Politics before people
Number 11
by Jonathan Coe
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NUMBER 11 is Jonathan Coe’s 11th novel. Published on 11th November (which is the 11th month), it is composed of a web of loosely connecting tales, each organised around the number 11 (the 11 bus route, table 11 in an award ceremony, the 11 contestants on a TV reality show, the 11th floor of a house conversion, and so forth). Number 11 is also the home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Coe’s concern is the chasm between the rich and the poor. He is a playful writer, and webs and chasms soon take over the plot in unexpected and mightily surreal ways.
The book begins when the school friends Alison and Rachel hear about the death of Dr David Kelly, the UN weapons inspector whose body was found in the Oxfordshire woods on 18th July 2003. There will be other victims of government policy as the years roll by, not least Alison herself – black, one-legged, lesbian – who does time for benefit fraud, while Rachel, white, straight and able-bodied, tutors the children of a squillionaire tax-dodger. The Blair government gets a good kicking, but so too does reality television and in one of the best scenes Alison’s mother, a former pop star, makes a disastrous appearance on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here. ‘So the revolution’s on its way, is it?’ says the villain of the story, an accountant called Frederick Francis. ‘ “The people” are getting ready to man the barricades and dust down the guillotines? I don’t think so. Give them enough ready meals and nights in front of the TV watching celebrities being humiliated in the jungle and they won’t even want to leave their sofas.’
Also included in the cast are a Chinese migrant who looks like the mother in Psycho, a policeman who wants to be known as the caped crusader, an Etonian who thinks food banks are funny, a widowed Oxford don, a glamour model and a disgruntled team of Polish builders.
Because Coe is more concerned with politics than people, his characters remain types, the rule being that those with the most money have the least morality. Conversational exchanges are oc- casions for the author to vent his spleen: ‘The poorest half of the world has the same amount of money as the richest 85 people’, says Rachel to Frederick. ‘It makes me think’, Frederick replies, ‘that the poorest half of the world should get their act together.’ The pleasure of the novel lies in its patterning – Coe’s figures wander in and out of the various stories, and the stories themselves echo other stories.
Sometimes Number 11 reads like a riff on Alice Through the Looking Glass, particularly when Alison finds herself literally living behind a mirror in the mansion owned by her employers; at other times it recalls Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of
Beauty, while a ghastly encounter in the final pages recalls the time when Ron Weasley met Hagrid’s pet spider, Aragog, in Harry Potter. Most of the echoes, however, are to
What A Carve Up!, Coe’s fourth novel, which featured the Winshaws, a media clan who make the Murdochs look like Swiss Family Robinson. The Winshaws return in Number 11, and Coe pays homage to his earlier novel in other ways too: the title of What a Carve Up! is taken from a 1960s comedy thriller starring Sid James. One of the characters in Number 11 is obsessed with another 1960s Sid James film called What A Whopper.
The references to What a Carve Up! invite the comparison: Coe’s 11th novel is less powerful than his fourth. It is a triumph, you might say, of style over substance.