No chocolate-box portrait: Bournville, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed

British novelists love to diagnose the state of the nation. Few do it better than Jonathan Coe, who writes with warmth and subversive glee about social change and the comforting mundanities it imperils. Bournville, his 14th novel, lacks the caustic verve of What a Carve Up! (1994) or the wistful charm of The Rotters’ Club (2001), but it’s an affectionate work of social history in fictional form, tracking four generations of a West Midlands family whose dreams, successes, misadventures and divisions reflect the shifting contours of postwar Britain. 

It’s largely set in a model village on the south-west side of Birmingham. Created by the Cadbury family of Quaker industrialists in the 1890s, Bournville was designed to house workers from their chocolate factory and ‘alleviate the evils of modern, more cramped living conditions’. Coe grew up five miles away, and one of the main characters, Mary, is based on his mother. Garrulous and resourceful, she has three sons: timid musician Peter, doomed forever to repeat the rhythms of childhood; perennially wary Martin, whose job with Cadbury plunges him into European politics; and breezy Jack, a football-mad pragmatist who likes asserting his suspicion of all things German.

Coe dwells on seven key events. Each is seen obliquely, and each provides an opportunity, laced with irony, to sample the country’s mood. On VE Day, Winston Churchill speaks of ‘this ancient island’ drawing the sword against tyranny, and his phrasing rings down the years. The televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II prompts one character to muse that this still newish broadcasting medium will surely prove a force for good. The 1966 World Cup Final, rather than being a moment of sublime unity, exposes different seams of national feeling, as does the wedding of Charles and Diana, which promises to sell an attractive and smartly orchestrated image of Britain, yet is fraught with nervousness.

Other developments highlight the nation’s unease about its brand. Any suggestion of decline meets with a blast of triumphalism, but this is tinged with self-doubt or queasy nostalgia. When the Birmingham-built Austin Mini Metro is launched in 1980, advertisements show the little cars forming a platoon on the white cliffs of Dover. Prospective buyers learn that ‘Now we have the means to fight back’ and ‘This could be your finest hour’. As Martin remarks to an enraptured Jack: ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it?’

A recurrently sticky subject is the attitude to British chocolate – relished here and in Scandinavia, yet deemed by French and Belgian bureaucrats to be greasy and unsuitable for adult palates. Among the comic set pieces, cleverly conceived even if hardly subtle, the best is an account of a European Parliament meeting to address this issue, where the obsession with procedure trumps any urge to achieve an outcome. Martin is on hand to document the impasse. His frequent trips to Brussels also bring to his attention a young British journalist with a wild mop of blond hair. Although he strikes Martin as ‘always underprepared, always over-committed, always in demand and always out of reach’, the pundits seem worryingly transfixed by his charisma.

As Bournville draws closer to the present, it grows angrier. Coe is plainly dismayed by the erosion of community and the opportunism of politicians. But he is too self-aware to harangue the reader. His pleasant sense of the absurd never recedes from view, and for all the novel’s satirical tang and historical sweep, it’s at root a tender portrait of apparently simple folk trying to fathom the mystery of their own personalities.