FICTION
The Proof of My Innocence
Jonathan Coe
Viking,$34.99
April this year marked 30 years since the publication of Jonathan Coe’s most famous novel, What a Carve Up!, a dazzlingly clever and often riotously funny satire of the spivs, sharks and out-and-out villains that transformed Britain in their own image across the Thatcher years.
It seems difficult to believe Coe didn’t have one eye on that anniversary when he began his new novel. For while The Proof of My Innocence may not be a continuation of What a Carve Up! in any literal sense, it serves as a spiritual sequel, bringing Coe’s portrait of the catastrophe of British politics into the 21st century.
Like What a Carve Up!, The Proof of My Innocence has a mystery at its heart, although this time it’s more Richard Osman than Agatha Christie. The victim is Christopher Swann, a blogger who has spent more than 40 years documenting the rise of the far-right radicals that now control conservative parties across the Anglosphere. Perhaps fittingly, Swann (whose name seems to have been chosen specifically to enable a truly groan worthy gag about things being “just Swann’s way”), is murdered while attending the first “TrueCon conference on the future of conservatism” at a stately home in the Cotswolds, an event that features sessions such as Britain’s Real Pandemic: The Woke Mind-Virus.
The case is assigned to Detective Inspector Prudence Freeborne. One day from retirement and with a husband who is grappling with a delayed cancer diagnosis due to NHS cuts, Prudence begins interrogating possible suspects. These include the hateful right-wing politician Roger Wagstaff and his shadow, Rebecca Wood, the dissolute right-wing windbag and beneficiary of slavery, Lord Wetherby and academic Professor Richard Wilkes, who has been parachuted into the conference at the last minute to talk about the work of the novelist Peter Cockerill.
Other characters are connected to the investigation. These include Christopher’s university friend Joanna’s depressed and directionless daughter, Phyl, his adopted daughter, Rashida, and Joanna and Christopher’s friend from their Cambridge days, Brian Collier.
In more recent novels such as the bewitching Mr Wilder and Me and the moving Bournville, Coe has largely eschewed the formal pyrotechnics that made earlier novels such as What a Carve Up! and The House of Sleep so exhilarating, but The Proof of My Innocence returns to the wild playfulness of those books with a vengeance. Some of its high jinks are generic – the novel riffs on cosy crime, dark academia and auto-fiction – but these jags are embedded within a larger metafictional game, which the novel then subverts a second time in its final stages.
It will come as no surprise to anybody familiar with Coe’s fiction that beneath its antic exterior The Proof of My Innocence is animated by electric anger about the destruction of Britain by the greed of the powerful and the delusions of nationalism in which they cloak themselves.