The State of the Nation novel: part one

As well as telling great stories about complex characters, many novels are interested in the social questions and political changes of their time. As in the title of Anthony Trollope’s highly-acclaimed 1875 novel, such writers explore The Way We Live Now.

Charles Dickens is possibly the English novelist whose works most frequently embody the features of what is commonly called the ‘state-of-the-nation’ novel. Whilst he produces riveting narratives featuring fantastically-imagined characters, Dickens always has his eye on the bigger picture. From the appalling conditions in the workhouses in Oliver Twist (1838) and the scandals of child labour in David Copperfield (1850) to the grinding lives of factory workers in Hard Times (1854) and the injustices of the legal system in Little Dorrit (1855), Dickens casts his net wide to expose and criticise the failings of Victorian society.

Whilst the state of the nation novel was particularly popular in 19th century Britain – other such works include Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845), Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849), Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) – it has remained a vibrant genre in the 20th and 21st centuries. Novels that I’ve discussed in this blog which fall into this category include E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958).

Jonathan Coe’s 2018 novel Middle England also fits comfortably in this genre. Taking place between 2010 and 2018, Middle England, which was awarded the Costa Novel prize in 2019, traces the events that led up to the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum.

Middle England – which I will be writing about in a future post – is actually the third in a trilogy of novels about the same group of characters. Coe didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and whilst only three years separate the first two novels – The Rotters’ Club (2001) and The Closed Circle (2004) – it was another 12 years before he decided to revive his characters for a third novel.

In The Rotters’ Club, set in the 1970s, Benjamin Trotter – the central character – and his friends are teenagers; in The Closed Circle, set around the millennium, they are approaching their forties; and by Middle England, they are in their mid-fifties, thus the same age as Coe who was born in 1961. Whilst Middle England is the most explicitly political of the three novels, the other two are set against the backdrop of the social and political events of the UK at the time and can thus – in my opinion – be called state of the nation novels. All three novels also feature food and meals typical of their times, allowing me to write a trilogy of posts about this trilogy of novels.

So, to start with The Rotters’ Club. The novel unfolds between 1973 and 1978 and follows Benjamin and his friends as they navigate the last five years of their secondary school in Birmingham before heading off to University. Benjamin is an awkward, confused very ordinary teenager, with literary ambitions and frustrated desires for the seemingly out of reach Cicely Boyd from the neighbouring girls’ school. As Coe himself has admitted, the descriptions of the school and the suburbs in which Benjamin and his schoolmates live are inspired by his own background and his time as a pupil at the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, but the characters and events of the story are pure imagination.

However, what is not imagined is the world in which Benjamin and his friends live, and Coe has described their school – which he names King William’s – as ‘a kind of microcosm for British society as a whole’.
The characters’ mundane yet painful experiences of growing up are played out against the backdrop of 1970s Britain: the IRA bombing campaign, the racism of the National Front and the bitter disputes between workers and managers at the Longbridge plant of British Leyland which led to a series of strikes which crippled production in the 1970s (Benjamin’s father, Colin, is a junior manager at British Leyland; his friend Doug Anderton’s father, Bill, is one of the shop stewards).

The food referred to in The Rotters’ Club is stereotypically 1970s. In the second chapter of the novel Colin Trotter and his boss, Jack Forrest, hold an informal meeting with Bill Anderton and another shop steward, Bill Slater, to try and resolve union grievances. Having started their evening in a pub, the four men then decamp to that 1970s bastion of fine dining, ‘a Berni inn on the Stratford Road’ where it is steaks all round:

‘Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others’.

A few chapters later, Benjamin’s parents invite his school friend Philip Chase and his parents, Sam and Barbara around for dinner; an excuse for Coe to present some gastronomic satire. Hors d’oeuvres of ‘salt and vinegar and cheese and onion crisps’ are followed by a starter of ‘melon slices, topped with glace cherries’. The main course is steak again, this time sirloin, ‘each portion charred, with exquisite calculation, almost but not quite to the point of unrecognizability – served with chips, mushrooms, salad and unlimited dollops of salad cream’. And finally it’s time for dessert: ‘fat wedges of Black Forest gateau, doused remorselessly with double cream’. This is the 1970s on a plate, with the whole gastronomic experience being washed down with liberal amounts of sweet German wine, as ‘In what amounted, for him, to a fit of extravagance, Colin had bought not one but two bottles of Blue Nun’ and when that is finished, the men move on to ‘the Trotter household’s alcoholic piece de resistance: Colin’s home made light ale, which he brewed in a forty-pint plastic keg in the cupboard under the stairs, using a kit from Boots the Chemist’.

With two references to steak, I felt compelled to cook it, choosing sirloin over fillet and serving it with a mushroom sauce as my nod to Sheila Trotter’s mushroom accompaniment (whilst avoiding the 1970s charring option).

STEAK A LA TROTTER
Ingredients (per person):
1 sirloin steak
A handful of mushrooms, diced
1 clove of garlic, crushed or chopped finely
Splash of red wine
1 teaspoon grain mustard
2 tablespoons crème fraiche
Olive oil, salt and pepper
Knob of butter

Method:
Melt the butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a small frying pan, and then add the mushrooms and garlic and cook over a medium heat until the mushrooms are softened and cooked through. Season with salt and pepper, and keep warm whilst you cook the steak.
Rub the steak with salt and pepper and a tablespoon of olive oil. Heat a heavy-based frying pan or griddle pan until it is smoking hot; place the steak in the pan and cook for as long as required (2 minutes each side if you, like me, like your steak medium-rare; otherwise, adjust accordingly).
Remove the steak to a plate, cover and with foil and allow to rest for about 5 minutes before serving.
Whilst the steak is resting, turn your attention back to the mushroom sauce. Add a good splash of red wine to the mushroom mixture, turn the heat up and cook off the wine. Then turn the heat down and stir through the mustard and crème fraiche, allowing them to warm through.
Serve the steak with the mushroom sauce spooned over and with your chosen accompaniments – salad and home-made oven-baked chips for me!