Bournville

Bournville, Coe's most recent novel, takes us back, as the title suggests, to the Birmingham of his Rotter's Club novels, and to the kind of ironic analysis of cultural values in post-war provincial Britain that he is best at. He follows the life of his central character, musician, mother and PE teacher Mary, through a series of "national landmarks" from VE Day in May 1945 through to Covid lockdown in May 2020. Mary is some sort of cousin of Sylvia Foley, and the Foley family and various characters from the Rotter's Club novels pop up on the peripheries of the story, but it's Mary and her children who are at the centre of the narrative. She's a strong and captivating character, whom Coe obviously cares deeply about. We don't really need show more his endnote to work out that he's writing about his own mother, but he assures us that the other characters are pure fiction, especially that irritating and incompetent tousled-haired old-Etonian Brussels reporter who improbably ends up running the country.

I felt that this was a very strong novel, with a good balance between story and historical background. But of course I'm reading it as someone who grew up at the same time as Coe and in a similar place, so he is putting his finger on a lot of things that have strong resonances for me. Especially the crass xenophobia of the WWII-obsessed atmosphere we grew up in during the sixties. Which started to dissolve a bit in the seventies, but came back with a vengeance after Thatcher came to power, and doesn't seem to have let off since. Coe's point seems to be that there's a specifically English way of avoiding serious engagement with the things that have gone wrong in our lives, echoed by the sheltered atmosphere of the Bournville planned community and by Mary's determined efforts to prevent family quarrels at the cost of allowing nastiness (specifically, her husband's intolerance to any kind of cultural or political difference) to continue indefinitely below the surface of family life. show less

This book is set in Bournville in Birmingham where the famous Cadbury's factory produced some of the nation's favourite chocolate bars. It follows four generations of a family in seven sections which cover some of the most famous events of the last 75 years including the coronation, a royal wedding and funeral, the 1966 World Cup and the covid pandemic. As somebody who enjoys reading about 20th century history and loves social history, this book was a dream for me to read.

Although the four generations start with Doll, it's her daughter Mary who is the hub of the story, and her children and grandchildren who experience alongside her some of the most memorable times in recent history. I liked how their own family situations were woven in show more with these events. Whilst they went about their own business and had their own personal family experiences, they were encountering the same historical happenings as the rest of us which fostered a kind of solidarity with me as a reader.

I was enthralled by this book really and just soaked up the social detail. I always enjoy a good family drama. Whilst the Lamb family have their ups and downs, Bournville is just as much about the everyday and the way we all experience the ebbs and flows of life against a backdrop of constant evolution. I found it fascinating to follow the family through the years and to witness the changes they saw. I smiled, laughed and cried - the ending felt particularly poignant and the author's note at the end only added to that.

Bournville is a superb novel. It could be about any one of us and our family history and that's what makes it such a strong and engaging read. Changing attitudes, the rise of technology, the end of a war, Brexit, it's all contained between the covers and it had me engrossed from start to finish. show less

At his best, I think that Jonathan Coe is one of my favourite novelists, although I can’t deny that I have found some of his novels far from entertaining, even tedious, and a couple of them have even been unnecessarily unpleasant.

Fortunately, I found this to be one of his best, on a par with The Rotter’s Club or Middle England. I suppose that part of his appeal for me is our closeness in age (I think he may be just a couple of years older than me), and our shared experience of growing up in the Midlands. He is, of course, from the more populous West Midlands (specifically Birmingham), while my adolescence was passed in the more verdant, yet also even further prevailing trends, East Midlands.

He has always been adept at managing show more several different threads of a plot, and at conveying different times with great ease and plausibility. In this novel, he uses the device of seven major events, ranging from VE Day in 1945 to the lockdown arising from the Covid pandemic in 2020. He follows members of a gradually expanding family, starting in the workers’ village established by the Cadbury family for the staff of their factory complex in Bournville.

I found this novel particularly evocative as I have my own recollections of several of the events that Coe uses as hooks for the developments within the story. I was especially impressed by the manner in which he used separate characters’ contrasting views (often diametrically opposed) to throw different perspectives on the numerous sub plots and twists.

I was pleased to see him return to such strong, mid-season form with this novel. show less

Jonathan Coe is a chronicler of Britain’s past and present. His novels fuse the factual and the fictional, the political and the personal, and combine well-drawn characters and a strong narrative drive with an approach to the construction of the novel that is, well, novel.

Bournville is a family saga spanning four generations and constructed around seven key events in modern British history: VE Day, 8th May 1945, the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the 1966 World Cup final, the Investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales in 1969, the Royal Wedding of 1981, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, 1997 and the 75th anniversary of VE Day in 2020. It also grapples with the metaphysical question of whether British chocolate is show more chocolate.

The Lamb family are a microcosm of British social and political attitudes as we move from the reformist optimism of the post-war Labour Government to Thatcherism, as Britain becomes multicultural, as it joins and leaves Europe, as factories turn into theme parks, as the Covid lockdown descends, as everything changes, and everything stays the same.

Coe has achieved a pleasing and deceptively effortless synthesis of the conventional and unconventional novel. He plays all kinds of stylistic and formal games while always keeping you engaged with the emotional heart of the story. He has written funnier books and the satirical anger of What a Carve Up! is almost entirely absent, but you wouldn’t want a novelist in his early sixties to rewrite the novels of his thirties. Bournville is thoughtful, formally inventive and ultimately deeply moving. show less

“Past, present and future: that was what she heard….Everything changes, and everything stays the same.”

I’m sure my request for Bournville by Jonathan Coe was inspired by the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Promising a portrait of Britain as experienced by a middle class family over a period of seventy five years, I felt a tug of nostalgia tied to the end of an era.

After a prologue set in 2020, Coe begins with VE Day in 1945 where the residents of Bournville, a Birmingham village built around the Cadbury chocolate factory, simply known as the Works, are celebrating the end of the war. It’s here that eleven year old Mary lives with her parents Sam and Doll, and over the next seven decades, coinciding with seven memorable events show more in British history, Coe revisits Mary and her growing family.

The unique structure works well to reflect the national and individual experience of the changes in culture, attitudes, politics, technology and economics. I enjoyed the sojourn through each ‘occasion’ which includes the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the World Cup Final between England v. West Germany in 1966, the investiture of Prince Charles in 1969, his wedding to Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, and then the Princess’s tragic death in 1997, ending with 2020, which marks the 75th Anniversary of VE Day, and the start of the CoVid pandemic, but it is the journey of the characters that illustrate their meaning. Coe charts the family’s joys and griefs, triumphs and regrets, gains and losses, creating a history of their own as time marches on.

Written with tenderness, humour, and insight, Bournville evokes life’s ordinary and extraordinary moments. Enjoy with a block of Cadbury chocolate. show less

Here is a state-of-the-nation novel, a family saga centring on the matriarch of the family, Mary, whom we meet as a child celebrating VE day and drop in on over the years until her death - alone - from an aneurism during the Covid pandemic. Her close relations - and other characters too - drop in and out of this novel. They have some of them been in recent novels of his, and may appear in future work. Bournville, home of Cadbury's chocolate factory, a former Quaker village, and now a pleasant residential area is the focus of family life. Martin, one of her three sons works there, and represents British chocolate interests when the EU declines to recognise the British product as chocolate. Links with Europe and specifically Germany pop show more up throughout the novel, starting with Mary witnessing, on VE Day, a local thug attacking an elderly German man who has lived in England for decades. We witness Mary's husband Geoffrey's racism and anti-foreigner views, and how they colour the politics of his eldest son Jake. We see how Mary becomes more open as the years pass, especially since Geoffrey dies, and accepts her third son's homosexuality. So many themes, so many threads.

As someone whose politics are so closely aligned with Coe's own, it's easy to like this book. Nevertheless, I found his treatment of the historical events that underpin this novel - the 1966 World Cup, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, Charles and Diana's wedding, and specifically Diana's death somewhat formulaic, as if he were ticking off 'issues' to incorporate into his story. Nevertheless, this is an involving and enjoyable read, and I'll be happy to encounter some of these characters again in some future work. show less

This is a thoroughly entertaining, but nonetheless, revealing story of an extended family from 1945 to 2020. The book is set around seven celebrations during this period and recounts how members of the family are moulded by their era, backgrounds and circumstances, but also, how they change with the passage of time. Coe explores sympathetically the relationship between the three brothers, Jack, Martin and Peter, who grow into very different lives and beliefs from each other, yet are kept together through their family links. Coe’s writing is full of humour and captures the essence of the events that he describes and how they affect the members of the family across the different generations.