Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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The author has said in an interview that he his “heart sank” when he initially heard of Ian McEwen’s “Lessons” published just ahead of his own and covering a similar timespan and the interaction between national and personal events – before reading it and realising how different the two books are in style and approach. I was gifted this book by Europa Editions and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review. In fact, a good bit of what takes place in the pandemic chapters are not the experiences of the fictional Lamb family, but of the Coe family. Good concept and well-written, but muddled and tedious in plot, overly biased/blatant in approach, and lazy in the characterisation of too many characters who are only shades different from each other, with very few exceptions.

Bournville is a rich and poignant new novel from the bestselling, Costa award-winning author of Middle England. B ournville, we learn from Jonathan Coe’s notes at the end of the novel, is the fourth in a planned quintet he’s writing under the general title of Unrest. I had heard good things about Jonathan Coe, this is was the first of his books I read, it will take a fair bit of convincing to get me back to it anytime soon. Bournville” va ascritto a tutti gli effetti alla categoria “saga familiare”, accompagna le vicende dei Lamb per tre quarti di secolo, con la particolarità di scandirne le tappe tramite gli avvenimenti della recente storia inglese e della famiglia reale; il personaggio centrale, l’unico che seguiamo in tutto il percorso esistenziale da nipotina a bisnonna, è Mary Lamb, che nella postfazione l’autore afferma ispirata in parte alla propria figura materna. E’ curioso che quasi in contemporanea, ma con ben altro piglio e personaggi meno pallidi e più sfaccettati, anche Ian McEwan abbia pubblicato un romanzo fiume biografico che a sua volta interpreta in filigrana la recente storia d’Inghilterra, benché in quel caso il racconto sia meno corale e molto più incentrato sul protagonista e sulle figure femminili che ne condizionano l’esistenza.As the latest in J Coe's Unrest sequence, Bournville is one of the most warm-hearted, brilliant and beguiling of his State of the Nation novels. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Now the author was not to know that since his epilogue was written a mere 5 months ago in April 2022 that a) the Queen would have passed away and, b) Boris Johnson would no longer be in power and the UK would be in an even worse state of affairs.

Cadburys supported my own education and allowed my father to take time off for his political activity, they continued to be fantastic employers, not just when they started out at Bournville.At times it feels like the narrative is more about the historical event, with the family fitting around it and reacting to the events. As Mary and Geoffrey’s children grow – we revisit the family for the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, then for Charles and Diana’s wedding in 1981 – the story of Britain’s “chocolate war” with the EU plays out. Martin rises within the corporate structure of Cadbury’s, finally going to Brussels to represent the interests of British chocolate. The beans themselves had always come from the far corners of the Empire, of course - nothing unBritish about that - but the means of turning them into edible chocolate had been invented by a Dutchman, and it was a truth universally acknowledged - if for ever unspoken - that it was the French, and the Belgians, and the Swiss, who had since brought the making of chocolate to a pitch of near-perfection.

Bournville is an enjoyable family saga, centred on the memorable Mary - inspired by Jonathan Coe's own mother - whom we first meet in her little village on VE Day. Particularly insightful is when one of the younger characters, with pretensions of becoming a world-famous author, slams into reality when his glossy portrayal of Wales collides with the truth of Britain’s treatment of it. Ci deve comunque essere un motivo per cui i due autori inglesi che preferisco hanno deciso, pressoché contemporaneamente, di scrivere un libro su una famiglia inglese più o meno negli ultimi settant'anni*, con ragazzi e ragazze che diventano adulti, poi genitori, poi maturi, poi vecchi e intanto i loro figli sono arrivati a loro volta ad essere maturi ed i nipoti sono già in rampa di lancio, mentre l'Inghilterra passa attraverso l'energia del dopoguerra, l'entusiasmo dei sixties, la folle corsa all'edonismo degli anni ottanta fino alla poco dignitosa epopea di un primo ministro con una capigliatura biondissima perennemente spettinata (ad ognuno il suo: a noi ne toccò uno con i capelli malamente trapiantati). From WWII, the story follows Mary as she grows up alongside major events, such as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and the year England won the soccer World Cup.It promised me a family story over a number of major events in British history, set in the home of Cadbury. Several big milestone events for the monarchy in the 20th century - the Queen's coronation, Charles and Diana's wedding, Diana's death - are titles of sections of the book and feature quite heavily, and I get that Coe was trying to say that whilst the lives of the characters moved on and these big events happened things didn't really change that much for the lives of ordinary people of the UK. Comforting nostalgia all the way through, three hundred and fifty-five pages of well condensed clichés written in the most simplistic style. Instead of the clever wit and irony that leavened his previous State-of-the-Nation novels like The Rotters' Club, Coe's satirical vision here is motivated here by anger and preachiness, and his sociological observations felt obvious and on-the-nose.