Winshaw Legacy, The : or What a Carve Up!

Rating:
Summary: Watch Out...
Review: Jonathan Coe has been favourably compared to Charles Dickens and it's not hard to see why. The classic Dickensian markers - a huge cast of characters, the use of foreshadowing, the social commentary - are all very much in evidence in Coe's work.

'What a Carve Up!' is a thoroughly post modern romp through the decades from World War II through to the early 90s. Coe uses the villains of the piece, the Winshaw family, to explore various aspects of British society during the period with humour and compassion and without resorting to diatribe. Most notably, he takes numerous broad swipes (not always effectively or fairly) at the 'greed is good' ethos of Thatcherite economics.

The finale sees justice meted out to those who deserve it - and justice is not always a punishment in Coe's world - in a thoroughly Biblical manner.

You will read Coe's work for the characters and the up-all-night-reading plot. But what you will remember is his apparent message: 'Watch out, hold on to your integrity....but keep on laughing.'

Rating:
Summary: A Satire Growing More Relevant
Review: Some reviewers criticise "What A Carve Up!" for over-the-top satire, cartoonish portrayals of purely evil characters, and shrill polemic style. I got to the book in America in July, 2002, and while I agree that the bad guys are dealt with simplistically, the treatment may not be so far off the mark. Ten years after Coe researched this book, all his issues remain in the headlines. The West is gearing up again to topple the monster we created and armed in Saddam Hussein. Agribusiness conglomerates have devastated what remained of small farm America, brought other trouble to the towns where their enormous operations brutalise the workers and animals; and people only wonder more about the ever-increasing hormone and feed treatments used to make our food. Anyone who tunes in to certain American TV and radio networks, or reads certain columnists, will notice that right wing politicians and pundits have gone on to perfect the demonically dishonest rhetorical style Coe goes after (particularly on pp 137-138, 63-64, 385-88, 313 of the paperback edition titled "The Winshaw Legacy").

As for the charge that Coe unfairly makes greed out to be a bad thing, what Thomas Winshaw does to Phocas Motor Services in the book (pp 322-24 of my edition) was played out in many much worse factual scenarios that I know of in the US throughout the 1980's. (Look at what US Steel did to southeast Chicago, for starters.) And his analysis of this sort of capitalism couldn't be any more relevant with all the short-sighted and criminally dishonest market manipulations by politically connected that are coming to light Stateside in 2002 (Enron, Harken, Halliburton, Dynegy, Worldcom, Global Crossing, Adelphia...). Think of the havoc that these scandals have brought to individual lives among employees and fundholders who counted on these 'businessmen' - really a network of interconnected charlatans - to be running sustainable companies, not inflating the value of their options to whatever unsustainable level would maximise their personal wealth. Lack of subtlety should be the last criticism pinned on someone who addresses this sort of outrage head-on.

In short, you don't need to be British to get this book, not even to appreciate the parts devoted to the National Health Service. The points he makes are just as relevant to what's happened in America under Reagan and Bushes I and II. I agree with the critcism that Coe panders to upper-class resentment by attributing all these various corruptions to one aristocratic family, when it's untitled corporate conservatives throughout society who need blaming. But he is doing a satire, and the aristocratic trope serves as the novel's framing device.

Rating:
Summary: A truly political novel
Review: This is the first Coe book I've read and I loved it. It's funny and clever, develops the plot in a fragmented, looping chronology with multiple perspectives, sources, and interlocking stories - all presided over by a very unhappy and frustrated lead narrator. You know, the sort of things you find in Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, and Will Self novels (and seemingly all serious films since at least 'Pulp Fiction'). But it is more straightforward, with less literary ambition, or pretension, than what I've read from those authors. The story is much easier to follow, and one can say exactly what happens at the end, rather than speculating on the desultory and stridently ambiguous finishes those other authors frequently give us.

The unfashionable clarity is a result of the book's overt politics. I find that Amis and Self bury their political commentary in stories that focus on how tormented their characters feel by the unexplained vagaries of life and how irreversibly complex it's all become. Coe, on the other hand, is willing to identify and blame the forces that have made society such a mess and living so hard to figure out. It's not some Fat Controller with supernatural powers, nor a mysterious seeming-friend doing improbable things with the money system to play out a personal grudge. It's right-wing politicians and businesses who, among other things: control our news sources and fill them with meaningless gossip or misleading agitprop, stoke up wars and profit on arms sales, industrialise food production at the expense of the ecology and consumer health, and intentionally ruin our public services to serve their theological devotion to laissez faire economics. In this way, Coe actually has more intellectual heft than the authors who imply that the world is just cosmically, unfathomably unfair and unpleasant. He's telling us that the malignant forces are entirely within our control, were we willing to stand up to the bent plutocratic filth that are allowed to run our governments and economy.