Jonathan Coe's What A Carve Up!

Two generally accepted ideas bother me from time to time: the eighties was the decade of greed; novels of the eighties (like Martin Amis’ Money) are dated because of it.

If Money was a comedic tour de force exposing the venality of the “me” generation, then Jonathan Coe’s 1994 What a Carve Up! is the previous decade’s reality on steroids. Corruption doesn’t happen to one through circumstance, opportunity, or incremental immorality, Coe displays. It’s fundamental, even genetic. And Coe is brilliant in not losing a sense of verisimilitude even while operating at a level usually understood as hyperbole or farce.

The first of his novels to garner international attention, What a Carve Up! (the title is taken from a British 1960s silly, farcical, comic horror movie, the novel subsequently retitled blandly for its U.S. release as The Winshaw Legacy) is a 500 page, four generation family study of viciously corrupt political and corporate aristocrats. It’s satire with a prevailing tone of black humour, but with an element that can get lost in the more sensationalistic exploits of the Winshaw family: that of the alternating chapters involving the troubled man, Michael, who will be tasked with chronicling those exploits in a family biography.

Who, exactly, are the family? Coe concentrates on (literally) the last and present generation of brothers, sisters, and cousins. Dorothy is the epitome of animal cruelty in the cause of monopolistic farming profits; Henry is the quintessential bought-and-paid for politician who also bails out his relatives’ many crimes; Thomas is the banker constantly enabled by Henry (and some people think this book is dated!?, though of course the twist these days is that central bankers control all politicians); Roddy is the “tastemaking” art dealer using his influence to fuck aspiring painters needing an “in”; Hilary is the crass opinion writer for the leading national newspaper who focuses on constant sensational dirt and shifting political commentary in order to align with popular political leaders or in opposition to them when they’re politically weak (in this case, Thatcher just before her defeat -- and again, as up-to-date as a highway pile-up); and, last but certainly not least, the cold, fearsome international arms dealer Mark, who helps Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War when it suits his economic portfolio, and who whacks opponents who dare to try to expose him.

I won’t go into too much of the plot, for two reasons: again, I dislike giving away what should be delightful surprises during the reading experience; and the plot is so intricately woven with hairpin detail, so meticulous in its mysterious, withheld cause-and-effect, especially towards the novel’s outrageous and horrific conclusion, that it would be akin to explaining a seven-course meal in comparatively pallid description.

Coe weaves a wonderfully contrasting narrative to the horrors of the Winshaws in his character of Michael, the inter-author of this outsized saga (yes, there are postmodernist elements here, and they’re handled with much more aplomb and integration than the corresponding material in Amis’ Money, since that comparison has already been made). Michael is the anti-Winshaw: withdrawn, defeated, unmotivated, and nursing a secret initiated by his aborted viewing, when he was a child, of the titular 1960s movie. In many remarkable patches, Coe reveals how that disturbing experience colours (or, rather, washes out) his ongoing adventures, and his relationship with Fiona is incredibly touching and I’d even say mildly tragic (I’m surprised other reviews don’t make more of this). The final, extended horrific scene at Winshaw Towers completes the “movie” and novel with expert integration. (It helps that Coe is a fluid writer, able to navigate long sentences with many and various subordinate clauses to match the complexity of the narrative.)

I’m now eager to read his lightly linked sequel, Number 11, published 23 years after What a Carve Up!