“They called him simply Boris, he had a mop of blonde hair on his head and he drove around Brussels in a red Alfa Romeo, with ‘heavy metal’ playing at full blast,” reads one of the seven historical segments with which that magnificent British writer, Jonathan Coe (Birmingham, 1961), has literary encapsulated the last eighty years of England. The novel is titled ‘Bournville’ and stars a middle-class family from that placid suburb of Binmingham, impregnated, because of its factories, with the aroma of the famous Cadbury chocolate. A place that at times symbolically becomes the center of the world. Of an entire world, since the end of the world war, with people who have taken to the streets “divided between the joy that the war had finally ended and the freedom to admit the ordeal that had been.” NOVEL Bournville’ Author Jonathan Coe Publisher Anagrama Year 2024 Pages 425 Price 21.90 euros 5 Mary Lamb, the neuralgic engine with which the entire lineage begins, is in some way, as she explains the author of the book at the end of his work, based on his late mother, Janet Coe, who died during Covid. Born in 1934, the Mary of the novel had three children: Peter, a violinist in the BBC Symphony Orchestra, gay, liberal and republican; Martin, a chocolate lobbyist in Brussels, married to Bridget (“she’s as black as the ace of spades”, his grandmother’s comment as soon as she saw a photo) and, finally, Jack, a little less “evolved”, who continues telling Irish jokes (that is, Belgian jokes in France) and that he is one of those who calls women “girls.” Mary, for her part, was a notable pianist when she was young, a musical talent now inherited by her granddaughter Lorna, and she could have become a great concert pianist if she had not dedicated herself to creating a family, like so many women of her generation. On the night of Victory over the Germans, Mary met the silent and expressionless Geoffrey with whom she would found a home, although she always had doubts about her choice. The only time you will see him cry was in front of the television, during Diana’s funeral: never “for anything that had happened before (to him, to Mary or to the children)” had he done so. Coe shows a great ability to achieve a perfect enjambment that ceaselessly links the private and the historical. An entire national imaginary, the great traumas, disappointments and collective joys, slides smoothly, almost without noticing, or accelerated, over time: since the 8th May 1945, Victory Day; the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953; the World Cup final against West Germany in 1966; the investiture of Charles, Prince of Wales in 1969 and his wedding to ‘Lady’ Diana Spencer in 1981; the funeral of the Princess of Wales in 1997 and, finally, the seventy-fifth anniversary of Victory Day, on May 8, 2020, which closes like a circle everything that has been narrated and happened to the Lamb family and the entire country , coinciding with the global pandemic. Unconventional chronicler in his undoubted mastery, with unforgettable satires (all in Anagrama) such as ‘What a cast!’, ‘El Club de los Canallas’, ‘El Closed Circle’ or ‘The Heart of England’, to name just a few, Coe has become the best and most fantastic portraitist of British socio-political interiors and exteriors that reflect, as a whole, the destiny and character of an entire nation. Funny and ironic, moving from the intimate to the political argument and national sarcasm, what differentiates an indisputable talent like Jonathan Coe from many others is his ability to achieve a perfect enjambment that endlessly links the private and the historical. Without flat realism A subtle construction that uses all kinds of narrative resources: public speeches, private letters and intimate diaries, news in the media or the use of secondary characters to complete perspectives and impacts of shared events. Refinedly allusive, but at the same time narrating plots at all times accessible to the majority, without being declared experimental, the originality in the construction of his works has always distanced Coe, from the beginning, from the flat, predictable and moldy realism of many narrators. of the same or similar events. As the Anglophile Ludwig, who had grown up in ultra-conservative Salzburg and who visited London in 1977, at the height of punk, would say, admiring that British ability to “be proud and laugh at themselves at the same time”: “Why did you choose this path of recent years? And why did you choose him? That is, simply called Boris.
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