic slide.
...nostalgia has, in the hands of Brexit’s alpha ideologues, become a dangerous political weapon. But the cleverness of Middle England is that while Coe doesn’t spare the easier targets ...he takes aim at nostalgia in all its forms. Including the sort that has helped Coe become one of our pre-eminent comic novelists ... threads of fiction and reality interweave to form an ironic lament for a country trapped in an imperialist fantasy. It’s the tale of what happens when nostalgia turns toxic ... Coe’s metier is the twerpishness of the comfortably-off, dissatisfied British man, available in all flavours ... Middle England is extremely funny – and it’s funny in a way that’s cathartic. If Coe comes across as a Remoaner licking his wounds, he always manages to cover his back, undercutting a rant or a moment of sentimentality with a wink at the reader ... The meta-joke of his fiction is that it cautions against nostalgia while simultaneously serving it up in great helpings.
...in the writing of literature... wishy-washiness is ostensibly tolerated, but covertly deplored: this is the road that leads to books being called 'quiet'. If you are Jonathan Coe, whose eleven novels have been peopled with protagonists caught between desire and passivity, uncertain not merely of the mark they wish to make on history but of the nature of that history, who are beguiled by the past just as they seek to free themselves from it, this is a problem ... As the Olympic viewers take from Boyle’s spectacle what accords most closely with their interests – its intertextuality and its references to Humphrey Jennings for the academics, the bits of Pink Floyd and Mike Oldfield for the old heads, James Bond for everyone else – Coe subtly reinforces one of Middle England’s key questions: what is it that binds us? And is it enough?Once again, equivocation emerges. We can never believe that Coe is endorsing the rage that a handful of his characters nurture against the rise of 'political correctness', but we are certainly invited to understand it.
Middle England completes a trilogy, reunites readers with the protagonist Benjamin Trotter and is saturated in the fraught and sometimes frightening politics of Englishness that found an outlet during the 2016 EU referendum campaign ... episodes are woven together with bits of contemporaneous historical material ... The effect is not entirely satisfactory. It sometimes feels as though Coe has simply tipped the contents of his notebook straight into the novel ... In any event, if you’ve been paying attention to Coe’s public pronouncements in recent years, you will know exactly where he stands. If Middle England were simply a fictionalised howl of aggrieved Remainer-dom, it would be considerably less arresting than it actually is. What is interesting about Coe — and what is interesting about this novel and the other two in the trilogy — is not so much his flight from Englishness as his ambivalent embrace of it.
Coe skilfully contrives to keep a balance between the individual stories of his large cast of characters and his general Condition of England themes. There is little doubt where his sympathies lie ... It’s natural to talk about the themes and arguments of a novel like this, but the point must also be made that Middle England is much more than a treatment of public affairs, not a succession of opinion page columns. On the contrary, it has all the human interest which led DH Lawrence to call the novel 'the Great Book of Life'. Coe can make you smile, sigh, laugh; he has abundant sympathy for his characters, even those...whose attitudes and opinions may be deplorable to him.
Middle England is as historically self-aware as the other two novels in the trilogy ... The prose is slick and precise and you always feel in safe hands. Coe is a master of transitions — using paragraph and section breaks to cut the action — and his set-pieces are perfect miniatures, stylishly engineered. But reading Middle England can seem like wandering around a model village: you marvel at the extraordinary attention to detail, but feel unsettled by the lack of life.
Even on its own, Middle England is certainly full -- of characters and events -- and fast, zipping across nearly a decade, Coe keeping a great deal moving in this near-contemporary state of the nation (and how it got there ...) novel. It feature a large cast of characters, and shifts between their often quite separate storylines ... Coe falls back onto some easy black and white contrasts that can feel a bit too glaringly obvious, but generally there's at least a bit of nuance ... It does make for a novel that can feel sometimes stretched thin. With such a large tableau, characters can seem neglected; certainly, there are some stories one would like to hear more of ... Middle England is an enjoyable read that generally captures the state of the nation well -- even as Coe seems slightly unsure of how much to force the issue, as it wavers in just how much of a Brextit-defined novel it wants to be. But in any case, it's certainly worthwhile.
Middle England’s authenticity lies in its characters...now in late-middle age, with grown children of their own, grappling with a country more divided than ever. Like the previous works in this series, Middle England covers a lot of ground ... At times the novel feels like Coe is cramming in as much action from topical events and somehow weaving it into the plot, but it’s really only a minor complaint. Middle England is a hilarious, nuanced and well-observed novel that keeps the pages turning while leaving a smile on readers’ faces.
The place in which many of us now live, which Coe describes in dismaying and delicious detail, is pockmarked with pound shops, garden centres and food banks ... Merrie England has metamorphosed into Misanthropic England. It’s as if a swathe of the population has until the last few years been in a coma from which it has been rescued by the likes of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage. One of the questions this often wickedly funny and timely novel asks is whether this is the real, unvarnished England, the one which decent English people, such as John Major and the murdered MP Jo Cox, knew in their gut was there all the while but preferred to pretend otherwise. Middle England makes for a grim if enthralling read though how it will weather after 11pm on 29 March next year is anyone’s guess.
While Middle England offers many subplots and too many narrators over its eight-plus-year span, its underlying—and timely—theme is the way the passions that led to Brexit and its global cousins, nationalism and 'other'-bashing, have infected daily life ... Of course, there’s also plenty of non-Brexit action in this novel, which is part humorous, part preachy, part elegiac, and a bit sprawling ... more than a half-dozen other characters also narrate from time to time, sometimes switching the story’s point of view in mid-paragraph or showing up only once ... All this is almost too much, especially because certain subplots are dropped too quickly. Luckily, Coe is a veteran who knows how to keep the action moving ... And while some of the characters, such as Sophie’s mother-in-law Helena and Doug’s daughter, are too starkly villainous, others are interestingly complex, most notably Ian.
...[a] politically charged comedy of manners ... Coe’s singular achievement is the dexterity with which he illustrates the generational conflicts and the nuanced experiences of aging, loneliness, declining health, and the seemingly irreversible march toward obsolescence as the inevitable cyclical counterpart of youthful idealism and romanticized enlightenment. Timely and timeless, this plaintive, clarion call is an acerbic, keenly observed satire peppered with the penetrating wit for which Coe is so justly admired. Like his protagonist, who receives a surprise Booker Prize nod, Coe too should be similarly rewarded.
As the narrative moves toward the Brexit vote in 2016, Coe, with his usual acuity, tells the story of a collective meltdown through its impact on individuals ... Coe’s empathy for even the most flawed people and a bedrock, albeit eroding, faith in human decency keep his text from being bitter, but it is deeply sad. Sharply observed, bitingly witty yet emotionally generous, and as ominous as the times deserve.
...excellent ... It’s a neat pastiche of the cultural flash points of the past decade, done with humor and empathy. While Coe’s own politics will be clear to the reader, the novel is a remarkable portrait of a country at an inflection point.
