The State of the Nation novel: part three

And so, following The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle, we come to the final novel in Jonathan Coe’s trilogy, Middle England. Awarded the Costa Novel prize in 2019, Middle England opens in 2010, with our protagonist Benjamin Trotter and his friends from his secondary school days now in their fifties. Marriages that were still vibrant in The Closed Circle have grown stale, parents are growing infirm and dying (the novel opens with the funeral of Benjamin’s mother, and midway through the novel his father dies too) and the next generation are now adults and forging their way in life (a substantial part of the novel is devoted to Sophie, Benjamin’s niece, her career as a fledgling academic, and her on-off marriage to a driving instructor, Ian, she meets on a speed awareness course). On the plus side, though, Benjamin has at last finished his novel, which becomes an overnight success when it is longlisted for the Man Booker prize. 

But, as with the two preceding novels, Middle Britain is about far more than these characters, their lives and their relationships. Taking place between 2010 and 2016, the novel traces the events that led up to the Leave vote in the 2016 referendum and seeks to establish what led to so many people voting in this way.

Coe is clearly an ardent Remainer. We are left in no doubt that his central characters support remaining in the EU, whilst those characters who are Leave voters – Benjamin’s widowed father, Colin, and Sophie’s mother-in-law, Helena – are portrayed in a less than positive light and frequently articulate offensive racist opinions. In the opening chapter, Benjamin and Colin are listening to Radio 4 in the car on their way home from the funeral, and the main news story is that ‘the prime minister, Gordon Brown, fighting for re-election, had been caught on microphone describing a potential supporter as “a sort of bigoted woman”’. That story, of Brown’s response to a long-term Labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, who questioned him about immigrants to Britain from Eastern Europe, is often regarded as causing his downfall in the General Election that took place a week later, though the truth is more complex. But by including this news story in the novel’s opening chapter, Coe both highlights the heightened role that immigration played in public discourse at this time which ultimately led to the Brexit vote, and also sets out his position (the reader is in no doubt that Colin and Helena are bigots).

But there is a more sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of Ian, Sophie’s boyfriend and then husband. He is also a Leave voter, and Sophie feels that the Brexit referendum has caused an insuperable rift between them: ‘Ian had reacted (to her mind) so bizarrely to the referendum result, with such gleeful, infantile triumphalism, … that, for the first time, she genuinely realized that she no longer understood why her husband thought and felt the way that he did…’. The couple separate and it seems as though there is no hope for this marriage. However, when Sophie finds out that Ian has fallen out with his mother following her refusal to act as a witness for her former East European cleaner and her husband who were attacked after the vote, she realises that her Brexit-voting husband is not the small-minded stereotype she had assumed him to be.

The fact that Sophie and Ian’s marriage can survive the Brexit vote, and that elsewhere in the novel Benjamin’s old school friend Doug Anderton, a leftwing journalist, can – post-divorce – fall in love with a Conservative MP, Gail Ransome, suggests that the novel’s title, Middle England, as well as being a reference to its principal geographical location – the Midlands – also points to the possibility that the way to resolve the deep divisions exposed – and caused – by Brexit – is through compromise and seeking a middle way.

And so to food. In contrast to both The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle there are far fewer food references in Middle England. But there is pasta. After his mother’s funeral, Benjamin brings his father Colin back to his house, and shortly afterwards his sister, Lois, and his niece, Sophie, arrive: ‘Benjamin clapped his hands and said, “Right, who’s for a bit of pasta?” and went into the kitchen to boil up some penne… and heated up some of his home-made arrabbiata sauce (he had a lot of time to practise his cooking these days).’

Pasta is, to my mind, an ideal thing to cook for a novel about England and its place in Europe. A foreign dish that has been absorbed so effortlessly into English eating habits that there can be very few people who don’t eat it on a regular basis, pasta perhaps sums up the feelings I – and many other Remainers – had about our being in the EU. It was something we took for granted and never expected would change.

‘Arrabbiata’ means angry in Italian, so an arrabbiata sauce is a tomato sauce made hot through the addition of chilli. Benjamin Trotter serves it with its traditional pasta accompaniment, penne – a cylindrical-shaped ridged pasta with each end cut on the bias. I took as my source recipe, the one in The Silver Spoon, the definitive Italian cookery book (Il cucchiaio d’argento is its Italian title), first published in 1950, which contains over 2000 recipes. The English translation was produced in 2005, reflecting the widespread absorption of Italian cooking into the English diet.

REMAINERS’ PENNE ARRABBIATA
Ingredients (serves 4)
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled but whole
¼ – ½ teaspoon crushed dried chilli flakes (depending on taste)
1 tin chopped tomatoes
Pinch of salt
350 – 400g penne pasta (depending on appetites)

Method:
Pour the oil into a frying pan and add the garlic cloves and chilli flakes (adding them to the cold oil will reduce the risk of them burning). Turn the heat to moderate and cook the garlic and chilli until the garlic cloves turn brown. Then remove the garlic from the oil (leaving the chilli in). Add the tinned tomatoes to the frying pan, season with salt and cook for 15-20 minutes.
Pour boiling water from a kettle into a large saucepan, salt generously and cook the penne following the instructions on the packet. When the penne is ready, drain. Serve with the sauce dolloped on top. Purists will say that this dish should not be served with parmesan cheese. I’m not a purist where parmesan is concerned. You do as you see fit.