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What sort of novels do people enjoy these days? Cosy crime, thinks recent English graduate Phyl who, for want of anything better to do beyond her zero hours job at Heathrow, is thinking of writing one herself. Auto-fiction. Or her personal favourite, dark academia.
Not the outward-looking, socially engaged, quasi-political novels with which Jonathan Coe has made his name.
But Coe turns the tables here, fashioning his own cosy crime caper out of his customary genial social realism in a novel that splices the death of a Conservative blogger at a right-wing Tory conference with the 44 days of Liz Truss’s ill-fated reign (there’s even mention of The Fresh Lettuce pub).
Yet Coe, in the past so sharp on the cultural relationship between Britain and conservatism, has become blunter the more polarised the country has become.
He’s losing his edge as a social satirist, although this novel suggests a future beckons as a cosy crime novelist.
