Talk given as part of a panel discussion on ‘the contemporary’ in British writing, at Birbeck College, London, 14 December 2006

I think that I’ve been invited here tonight as a practitioner rather than a theorist: someone who has tried to capture aspects of the contemporary in a series of novels. So please forgive me if I talk in this personal, specific capacity. The observations I’m going to make will be focussed very narrowly on my own work – or rather, what I can remember about the impulses that lay behind some of it – but with any luck they might lead everyone into broader areas of discussion.

It’s not so much the case any more, but there was certainly a feeling around, about ten or fifteen years ago, that British novelists in particular were preoccupied with the past. The great success of books like A S Byatt’s Possession and Rose Tremain’s Restoration led to a feeling that what the British novelist excelled at was a kind of historical pastiche. In the background a generation of younger critics and reviewers – and I was probably one of them – grumbled that ‘contemporary’ British life was being under-represented in our fiction. It was in this cultural context – although not for this reason – that I began writing a novel called What a Carve Up.

The impulses which inspire you to write a piece of fiction are cloudy and complex, and it’s hard now to talk with any precision about what I thought I was trying to achieve in a work begun more than a decade and a half ago. I do remember thinking, though, in 1990 or thereabouts, that the country had gone through some pretty revolutionary changes during the Thatcher decade, that many of these changes were not for the better, and that it would be worthwhile to attempt a large-scale, panoramic representation of what Britain looked like (to me) at that particular historical moment.

If you look at the contents page of What a Carve Up you will see that it is portioned up into sections headed August 1990, September 1990 and so on, running up to January 1991, the month when the Americans launched an invasion of Iraq, with British support, in a first attempt to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein. However, what strikes me now, thinking about the novel, is how little of its action is actually set during those months – the ‘present’ of the novel, if you like. There is an extended prologue set during the 1940s, there are long quotations from a fictional politician’s diary entries for the 1950s and 60s, and many long flashbacks to the 1980s – the decade which is the novel’s real narrative focus. The climax of the novel is the American attack on Iraq, and much of what precedes this in the book is an attempt, I suppose, to sketch, however obliquely, some of the political and historical forces which led up to this moment.

I am thinking on my feet as I write these words, so please allow me to backtrack here and make a quick contrast with an earlier novel of mine, a contrast which suddenly seems significant. A book which I wrote in the 1980s, called A Touch of Love, uses as its focal point another contemporary American imperial episode – Ronald Reagan’s attack on Libya in 1986, which provoked outrage in this country for its use of UK air bases. I remember quite distinctly feeling that this was a defining, apocalyptic historical moment, and wanting to capture that feeling in fiction. And yet in that novel, the moment has very little resonance – partly, no doubt, because I didn’t have the resources as a writer to deal with it adequately, but also because it emerges from nowhere, with no context to explain or support it. It has no place in the narrative – is not supported by the narrative structure, if you like – and therefore doesn’t seem to affect the reader very deeply.

Now that I think about it, a pattern starts to emerge in my novels. There are three of them, I would say, that attempt to deal with ‘the contemporary’: that is, which try to capture a sense of what it felt like to live in the historical present in which I was writing them. These novels are called A Touch of Love, What a Carve Up and most recently, The Closed Circle: and all of them, I see now, were inspired by, or revolve around, or lead up to these explosive historical moments which I’ve just referred to as ‘defining’ or even apocalyptic. These moments were, respectively, the American attack on Libya in 1986, the American invasion of Iraq in 1991, and the more recent American invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Let me talk about the last of these now. I’ve already said that in What a Carve Up, the bulk of the narrative was set in the 1980s and attempted to portray some of the political and economic forces – some of the political atmosphere might be a better way of putting it – which preceded the 1991 attack on Iraq: the novel tries to move readers into a position where they can see that attack as dreadful, certainly, but also explicable and even (in narrative terms at least) inevitable.

What then was I trying to do in The Closed Circle? This is a slightly more complicated case, as the novel forms a narrative diptych with an earlier book of mine called The Rotters’ Club. The two works were conceived together and I think of them, in effect, as forming one long novel. The Rotters’ Club shows a group of provincial schoolchildren growing up in the 1970s against a backdrop of industrial unrest, racial tension and terrorist activity. The Closed Circle shows the same characters as middle-aged adults, and provides a snapshot of their lives between the years 1999 and 2003. The political context has changed dramatically: the power of the trades unions has been broken, economic neo-liberalism has taken over, and rigid distinctions between left- and right-wing ideologies are seen as old-fashioned.

When I began writing this diptych, I thought of the first book, essentially, simply as a prologue to the second. The subject of these novels was once again to be the contemporary – the here and now – but I wanted to show how the Britain I was intending to portray (Britain in the middle of Tony Blair’s period of office) was largely the creation of my own generation; and to show how that generation, in turn, was shaped and defined by the events and the ethos of the 1970s. If I might digress for a moment, it turns out that the books were rarely seen in that way.  I underestimated the extent to which people were nostalgic for some of the more ephemeral cultural aspects of the 1970s, leading them to seize upon The Rotters’ Club as a self-contained celebration of that era. To me the narrative of that novel doesn’t really work, and was never intended to work, if you read it in isolation, but that’s how many people have read it. When The Closed Circle appeared it was seen almost as an afterthought, and many readers almost seemed to resent it for the way it took the perceived high spirits of the earlier book and curdled them into something more disillusioned and ambiguous. Perhaps I simply made a tactical error by publishing them separately.

Anyway. The real business of writing The Closed Circle began in April 2003. I rented a house just outside Bath for a few days and I vividly remember listening to the radio while I was there and hearing that the latest American invasion of Iraq had been brought – or so we were told – to a triumphant conclusion. The Iraqis, it was reported, had been ‘liberated’ from the regime of Saddam Hussein. I am no expert either in military tactics or in foreign policy, but to me this seemed an implausible interpretation. Three and a half years later, Iraq, as we all know, is a violent and anarchic mess. That day as I listened to the radio the whole narrative shape of the novel was disclosed to me. The story of a marriage break-up, in which the abandoned wife feels shame and anger at being ‘liberated’ by her husband, would parallel the political events unfolding at the same time. The wife, Susan, learns of her husband’s betrayal as she watches the news on the television, and sees in the eyes of the Iraqi people what she feels in her own heart: ‘a kind of fury: the fury of a people who had been granted freedom, of sorts, but not on their own terms; … a people who would never feel kindly towards those who had freed them; would never trust their motives’. As with my earlier novels, I hoped that in this way I had found a means of keeping the personal and political narratives running on the same track.

And yet with this novel, it felt different, somehow, this whole business of ‘writing the contemporary’.  I’ve often wondered why this should have been. Perhaps because, with the Thatcher years – whatever else you might have thought of them – what you saw was what you got. Certainly by the time of the miners’ strike – only five years into her rule –  it was chillingly clear what kind of administration we were dealing with. By the time I came to write What a Carve Up!, six years later, we had all made up our minds what we thought of the Thatcher regime. But the Blair years have been infinitely more slippery. We voted him in, on a wave of optimism, and soon found ourselves faced with a government which says one thing, in a tremulous voice and with its hand on its heart, and then does another. The language of politics has become devalued and meaningless. Nobody trusts it, and so nobody listens to it. In the case of my generation – the middle-class Middle Englanders whose adolescence I wrote about in The Rotters’ Club – we disapprove of Thatcherism and Blairism, for good, old-fashioned left-liberal reasons, but we rather like the material benefits it confers upon us. We disapprove of military adventurism but at the same time we are all scared of terrorists and want to be protected from them. And most dispiriting of all, bad as this administration is, all the alternatives currently on offer seem to be worse.

The contemporary ‘historical moment’ which I tried to capture in The Closed Circle, then, is characterised by confusion and apathy; by a sense of drift, and a vague undercurrent of resentment. All of these qualities are difficult to reconcile with the requirements of narrative. I tried to draw a portrait of a class and a culture in a state of flux and disorientation, but the form in which I tried to do it – essentially a mild variation on social realism, using multiple points of view – was probably too traditional.

The novelist B S Johnson once wrote that ‘Present-day reality is changing rapidly; it always has done, but for each generation it appears to be speeding up. Novelists must evolve (by inventing, borrowing, stealing or cobbling from other media) forms which will satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality, their own reality and not Dickens’ reality or Hardy’s reality or even James Joyce’s reality’. As for the form which will satisfactorily contain Tony Blair’s reality – the reality of what it is like to be alive in Britain in the first decade of the 21st century – it doesn’t seem to have been found yet. Not by me, at any rate.

© Jonathan Coe 2006

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