The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe review – a blue murder mystery
Set during Liz Truss’s premiership, Coe’s multilayered novel is a mixture of whodunnit and political chronicle with a villain hiding in plain sight
My favourite joke in Jonathan Coe’s new novel is hardly a side-splitter, more what someone of my acquaintance would label “Radio 4 funny, not funny-funny”. In fact, it might not even be intended as a joke at all, though longtime fans of the author of What a Carve Up! will have their suspicions. A memoirist called Brian is recalling a mesmerisingly beautiful young woman he encountered as a student at Cambridge. “‘I heard her described variously as ‘elfin’, as ‘eldritch’,” he tells us, adding that “eldritch” is the word used by a minor character in the book, Tommy Cope, who is “always reaching for the slightly more recondite adjective”. The subtle joke being that “recondite” is itself pretty, well, recondite.
Cope himself features rarely, though his comic purpose as a Coe stand-in is clear. “He came from the Midlands and he was studying English literature and he was another grammar-school boy,” explains Brian of Cope/Coe (in a novel containing numerous word games, the author has literally taken the “p”); and he is also strikingly quiet and nondescript. Brian continues: “However, it turned out that he had also been writing short stories and even novels, which he began to publish in the years after we’d graduated. Much to the surprise of us all, some of them turned out to be mildly satirical in nature, and furthermore to suggest an interest in politics, something of which he’d never given any of us the least inkling when he was a student. I don’t really follow these things, but I was told that one of them – a sophomore effort under the title Quite the Mash-Up – achieved what in literary circles is known as a ‘modest success’. Who knew.”
Continue reading...-
Novelist Jonathan Coe: ‘Liz Truss was very unimpressed to meet me’
World - The Guardian - October 26 -
Sara Sharif was innocent soul, murder accused said
Top stories - BBC News - October 31 -
Technics SL-1300G Review: A Bomb Proof Classic
Tech - Wired - October 31 -
A Feathered Murder Mystery at 10,000 Feet
Science - The New York Times - October 23 -
Texas mother on death row, supported by Kim Kardashian, is 'actually innocent,' judge says
Top stories - NBC News - 5 days ago -
Lynette White murderer release won't be reviewed
Top stories - BBC News - November 10 -
Book Review: 'Those Opulent Days' is a mystery drenched in cruelties of colonial French Indochina
Entertainment - ABC News - November 11 -
Review: In 'All We Imagine as Light,' the big-city blues yield to a sublime sisterhood
Entertainment - Los Angeles Times - 5 days ago
More from The Guardian
-
ICC issues arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged Gaza war crimes
World - The Guardian - 1 hour ago -
Ukraine claims Russia fired intercontinental ballistic missile at Dnipro
World - The Guardian - 4 hours ago -
Police report details sexual assault allegations against Pete Hegseth
World - The Guardian - 3 hours ago -
First close-up image of a star outside Milky Way shows supergiant in ‘cocoon’
World - The Guardian - 1 hour ago -
Son of woman killed by IRA condemns ‘cruel’ Disney series
World - The Guardian - 3 hours ago