This is a novel that spans the Truss administration, from its heady dawn to its decline and fall 49 days later. The Proof of My Innocence starts as a satire, not so much of Truss and her world but the ideologists who thought that the prime minister’s brief, shining moment was their long-cherished future. They meet in a collapsing Cotswolds castle to hear from delegates such as Josephine Winshaw, who intones that everything now is woke: ‘Paying your TV licence was woke. Getting vaccinated was woke… buying avocados was woke, and reading novels was woke.’ Another speaker praises a reactionary novelist to a much smaller audience.
Into this milieu steps Christopher Swann, a blogger. To him the radical economic libertarianism that Truss represents stems from early 1980s Cambridge. He is murdered at the conference, having annoyed enough people to turn Coe’s novel into cosy crime fiction. I say Coe’s novel, but by now the enterprise has become a network of stories within stories by other hands and in other styles. Our author shows up in some scenes, thinly disguised as the future author of ‘Quite the Mash-Up’.
The wonderful thing about Coe is the way he gets away with this without his work ever seeming to be up itself. One reason is the progressive mockery that gives his books a political purpose beyond the games. And the mockery is based on minor but far-reaching observations. His characters are not the first to find the public transport refrain ‘See it, say it, sorted’ jarring, but it takes Coe to turn this into the organising principle for a book of 340 pages.
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