As well as being one of the country’s most consistently entertaining authors, Jonathan Coe has always been good at state-of-the-nation polemics. It was back in 1994 that he made his name with What a Carve Up!, a novel that skewered the British political environment of the 1980s with a streak of devilish humour that could have come straight from the Ealing comedies of the 1950s. In 2015, he did similar with Number 11, a sequel that depicted a more modern Britain that he found not much improved.
Now, following quieter, more personal novels like Mr Wilder And Me (2020) and Bournville (2022), Coe returns to political satire with The Proof of My Innocence, his fifteenth novel. The book gleefully lambasts 14 years of – as he sees it – Tory mismanagement that reached an inglorious nadir with the ascension of Liz Truss as Prime Minister, a position she held for 49 days. This is his most ambitious work to date, told in three very distinct styles, each given its own separate section.
First is cosy crime pastiche, then a locked-room murder mystery , and finally an exercise in auto-fiction. Throughout, he takes potshots at the nanny state, grumbling that one cannot even board a train these days without being hectored by an automated voice to “See it, say it, sorted”. The novel opens with Phyl, a recently-graduated university student back living with her parents, who works at an airport sushi restaurant.
She has no idea what to do with the rest of her life, and feels an increasi.