The Proof of My Innocence – the new, bitingly funny novel from the author of The Rotter's Club and Middle England – blends murder mystery, coming-of-age story, dark academia and sublimely sharp political commentary to unputdownable effect. In this exclusive piece, Jonathan Coe shares his top five political novels of all time.
‘Political’ novels come in all shapes, sizes and forms. We could be talking sexual politics, environmental politics or – as in the case of Vesna Goldsworthy’s absorbing, astringent love story - international relations during the Cold War. The protagonist of Iron Curtain is the spoiled daughter of a party bigwig in an unnamed Soviet satellite state She falls for a visiting British poet and follows him to London, where she discovers that not only is he vain and unreliable, but the Britain she has escaped to is itself no Utopia. These are the 1980s, and Thatcherism is establishing its grip on the UK even as the Soviet bloc (partly thanks to Mrs Thatcher herself) is crumbling before the world’s eyes. Goldsworthy - a Serbian-born poet and novelist who has lived in the UK for many years – has a keen and knowledgeable eye for both of these worlds, and teases some beautiful dry comedy, as well as pathos, out of a fascinating historical moment.
Cecile Pin’s novel focuses on the so-called Vietnamese boat people who fled their country in the late 1970s. She tells the story of one such family, some of whom reach safety on foreign shores only to find themselves being caught in a purgatorial, never-ending limbo, being moved from one refugee centre to another. For those of us who never have, and never will experience such a thing, the novel does a great job in evoking the conditions in these centres and the sense of hopelessness they induce in the people who are caught there.
When the family at last reaches the United Kingdom (rather than America as they had intended), Pin excels at narrating the problems they face in adjusting to, and finding acceptance within, a society which is radically different from the one they are used to. The novel could simply have been a story of ‘good’ immigrants encountering racism and prejudice from a hostile population, but her treatment of the subject is more nuanced than that. It’s a complex and multi-layered book, treating themes of exceptional urgency with a terrific lightness of touch.
A debut novel which is due to be published in February next year. To say that it’s going to make waves would, I think, be a huge understatement. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it: a first-person story, narrated by a UN worker who has been sent to Iraq and tasked with deradicalising ISIS brides to prepare them for returning to their home countries. Sounds a bit solemn and worthy? Think again. Younis is a fantastic comic writer: caustic, pitiless, unafraid, with razor-sharp powers of observation. The book is laugh-out-loud funny, and many of the jokes, besides being hilarious, are jaw-dropping in their audacity. And there is sex, too: masses of it, sometimes erotic, sometimes shocking, but always – like the rest of the book – profoundly truthful. Fundamentally is certainly a wild ride, but besides being one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in a long while, it will also leave you deeply moved and (incidentally) much better informed than you were before about one of the key political crises of our time. Essential reading.
In this autobiographical graphic novel, the Canadian writer and artist Kate Beaton recalls the two years she spent working in the oil sands of Alberta. The novel deals with two kinds of toxicity present in this environment: the casual sexism and sexual aggression experienced by the author in an almost entirely male workspace, and the polluted environs of the factory, as epitomised by the fate of the ducks which live on the nearby lake. Through her immense skill not just as an artist but also as a writer of dialogue, Beaton takes us directly into a remote, isolated world few of us will ever experience, even though the work that goes on there has an immense impact on our everyday lives. At the heart of the book lies a dark and disturbing episode. The honesty with which the author portrays an episode of sexual assault and its aftermath is truly remarkable, and perhaps the book’s greatest and most surprising strength is Beaton’s refusal simply to judge and condemn the men she has been working with. She still finds reserves of compassion within herself, and the reader can’t help but be haunted as well as harrowed. A unique, unmissable book.
In this selection I’ve tried to emphasise recent books rather than the canonised classics, and there are more things is certainly one of the most challenging and original political novels to have appeared in the UK in the last few years. Calling it ‘original’, of course, doesn’t mean that it’s without precedent: the narrative swings between recent events in London and more distant ones in Brazil, and the London sections remind me, in an oblique way, of B S Johnson’s Albert Angelo, another novel which slides restlessly between styles, forms and voices in its effort to pin down the ever-mutating texture of life in the capital city. For Fowler, just like Johnson, radicalism in politics seems to imply a parallel radicalism in fictional form: her novel is choppy, fragmented, freewheeling, oscillating between prose and poetry, past and present tense, even between languages. For me, as a sixty-something novelist, it gives a vivid and bracing intimation of what politics is coming to mean for a younger and more embattled generation.
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