A wonderful mix of traditional countrified whodunnit, and very up to date politics and current affairs. Confusing in parts, with so many characters and time periods, nevertheless I enjoyed it very much

Thank you to NetGalley for providing this book for review.

Jonathan Coe’s acerbic gaze is always enjoyable and this romp was no exception! I really enjoyed the fact pace, the great characters, the wry asides and the very funny writing. Highly recommended.

Hats off to Jonathan Coe who, while maintaining a light tone, writes a multi-layered book that blends classic mystery, political satire, and personal history." Intriguing, captivating, excellent storytelling.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

From the author of the excellent “Middle England”, it’s a detective story (within a story) that takes place during the time of Liz Truss and the death of Queen Elizabeth II. But it also skips back decades giving an indication as to the development of the characters. As expected, there is also a theme of the rise of the right in British politics mixed into the plot. Very enjoyable novel.

Though some readers have complained that this is not as good as Coe's usual fare, I disagree. I found it to be a refreshingly quirky take on the murder mystery genre, written with all the observational skill and dexterity we've come to expect from Coe.

My first Coe but not my last! This was meta book within meta book within meta book. Although there are many narrators, narratives and characters to keep track of, Coe masterfully laid them out and was super easy to follow what goes going on.

“In a world where all efforts to tell the truth in words or images are compromised, contaminated, there’s something unique about fiction. Something authentic, something you can depend on.
PURE/RELIABLE”

N.B. My thanks to NetGalley for the unexpected opportunity to read a digital copy of this book after its publication date. My apologies for taking so long to post my honest review.

If you liked the idea of [book:Possession|41219], but thought the execution was too heavy, then this may be the novel for you. Likewise if you love Ali Smith’s novels, full of references to the real world, combined with a convincing fictional world. I discovered Jonathan Coe last summer when I read [book:The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim|7419758]. I said at the time that I’d found a new favourite author and this has confirmed it. I love the humour. I love the political digs and societal commentary. I love the Britishness and the references to the way things were when I was growing up; Jonathan Coe is only two years older than me.

Has Coe been criticised for writing satire that includes factual criticisms in his fiction, rather than writing straightforward fact? In any case, this novel more than makes the case for fiction that can present truth and raise political questions in a more palatable form than mere polemic. By including fictional conversations and speeches, he presents a number of viewpoints, whilst making it clear which he sympathises with (and it ain’t Conservatives). In a (fictional) memoir by one of the older character’s university friends, he presents the backstory to the cosy crime; a story of ‘dark academia’. In a section of imaginary autofiction, the younger characters Phyl and Rash interact with the probable murderer. But then we are brought back down to earth with a crash by being thrown back in with the fictional reality that crosses with the embedded fiction.

But there’s also a tension in this novel between the older generation, ‘boomers’ and the younger generation, ‘millennials’. Older people put their faith in the written word, but that can be destroyed or changed by censorship or editing. The younger generation’s touchstone is the internet and social media which seems ephemeral, but may leave an indelible record, if only you know where to find the information. The ability to disseminate your information by multiple means, possibly to many people at the same time, makes it easier to keep a record of something on a remote device that may be impossible to track. On the other hand, keeping vital information on your mobile phone may lead to watery disaster.

I shan’t attempt to summarise the plot because the book is structured in nesting layers that I’m not sure I understood entirely. I would have to think very hard about it and perhaps look at a physical copy of the book to make it clearer. I was left slightly floundering, trying to work out which part of the book was real and what was somebody else’s written version. What is real? What is fiction? All bearing in mind that it’s all fiction, bar the awfulness that was the Tory government, particularly post-Brexit.

This is all very clever because those are exactly the issues that Jonathan Coe is highlighting in his – mostly fictional – book. He is a master of political satire without becoming overly political. You could easily read this without any prior knowledge of the personalities in British politics. However, there is one part where a pompous old-school professor pontificates about Conservatism and freedom. Followed by hilarious lists of all the things that right-wing-minded people consider ‘woke’. The long litany of complaints is presented in a comical way. But when the police are interviewing the hotel owner, he mentions a disturbing view that I have never heard voiced in public: that “every other newsreader on the television is black, or a lesbian, or both.” Someone else looks back fondly on pre-Thatcher Conservative values that have been widely abandoned in later more obviously mercenary iterations. These include the basic human values that should be the ground rules of any society: “Don't be racist, don’t be sexist.”

Another wonderful aspect of the novel is its bookishness, especially the explanation of an uncorrected proof copy; I was reading it as a digital ARC on my phone, also an uncorrected proof. The unusual structure of the book as a whole is slightly unsettling as much of it is supposedly Phyl’s novel, written as a way of occupying herself after graduating, helping her to work through the shock of the loss of one of her mother’s university friends. Part of it is written as a cosy mystery, Murder at Wetherby Pond. Incidentally, that’s a joke: Wetherby Pond is the name of a character in a 1950 St. Trinians style film played by Alastair Sim. I only know this because Jonathan Coe mentioned it on Bluesky. This is another disconnect between individual experience, as I completely missed the reference. Yet a series like Friends can make connections between generations, though their experience of it can be completely different. Coe mentions young women in 2022 relaxing by watching old episodes of Friends on their phones, a window into a time before the tyranny of 24/7 interconnectness. But I’ve also heard Gen Z commenting on how shocking some of the attitudes are on the show. My daughter’s first reaction was that bras back then weren’t padded or underwired; she was rather scandalised.

I like the way that Coe puts the reader slightly off-balance by revealing details in a certain order, revealing my own assumptions by doing the opposite of what I’d expected. Hence, after revealing Phyl lives in a vicarage, it’s her mother who is the vicar rather than her father.

For anyone who followed British government announcements during the Covid pandemic, the three-part slogan ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ may invoke involuntary twitching, but was apparently a real British rail slogan. As an antidote, I’d recommend staff-isolating with a copy of this book, with the single admonition: Read it!

September 2022 – almost a kind of liminal month, where everything is at a boundary. Liz Truss is about to become Prime Minister – for a famously or infamously short time. The Queen is about to despair of the country and shrug off her last connection with this mortal coil – as is someone else. For Christopher Swann is a leftie political blogger who has paid for a place at a posh countryside hotel to witness what his leftiness makes him call a "far" right political yackfest of seminars and lectures. During the conference he will speak to a few key people, get switched to a posh suite, believe his memory stick has been stolen – and die. The female detective charged with solving the stabbing is hours from retirement – like I say, liminal. But boundaries and borders also imply a start – what is actually starting here, on these pages?

This at least starts out feeling like a very rum do and no mistake. We open with a flash-forward to an arrest, then gather we're to learn about a young lass (well, early 20s) fresh from university and needing more to life than her fast-food job. The narrative makes pot shots at some things de nos jour (Wordle, 'cosy crime'), before Swann turns up, says the conference could be the death of someone – and from then on we seem indeed to be reading a semi-cosy crime about his demise. This leaves us and the coppers involved with four potential killers, the world's most forgivingly patient fisherman, and much toing and froing about whether the NHS is too much of a sacred cow or free game for privatisation.

Not thoroughly appealing? Rest assured, Mr Coe does know what his trade is. There is a large list of people credited with being early readers, just in case there needed to be extra advice and confidence applied to the material, but I was happy to sit back and see what he was doing. In all I found the comedy here to be less than usual, but surprisingly quirky when it turned up – the old folks abode called Avalon Rest Home – 'Ave a Long Rest, indeed. After the 'third' (term used loosely) that is a cosy crime, we enter a second genre for the middle chunk, where we learn of early 1980s (aka pre-1980s) Cambridge life, and then swerve into a third approach for the ending. But to get back to the comedy, that genre is surely here as an indication that anything can become a call-back, and anything can be able to have two appearances within these covers, even if it may mean thoroughly ruining a certain Oliver Reed film for some.

Oh, and the folks home isn't the only entity here to have a quirky name – and when you twig to the title of this very volume, it's a charming moment in your day.

This doesn't look spry and sprightly, when you see the length of the audio book version. But it is. It doesn't end up as political as you may fear from my summary of the early sections – although if anything the book is there to question whether extreme politics could ultimately cause the ultimate, murderous conclusion of someone's life. There are digs at literature – both in academe and the real world – that may appeal less to others, and there is certainly a quirky, rum structure and intent, but on the whole this is another Coe success, if not as bravura as some of his previous. It still merits four stars, for want of anything more accurate.

I have loved Jonathan Coe’s work for decades. Just the right mix of politics and intrigue. I would say that you really need to concentrate on the stories within stories in this book and I wish I’d read it in one sitting, I think I would have understood it better. As usual, the plot twists are clever and the writing and characterisation are polished and three dimensional. I will keep on reading whatever Jonathan Coe writes!

Political blogger Christopher Swann attends a conservative conference, uncovers secrets and gets killed - but whodunit? The answer lies somehow in an obscure 1980s novel called My Innocence, the last book by conservative writer Peter Cockerill - or more precisely, an early proof copy of that book…

A new Jonathan Coe novel is always a good thing and, while I wouldn’t put The Proof of My Innocence up there as among his best, it’s an enjoyable enough read to make it worthwhile for all fans of this author.

Coe’s approach is more playful than usual, dividing up the lion’s share of the book into three parts, each one lampooning a trendy literary genre today: Part 1 Murder at Wetherby Pond is “A Cosy Crime Mystery”, Part 2 The Shadow Chamber is “A Dark Academia Story”, and Part 3 Proof/Reborn is “An Essay in Autofiction”.

Despite not being a fan of cosy anything in fiction, the first part was very entertaining and easily the best section of the novel. This concerns the build-up and murder, followed by the introduction of the delightful character of Detective Inspector Prudence Freeborne, and an examination of the key suspects.

The Shadow Chamber is where the novel ground to a halt for me. It’s presented as a memoir of a retired student of Cambridge from the 1980s when many of the key players from the first part were youngsters beginning their path to power during Mrs Thatcher’s administration.

Not a great deal happened in this part with lots of dull plummy talk and an underwhelming and quite silly reveal of what really happens in a conservative professor’s salons at the end. I’ve read exactly one dark academia book - Donna Tartt’s The Secret History - so am far from being an expert in this genre, but I feel like Coe didn’t quite nail this one. The balance was slanted far more in the academia direction and not enough in the dark.

Things pick up slightly in Proof/Reborn as the story returns to the present and the murder victim’s daughter and her friend decide to solve the case themselves. It’s periodically enjoyable - I did want to find out whodunit - but also dragged in places as Coe ambled towards the conclusion, trying to make a point about modern conservatism, the way people think today and other things that I definitely failed to grasp.

Also: autofiction? That is the worst literary genre of all time. Karl Ove Knausgaard and his loathsome ilk can shove right off. “My Struggle” is an apt description of what it’s like reading his ghastly “prose” and suffering through his endlessly odious self-absorption.

The book covers appearing throughout are explained in the end, so not only do we find out whodunit but we get another surprise in the framing of what we’ve just read too, which is clever. It also explains quite why so much of the preceding story had so many coincidences - characters’ names sharing the same letters, the many interpretations of the clue the murder victim wrote in his blood - not to mention the cliched conceit of having the villain monologue their motivations. Although the second reveal closes the book quite tidily too; another layer of conceit to the novel!

Coe’s point in this book seems to be that, since Thatcher, Britain has adopted similar values to Reagan’s America - every man for himself, individualism above all else, no social safety net - and the country has become the poorer for it. Whereas, pre-Thatcher, we lived in a more conscientious, united country, one that created the NHS, etc.

He illustrates the death of the older world by setting the story in September 2022 when the Queen died, and the failures of conservatism with the appointment of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, whose disastrous administration was the shortest in British history (49 days) and tanked the already woeful Covid economy still further.

Whether it’s true that that’s how we got to where we are now, or whether his view of Britain is accurate isn’t for me to say, because I have no idea (although I suspect there’s a smidge more to it than that), but it’s an intriguing viewpoint.

(Incidentally, like his murder victim, Coe has also been writing about conservatism for many years now, especially in books like What a Carve Up! and Number 11, both of which form a small series featuring the Thatcherite Winshaw family - of whom, Josephine Winshaw weirdly cameos in this book too. So… Proof is also set in that same world?)

I would’ve preferred if Coe had fully committed to the locked room murder mystery storyline for the entire book instead of just part of it, because Coe is more than adept in that style and the succeeding, differing parts were definitely lacklustre in comparison. But there were moments in those other parts that were decent, Coe’s writing is as excellent as ever, and I enjoyed the novel well enough - worth a look if you’re a fan of the author and/or genre fiction, though I wouldn’t expect a consistently high quality story in The Proof of My Innocence.

I didn't get on with this at all, despite its obvious intelligence, and adept-enoigh plot build ups, i guess the original main protagonist's boredom effected me too: I simply wasn't engaged...

In this tricksy book, full of literary sleights of hand, Jonathan Coe delves deep into the underbelly of British Conservative politics at the time of Liz Truss’s short spell as prime minister and the death of Queen Elizabeth. And this not a pretty world.
In 2022 we meet Phyl, an aimless graduate with dreams of writing a cosy crime caper. Her mom’s friend from varsity, Christopher, a left-wing commentator and scourge of the Tories, is visiting on the eve of an extreme-right conference, which he plans to disrupt with bombshell revelations that threaten very powerful people
We then find ourselves in a novel-within-a-novel set at such a conference and where a baffling murder takes place. Enter Inspector Prudence Freeborne who sets about solving the case.
One of the suspects is Roger Wagstaff, a literary critic who’s made it his life work to revive the reputation of Peter Cockerill, a much-maligned author who killed himself back in the day.
It’s a tangled web and Coe employs various literary games to get to the bottom of it all, which, while amusing at times, sadly become a bit of a yawn.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC!

I'd never read Jonathan Coe before, so I don't know if The Proof of My Innocence is typical of his writing style. I found it light, a bit broad in humour and theme, and experimental in ways that didn't work with those two descriptors. I'm a fan of media that plays with "reality", books within books, where you don't know what's meant to be "real" or what's meant to be fiction in the author's created reality. I loved The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas. Atonement by Ian McEwan. But both of those books had tones that earned their meta. TPOMI did not, in my opinion. It was too superficial, too comedic in a non-intellectual way. I found the meta/playing irritating rather than engaging.

TPOMI centres on.... Well, what does it centre on? Without spoiling, it's hard to say. A good portion of the books is a murder mystery, which is well-enough done, although the author gives away the twist early on and then continues as if it's still a mystery. There's also an "auto-fiction" style story of a young student at Cambridge in the 1980s, which contains clues that tie into the mystery. Both stories detail the rise of the extreme right in the UK, spreading to the USA, and that aspects is interesting and disturbing. It's also frustratingly superficial and broad. A journalist calling everything "woke"? Coe feels no need to try and convince his readers of anything and just assumes they're on the same page. I would have liked a bit more depth to the politics. Sometimes the novel felt like scrolling through pre-Musk Twitter, in which young people accuse older of hating them because they don't like their own lives. Just... broad, like I said.

There were a decent number of plot-holes and things that didn't make sense if you thought about them for more than a minute. The characters and their voices all felt very samey, without truly distinct personalities. There was a weird random lecture about asexuality that had nothing to do with anything else in the book. The title turns out to be a really annoying twist on language and there's one element of the murder mystery, involving the TV show Friends, that made me roll my eyes so hard it hurt. All that said, I was entertained enough to read all the way through and intrigued enough to wonder if I'd like some of the author's earlier books.

This is a fantastic book. As a fan of both Jonathan Coe and murder mysteries, it was great to see them come together, but Coe has elevated the mystery genre several levels.

The story sees the murder of a left wing blogger uncover powerful right wing networks that have been organising for decades to shift Britain rightwards. Coe brilliantly creates very convincing characters, rooted in real events from the 1980s to the present day. His description of what one such network was getting up to in the early 1980s, ahead of the 1984-85 miners' strike, and currently in terms of NHS privatisation, is very well done. It's scary because it's true.

The novel is set in the present day (well, the time of Liz Truss's time in office and the death of the queen) and shows how characters and events have been shaped by what came before.

It begins innocuously enough with a young woman, Phyl, who has returned home after university and is somewhat unsure of what she should be doing with her life. The story then takes us back to the time when her mother, Jo, was a student at Cambridge university and various characters she knew there.

I'm probably not doing this novel justice because I'm trying not to give away any spoilers as to the specifics of the plot. But the characters are interesting and well-defined, and the plot is fantastic. It's also a sharp comment on crime writing and auto fiction, with Coe somehow managing to weave in the kind of elements you'd expect in a whodunnit (games with characters' initials and names, the mystery of a 'locked door murder') without being smug or ridiculing about it.

Thanks to Netgalley for the access.

Metafictional political thriller-whodunnit-comedy
—
This has it all, and yet, the centre will not hold.

Opening with the coming-of-age tale of Phyl in a holding pattern of ennui when life coalesces around her, the world and the lives of her parent’s friends coming into focus; taking inspiration from everything around her, Phyl begins to spin a tale as a cosy crime, dark academia and autofiction, and in doing so, she might come closer to the dangerous truth than anyone might expect.

Covering so many genres in one novel, like another release this year, you would anticipate that each would be a well-written version of that form. Admittedly, in the world of the book, they’re all written by Phyl, a neophyte novelist who’s barely written anything before, and so perhaps they should start off bad, get better, and improve. But the first book is baaad, the second a little better, the third—well, it’s supposed to be a bestseller.

For me, three stars.

Many years ago I read What a Carve Up! by Johnathan Coe - a brilliant political satire looking at the changes our nation was going through under Thatcher. Post war Britain moved away from a country trying to create a more equal, fairer, community based society to one that put selfishness and greed at its heart. This all culminates in the short term of Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership which is when this novel takes places. Once again Johnathan Coe surveys the nation and considers where it all went wrong.
With the far right on the rise, perhaps the best way to get by, is to read an extremely funny satire. Not just funny but poignant and clever. Highly recommended.

Clever and witty as usual eith Jonathan Coe, but I felt myself enjoying it less as it went on - the last of the books within the book was my least favourite, and liked one ending more than the next!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This was my first Jonathan Coe and is unlikely to be my last - I found this novel very intriguing and, while the meshing together of genres didn't always work completely, it was a really refreshing and interesting read, as well as very funny at times. A Brexit murder mystery!

I’m glad I persevered.

Phil is forced to move home after completing her degree. She works at a sushi restaurant at Terminal 4 Heathrow. Her plans for becoming an author are put onto hold.

Her mother, a clergywoman has invited Chris a friend from her days at Cambridge to stay with the family as he’s arranged to attend a conference in the Cotswolds, his adopted daughter Rashida, joins him. It seems like he’s only just left for this far-right conservative gathering when they receive news of his death. He’s been murdered.

Inspector Prudence Freeborne oversees finding the murderer – however -Phyl and Rash decide to also investigate his murder.

I’ve not come across Jonathan Coe’s work before plunging head-first into reading this novel. It was a wild ride! From Liz Truss and the lettuce that lived longer than her appointment as Prime Minister, to the friendship that Chris and Phyl’s mother had dating back to their time at Cambridge University. The fact that there were three books nestled within this book astonished me and caused quite a lot of confusion and I’m so pleased that I decided to persevere to the end. I might even be tempted to read more of Jonathan Coe’s work.

Rony

Elite Reviewing Group received a copy of the book to review from NetGalley.

The Proof of My Innocence, by Jonathan Coe - book review

What will we think of Jonathan Coe’s novel, The Proof of my Innocence, in 30 years’ time? And does it matter? Like Anthony Horowitz’s Alan Conway/Atticus Pünd/Susan Ryeland series, Coe offers us a novel that seeks to subvert its own form, but while Horowitz gives us smooth entertainment, Coe comes up with something altogether more freewheeling which is somehow both lighter and heavier. Lighter - because he breaks so many rules that you’re not always sure how to approach the material. Heavier - because Coe is busy asking questions of the reader and doesn’t hang around waiting for our answers.
Supposedly, this is all about Liz Truss. The novel opens with her poised to become prime minister; its last pages quote from her resignation speech. Coe is furious that her brand of Conservatism (which we’ll a little sloppily label as ‘popcon’) could have propelled her to power and he’s keen to emphasise what he considers that particular ideology’s illegitimacy: it can win office only by being dishonest about its intentions and its victory, however short-lived, shows the rottenness of a society that pits old against young, puts a stop to the limited social mobility that was possible during the post-war consensus and which, moreover, can no longer agree on what constitutes a fact.
Some of these themes have been previously explored by Coe and others. What’s different here is that Coe shifts through three literary genres: cosy crime, dark academia and autofiction. The requirements of each genre mean that although the over-arching plot does make perfect sense, there are inconsistencies that can trip up the reader. These inconsistencies don’t restrict themselves to facts: we spend quite some time trying to work out whether Coe is sympathetic to each of these genres and what that sympathy might mean.
Take cosy crime, for example. Coe takes the notion of the eccentric detective and really runs with it; he criticises familiar elements such as secret passageways. The supposed writer is doing cosy crime because she thinks it will be easy. So where there are elements that don’t necessarily land, we can’t necessarily tell whether Coe’s doing it on purpose.
He’s on firmer ground when we get to dark academia, and maybe this is where his loyalty lies, as he’s covered 1980s excess before. A theme of dark academia is that higher education was so much better when people (students, lecturers) could wander around reading novels all day: a character who has supposedly come to come to study medicine but spends his time in the philosophy, history or English literature lecture halls is one of the heroes of the novel. Social circles at 1980s Cambridge were determined on class lines, but this means that although we can seethe at the exclusion of the novel’s main protagonists from the ranks of those who will, forty years later, be the thinkers behind Truss, we don’t really get to see the popconners up close.
And the reaction of the normal folk is to find their niche, away from the corridors of power. They might become a vicar and undertake minor good works, or set up an ethical business. What they don’t do is find ways to seriously oppose those with power. Even the great scoop that someone thinks they’ve got, had it been published, would have done very little to change the political narrative. Truss was brought down by the markets, not by her associations with Tufton Street which were widely known about even if they were not always transparently reported.
I wonder whether Coe believes that he should himself have done more. He appears here, lightly disguised, as a Cambridge student and a contemporary of the popconners. And when he isn’t encouraging us to think about the potency of literary fashion, and having his characters be furious at the success of Martin Amis (in particular, Money) he’s asking: what should, what could a novelist do about it all? Is it right to pander to fashion, or should a writer aim for legacy? And where does truth fit in with all this, anyhow?
Those are big questions, and at times things can get a bit overwhelming. Coe is a master of the set piece, and feeds us a few; at times we’re wondering whether we’re missing too many of the references. Is this a reference to Women in Love? Is that a reference to Don’t Look Now? (Yes, it was.) You don’t have to notice them all, in fact you don’t need to notice any of them. But to get the most out of this novel you need to be prepared to let Coe take you in numerous directions. There’s some cosy crime and some laughs at Liz Truss’s expense, sure, but - unlike your standard mystery writer - Coe wants you to do some work. The state of the nation depends on it.