Bournville: From the bestselling author of Middle England

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Someone in a previous GR review of this book (Kay Dunham) described the style as similar to that of the Famous Five, this is exactly it. It does try your patience, though, to be treated like that as a reader: everything being spelled out for you, it makes you feel stupid at times. Wet in the southwest side of Birmingham, Bourneville was designed to house chocolate factory workers. It focuses foremost on Mary, who is a child during VE day, and overwhelmed by the patriotism and the joyousness of triumphing over the Germans.

Bournville is Jonathan Coe's most ambitious novel yet . . . a novel about people and place. Entertaining and often poignant, it presents a captivating portrait of how Britons lived then and the way they live now * Economist * This is another eminently readable Coe, full of believable characters and fizzing dialogue. And it couldn't be more timely * Big Issue * He had long toyed with the idea of writing a novel set during the week of Princess Diana’s funeral, but he wanted to take a longer view than he has in the past. The public reaction to the Queen’s death – in particular “the queue” – confirmed his growing belief “that we’re a nation mainly driven by emotion”, he says. Where he used to regard events such as the response to Diana’s death and the Brexit referendum as “turning points, moments when the country changed direction”, now he is not so sure. Instead, he sees them as “symptoms” of a national identity crisis that has been brewing for decades. “We are starting to look like a country that is not driven by facts and evidence and reason at all, but in the far extremes of Brexitland by a kind of fantasy and wishful thinking.”In Bournville, a placid suburb of Birmingham, sits a famous chocolate factory. For eleven-year-old Mary and her family in 1945, it's the centre of the world. The reason their streets smell faintly of chocolate, the place where most of their friends and neighbours have worked for decades. Mary will go on to live through the Coronation and the World Cup final, royal weddings and royal funerals, Brexit and Covid-19. She'll have children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Parts of the chocolate factory will be transformed into a theme park, as modern life and the city crowd in on their peaceful enclave.

A few weeks ago I read and reviewed Ian McEwan‘s most recent novel Lessons. One of the key themes of the novel was how certain major world events affected the main character, a man who was the same age as McEwan, though whose life was very different from McEwan’s. Our first stop is 1945, where we meet Lorna’s grandmother, Mary, as a child, on the eve of the VE Day celebrations. Mary’s parents, Doll and Sam, live in the chocolate-manufacturing suburb of Birmingham that gives the book its title. There is warmth and humour in the portrait of lower middle-class life presented, but it’s not sanitised. A strain of xenophobia bubbles up throughout the episode and climaxes in an act of violence that will echo throughout the book. Coe has the great gift of combining engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft

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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 Spectator

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. A tender portrayal of the state of the nation through the prism of family relationships * Woman & Home * There are a few good chapters, especially those talking about Cadbury's, but I was dismayed to read in the author notes that the death of Mary Lamb in the novel was an accurate account of the passing of Coe's own mother during the Covid pandemic. When Mary and Geoffrey get engaged, Geoffrey still feels some anxiety, knowing: "he would never quite feel sure of her until the vows were spoken and the wedding ring was on her finger", and she does, in fact, have another suitor; this possibility of how everything could have been different in just slightly different circumstances also hangs nicely over the novel. If Peter does find happiness, Bridget -- though otherwise happily married -- never gets the acceptance from too many of the members of the family that she deserves.

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And per chance, the story does improve slightly towards the end, from the 1980s onwards. My guess is that this is the period Coe has lived first hand and therefore is more comfortable in relating it. Oxfam books blog: Jonathan Coe and William Sutcliffe create window displays for the Oxfam Bloomsbury Bookshop". Archived from the original on 8 June 2011. A compelling social history that's sprinkled throughout with Coe's inimitable humour, love and white-hot anger * Evening Standard * There are other problems, like too many similar characters, but the ones I've listed above are the main ones. There's nothing new to be learned or experienced in Bournville because the early chapters are far too on-the-nose with historic events we all already know about, the middle is dull and non-eventful and the beginning/end bookends are far too personal. 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.

T)he loving, funny, clear-sighted and ruminative examination of recent British history (.....) As ever, prizing clarity over verbal fireworks, Coe’s writing draws the reader into the family dramas as they unfold over the decades. He has the great gift of combining plausible and engaging human stories with a deeper structural pattern that gives the book its heft. (...) Bittersweet as the eponymous bar of plain chocolate, the book ranges over a huge span of time, includes a large cast of characters, yet never flags nor confuses. (...) The book also builds a deeper integrity out of echoes and motifs, like a piece of music." - Marcel Theroux, The Guardian He published his first novel, The Accidental Woman, in 1987. In 1994 his fourth novel What a Carve Up! won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It was followed by The House of Sleep, which won the Writers' Guild of Great Britain Best Novel award and, in France, the Prix Médicis. As of 2022, Coe has published fourteen novels.It will be another twenty-one years before the next Anglo-German episode occurs. Mary has married Geoffrey, Carl’s grandson, and they have three boys. Their German cousins visit England for the first time that we know of, to attend the World Cup in 1966, played in England. The Germans are confident that Germany will win, the English less confident that England will win. However there are clashes between the two sets of cousins not only over football but over the relative quality of their national chocolate and over the war, resulting in a fight.