"Bournville"

 

This very afternoon I finished reading a 350 page novel by Jonathan Coe. It was titled "Bournville" just like the Birmingham garden suburb that was munificently developed by Britain's famous Cadbury chocolate family at the end of the Victorian era.

Though the Cadbury company figures in the novel, it is not a book about chocolate. It is about an evolving family and quite ambitiously it spans the years from World War II right through to the COVID pandemic of 2020/21.

Through the Lamb family, Jonathan Coe seeks to paint a portrait of the England that he has witnessed during his own life. That picture is generally affectionate and sometimes funny though his disdain for one Boris Johnson, former prime minister and arch-bullshitter is undeniably bitter.

Jonathan Coe

I would not call this a high-brow novel. It is quite light and easy to read. The ideas within it have an honest, everyday quality. As a backdrop to the family's progress through eight decades, the book often makes use of national events such as Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 and Princess Diana's funeral in 1997.

Jonathan Coe's own mother died at home during the COVID crisis when families were not allowed to come together even for funerals. He takes much of that experience and decants it into his account of the death of octogenarian Mary Lamb near the end of the novel. At that point, one of her three grown up sons is holding the narrator's baton:-

"And I try to be grateful. I try to be grateful for that fact that my mother willed herself to stay alive for long enough to have one last conversation with me, in the sunlight, beneath the shade of the sumac tree in the garden which was not just her garden, for almost fifty years, but mine as well, the setting for so many of my childhood games and childhood fantasies. That memory will never go away, at least. It was a precious gift that she saved for me." (page 341)

"Bournville" was recommended to me by my quizzing friend Mike. He was very enthusiastic about it. For me it did not engender the same amount of enthusiasm but I still enjoyed it. It covered the very era that I myself have traversed and there was a warmth and wittiness about the novel that helped me to keep turning the pages and sometimes getting lost in the writing.

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"You get the sense of an author more at ease with himself, one better able to channel his anger and frustration at the direction his country has taken, as well as his abiding love for it, into prose of enduring beauty, into characters who come to glorious, redemptive life on the page." - 'The Guardian'