The style & technique of JONATHAN COE

He’s written a dozen novels, non-fiction books about film stars Humphrey Bogart and James Stewart and the experimental novelist BS Johnson, and a couple of children’s books. Jonathan Coe’s novels have political preoccupations, humour and strong characterisation. His first big success was What a Carve Up! (1994), a satirical novel about life in 1980s Britain, with members of the same (Winshaw) family serving their own selfish interests, with grievous and far-reaching consequences. It was an explicit criticism of Thatcherism. Here I’ll focus on his Rotters’ Club trilogy, regarded by a good many critics as his most notable work.

How he began

Coe was born in 1961 not far from Birmingham, where some of his best-known books are set. His first surviving story was a detective thriller, , written, believe it or not, when he was just eight years old. He continued writing fiction throughout his schooldays, his three years at Trinity College, Cambridge and his time as a postgraduate at Warwick University, where he, he wrote his first published novel, , which came out in 1987 to mixed reviews. It covers fifteen years in the life of Maria, the first girl at her school to get into Oxford. It’s stylistically accomplished, but lacks the humour of the later novels.