There are some writers whose line of literary descent is so clear as to resemble a kind of genealogical chart. The lineage of the English comic novel, for instance, runs smoothly from Fielding to Dickens, Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, Waugh to Kingsley Amis, and from Amis through to Jonathan Coe, whose The Proof of My Innocence is one of the funniest novels published in Britain in recent years. In a burlesque fusion of murder mystery, dark academia, and autofiction, Coe charts the development of a pro-NHS-privatisation thinktank from its roots in Cambridge in the 1980s to its short-lived triumph with the rise of Liz Truss in 2022, scattering the story between the perspectives variously of a failed conservative novelist, a Cambridge undergraduate, a murdered anti-Tory blogger, a police detective, and a sushi attendant.
The plot, though deft and excellent, is difficult to summarise, and plays second fiddle to a more striking unity of theme: nostalgia; or, more specifically, anemoia, defined by Coe as “nostalgia for a time before you were born.” Almost every major character yearns for some period of the past: Peter Cockerill, a failed novelist, for the 1930s; Andrew, a middle-aged man, for the 1950s, and Phyl, a dropout undergraduate, for the 1990s. The three best segments of the novel, the introductory chapters and the later ones set at TrueCon and at Cambridge, are the ones in which the nostalgia theme is most fully fleshed out.
The opening chapters track the daily life of Phyl, a Newcastle University dropout who lives with her parents. She is a very real type, the ennui-riven, naïve Zoomer disillusioned at the complete lack of socioeconomic prospects open to her. Her main pleasure in life is to escape into the past, into the 1990s, by watching Friends. Though perhaps Coe labours the symbolism of Friends a bit too heavily, it coheres with his central theme, and Phyl remains a likeable character even though she never quite exceeds the sum of her parts.
Her day-to-day life and surroundings, too, are convincingly rendered. Henry James once wrote of Anthony Trollope that “his great, his inestimable merit was a complete appreciation of the usual”, and in a sense the same is true of Coe. Lounging about at home, walking to the high street, riding the bus to work, bickering with strangers in lifts, and chopping sushi for customers – it is difficult to write well about these things without importing their monotony, but he manages it, and his good humour prevents the book from acquiring the dryness of a social document.
The next segment of the story picks up at the 2022 TrueCon conference in the fictional village of Wetherby Pond (a reference to Alastair Sim’s character in the The Happiest Days of Your Life). Here is the dark side of nostalgia: represented in its crude form by the murder of a blogger at TrueCon; represented more subtly by the implication that the Conservative MPs, Telegraph columnists, and free-marketeers gathered at the conference are the very people who, in their quest for a nineteenth-century laissez-faire Utopia, have created the decaying, prospectless Britain inhabited by Phyl. The never-changing slogans of these people are recorded with a deadly accurate pen: “Our decision to leave the European Union in 2016 was the single most decisive blow struck for British freedom since Magna Carta”, “The modern Left is continually looking for new and ever more insidious ways of limiting the freedom of the sovereign individual”, etc., etc. There is one farcical scene, too long to reproduce here, in which everything from the Church of England to the consumption of vegetables is denounced as “woke.” These passages are depressing precisely because, allowing for the exaggerations of satire, they could have appeared in earnest in yesterday’s Telegraph. There are similarities here with another recent book, James O’Brien’s brilliant How They Broke Britain (2023). O’Brien’s account of a country torn to pieces by self-assured thinktanks, politicians, and client journalists – and his analysis of their yearning for a Victorian never-never world where all classes know their place, there are no immigrants, and laissez-faire economics rule supreme – could not have been fictionalised more aptly than in these TrueCon chapters.
The very best part of The Proof of My Innocence – one which could easily be expanded into full-length book – is the flashback section set in Cambridge in the 1980s and narrated by Brian Collier. Brian is Coe’s most endearing character, a sort of updated Arthur Kipps, struggling to reconcile his council-estate roots with his rise to a new social sphere at university. He is a much more convincing figure than Phyl: indeed, between him and her is the difference between first-hand and reported experience. His social awkwardness, his love life, his adventures mixing with a cliquey political set, his disgust for the pretension and vulgarity of the Cambridge Union, are all rendered more sincerely and believably than anything else in the book. He is joined by an array of comic university characters: Tommy, the perpetually lovelorn poet, is an example of one of the fail-safe stock characters of humorous fiction, with notes of Tracy Tupman or Bingo Little; likewise Dr Glazeby is a waffling academic in the tradition of Amis’s Professor Welch. Coe drew on his own undergraduate years to produce these chapters, and they possess the happy tinge of genuine memories. Here, then, is the third form of nostalgia: if the first is escape and the second is delusion, the third is simple memory.
Coe’s personal nostalgia is for the post-war years, a time, he says, ruled by the “belief that things should not be shared out too unequally”, glimpsed here in ghost form through flashes of black-and-white comedies. Though he is sensible enough to see that every generation idealises the previous one, and understands well the dangers of nostalgia, there is a palpable affection for an age which was, in his view, better, more orderly, more compassionate, with more sense of purpose and community spirit, than our current neoliberal world. In certain passages, such as the early description of a decaying high street, he crystallises the changes of the last half-century as pithily as it is possible to do.
It is, however, when he is making jokes that he is at his best. Even the simplest of his passages are funny. Consider this one: “And so, for the second time during this unfortunate week, the proceedings of the TrueCon conference were interrupted. An absorbing discussion entitled ‘Why Free Markets and Nationhood Go Hand in Hand’ had to be curtailed.” You can almost hear the Dickensian glee in the nomenclature, in “unfortunate week” and “absorbing discussion.” Later, a home library is described as “testament to a bibliomania that had long since spiralled out of control”, and the history of an aristocratic family as “a series of regrettable episodes characterised above all by violence, mental illness, and an unswerving commitment to the exploitation of anyone less powerful than themselves.” It is these kinds of wry observations which – with Coe’s other defining qualities, his high spirits, clean style, mockery of authority, and eye for hypocrisy – place him so firmly in the tradition of Henry Fielding and PG Wodehouse, and make him better worth reading than almost any English novelist currently active.
