The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe review: 'grumpy and smug'

Satirical novels are supposed to combine anger and humour but The Proof of My Innocence comes off as sour and petulant, writes Stuart Kelly

Jonathan Coe | AFP via Getty Images

There is a strange moment in Jonathan Coe’s new novel, addressing the somewhat blinkered scope of the English literature curriculum at Oxbridge at the end of the last century. A reference is made to “some don at another college, whose name I could never remember, who privately published the occasional very slim volume of poetry and could be claimed as an unsung genius with reasonable safety given the ferocious incomprehensibility of his output”. It is a clear snook cocked at JH Prynne, and it made me wonder how many of the readers of The Rotters’ Club or What a Carve Up! give a tinker’s cuss about the snub. Coe can always excuse himself, given there is a walk-on part for one “Tommy Cope” who “achieved what in literary circles is known as a “modest success” for “a sophomore effort under the title Quite the Mash-up”. Coe’s poetry, pastiche-wise, is an excellent parody of bad verse, but the overall tone is somehow sour and petulant. It is as if Coe is saying “Look at me, I can make a joke at my own expense, so the rest of you better suck it up”.

Coe’s latest novel is again, broadly, a “state of the nation” affair, and what a state the nation is in: it roughly covers the premiership of Liz Truss. It is difficult to satirise a figure whose credibility automatically evaporates with the mention of the phrase “pork markets”; nor would one expect any attempt to understand Truss.

Phyl is a recent graduate working in “Hey! Teriyaki” (not, you understand, Yo! Sushi, because this is fiction), comfort-binging on Friends and living with her parents. The dread words come on page eight: “She was thinking of writing a book”. Chris, an old university friend of her parents, comes to stay en route to reporting for his blog on a right-wing think tank founded when they were students, whose nefarious plans will finally come to fruition with Truss as Prime Minister.

When Chris dies suddenly, Phyl and Chris’s adopted daughter, Rashida, investigate in the form of three novellas – one cosy crime, one “dark academia” and one autofiction. The conceit is given a soupçon of relevance since Kwasi Kwarteng (him being chancellor was not a fiction) has had to pull out of the conference and has been replaced by one Professor Richard Wilkes, lecturing on the novels of the late Peter Cockerill. Cockerill once spoke to the embryonic form of the conservative Cambridge think-tank, shortly before committing suicide. In the age of “an entirely different cohort of writers – Rushdie, Ishiguro, McEwan and so on…” Cockerill “refused to toe the fashionable anti-Thatcher line”. Martin Amis is referred to most frequently as the epitome of the group, though one should bear in mind this satirical snarl from his The Information in 1995: “Gwyn was Labour. It was obvious… Obvious because Gwyn was what he was, a writer, in England, at the end of the 20th century”.

It may be old-fashioned, but I still think of the satirical novel as being primarily angry and funny. This is grumpy and smug. More worryingly, I did not laugh once while reading it. The detective is called “Prudence Freeborn”, which morphs into proof re-born, because a proof of Cockerill’s novel might be the proof of the murderer and so on. There is a pint of “Thruxton’s Old Undrinkable” in the “cosy crime” parody, which sums up the sense of low hanging fruit.

I was not aware of “dark academia”, although the text indicates it by reference to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. I doubt it matters much that this instance lacks the supernatural elements the genre normally requires – as in RF Kuang’s Babel (and, incidentally, her Yellowface is far more cutting as satire) – since as it is it barely stands comparison with Edmund Crispin let alone Colin Dexter for campus crime. The “Proof / Reborn” autofiction lacks the monomania or experimentalism of Knausgaard or Sheila Heti. Even the idea of “parodic anthology” is passé: David Lodge’s The British Museum is Falling Down was published in 1965 (which seems unbelievable); James Hogg’s Poetic Mirror was 1816. But it allows for a few snarks about literary fashions.

The entire book is a cobbled-together rag-bag to hold together various squibs. If Coe had wanted a genre, those old volumes of Table Talk by the likes of Samuel Rogers or William Hazlitt would have been a better form, where he might happily have divagated on the 1980s starting with Ernie Wise advertising a mobile phone, or the lack of smart phones in Friends being nostalgia for millennials, or the impossibility of the true present tense, or young people having to ask for consent to use someone’s mental image for onanistic purposes. It might even get away with a pub bore long litany of all the things that are woke these days.

When it turns out Kwasi was too busy with his abacus to attend the conference, the organisers hint at a cultural figure as replacement. “So who’s flying in from Venice, then? Jeffrey Archer? Andrew Lloyd Webber?” Saying that this is the character speaking rather than the author still cannot conceal the contempt dripping from it, a contempt we are invited to share. On such hauteur Trump entered the White House.

The Proof of my Innocence, by Jonathan Coe, Penguin Viking, £18.99