Everything is Whirling and Twirling! What Are You Reading this Summer 2023?

I start Angus Wilson's book of stories THE WRONG SET (1949). I'm only reading this because it's another book I've owned for too long, unread, an old orange Penguin. So far the writing seems mannered and tends to start with lavish description of things like flowers which can be hard to envision. Wilson shows some small stylistic eccentricities - for instance, sometimes continuing an exchange of dialogue between two people within a single paragraph. The general manner makes me think that perhaps at this point he is influenced by Ronald Firbank, who is even mentioned once. Reflecting that Wilson was gay at a time that it was illegal, I wonder if this aspect of life will in any way be signalled in the stories.

I've been greatly enjoying Bread and Wine, Ignazio Silone. The fact that it was published in 1936 while Mussolini and fascism were still riding high in Italy and Stalin's purges were roiling the international socialist movement adds considerable interest as a historical document. It also helps that in places it is very funny (see: Chapter 13!).

I just read that a few months ago, Aimless— have you read others in the trilogy?

Not yet. They sound interesting, but may be a bit harder for me to locate locally.

I am starting Family Sayings by Natalia Ginzburg translated by D.M. Low. In lieu of Acknowledgments, I read the Introduction by the Translator and the Author's Preface and then the first chapter. It's off to a good start.

Not yet. They sound interesting, but may be a bit harder for me to locate locally.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

I'm hoping they're closer to Flattery than, say, Sally Rooney (not that I hate Rooney).

As well as Wilson I commence reading Jonathan Coe's last novel BOURNVILLE (2022).

Thus far it's very characteristic. Leisurely narrative with a sensitive character passing through different places and thinking earnest thoughts, while recognisable social events take place - here, the start of the pandemic.

Then back to 1945 for the history of Bournville, a village formed around Cadbury's chocolate factory.

One speech by a European character asks how such a witty people as the British could vote for Brexit and BJ. The speech is bad. It's unpromising that it's reprinted on the back of the book. Whether Coe will offer a serious consideration of why people vote as they do, including eg media ownership and those owners' hostility to socialism, I am unsure.

Finished The Country Girls which was highly readable, and because I'd given up on something else and I was camping with no wifi and it was on the e-reader, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk-Kidd, which was extremely of its genre (families and moderate but not unendurable child abuse and very much *feelings*). Next up, The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss.

BOURNVILLE continues engaging. I like Coe's rendition of the now quaint activities and ways of talking of early 1950s youth. Certain slow undercurrents are perceptible about characters' political attitudes. Coe is easy and enjoyable to read.

In THE WRONG SET:

'Fresh Air Fiend' is a puzzling story about an alcoholic woman married to a Professor, and a young woman who wants to rescue the Prof. It's hard to make anything of it but Wilson perhaps enjoys the flamboyant put-downs by the alcoholic.

'Union Reunion' depicts a family reunion in South Africa in 1924. They end up quarrelling. Formally it has the interest of devolving into free indirect speech or interior monologue, drifting into characters' thoughts. The human relations are inconclusive, and in a work of this length it's hard to get committed to the characters, but the story has some political interest. These white characters believe in their privilege and talk of the need to keep black people in line. Possibly Wilson's deepest motives in this story were political.

'Saturnalia' depicts a dance at a London hotel where the classes are supposed to mix. The character sketches can be quite vivid. Again the story doesn't amount to that much, but it tends to confirm the impression that Wilson's prime theme in this particular book is social class.

over the last month have read the first ten inspector montalbano novels in reverse order. quite glad I started at #10 and worked back because #1 was my least favourite. I thought I was prepared by the TV series for quite a bit of stuff about food but there was even more than I was expecting.

now onto LIGHTHOUSE by tony parker an oral history of lighthouse keepers in the UK.

How do race, ethnicity, and class intersect in the UK? I am still enjoying Family Sayings (alpine walks, yoghurt cultures under the mother's scarf that must settle properly) but also anticipating Almost British by Charlotte Mendelson and Small Worlds by Caleb Azumah Nelson and remembering scenes from Michael Apted's first film in his series. The present progressive is much less satistfactory than the simple present.

Almost English, rather

Finished Keith Waldrop’s Light While There is Light, a “fictional memoir” about a family closely resembling his own, caught in a web of religious wingnuttery, poverty, and working scams. Excellent book, elegiac and rather beautiful.

Also finished TJ Clark’s The Sight of Death, a truly incredible book consisting of journal entries regarding two large paintings by Poussin. It is, at its heart, a book about how we see what we see, the process of absorbing or not absorbing visual art, and the intricacies of how ideology and aesthetics play into things. Highly recommended.

Midway through Edna O'Brien's Country Girls Trilogy. I thought it was pretty bad when her mum died and her dad hit her and her best friend bullied her and got her expelled from school and she fell under the spell of an auld lech(*). But as a 21 year old getting kidnapped back home for the crime of seeing a married (separated) man - jesus what an ignorant bigoted suffocating morality. 'Divorce is worse than murder'! What a vile religion.

(*) it's maybe a somewhat less bleak read overall than those selected lowlights suggest.

^need to read the first two in the series, but just recently read girls in their married bliss which i enjoyed, though found the stylistic whiplash of the alternating chapters took some getting used to.

started and finished rayner heppenstall's two moons: parallel narratives on opposing pages with reports on contemporary events (mostly involving death & destruction) offset by a semi-fictional account of his son's accident and the extended family's coming to terms with their new reality. the structure makes it an occasionally frustrating read, but does occasion some presumably intentional resonances, eg mention in passing of ann quin's last swim/reports on cross channel swimming record attempts earlier in the novel (bs johnson & family also make a cameo appearance). there are a few points where he lets his emotions peak through the distanced style... also a few moments where it's obvious this is a product of his later reactionary old man period.

now onto moorcock's byzantium endures.

I finished Van Halen Rising. A quick read for me. Decently written and full of fun stories. Everyone always hated DLR.

Started Cortazar's Blow Up and Other Stories.

Speaking of the Irish: I've read about half of John McGahern's short fiction after reading Amongst Women years ago and am entranced.

By coincidence, after Bread and Wine I read Cause for Alarm, a zippy little thriller by Eric Ambler, also set in Italy under Mussolini and published two years later in 1938. The two books both portray the brutality of the fascists, but could hardly have been more different in their tone.

Silone's book was intended to reach a pan-european, socialist-leaning, intellectual and politically sophisticated audience. Ambler's audience was British, middle-class, much more insular, reflexively suspicious of socialism and foreigners in general. Putting them side-by-side they say a hell of a lot about the vast differences between prewar England/Britain and the rest of Europe.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

Start with the last story, "The Country Funeral."

Eh? The last story in Show Them A Good Time is "Not The End Yet."

I finish Angus Wilson, THE WRONG SET (1949).

Here are further stories that appear in it.

'Realpolitik' is a brief highlight. It depicts a meeting at an old museum which has been taken over by a new executive who wants things to be businesslike, streamlined and popular. It feels like a 1980s scenario, it even feels very relevant now. But this was written in the 1940s! The way the executive beats everyone else in the conversation is deftly written by Wilson.

'A Story of Historical Interest' is about a woman whose old philandering father becomes very ill and eventually dies. Moving back and forth in time, it shows her talking to his nurse (who is Irish and whom she distrusts*) and travelling with him in an ambulance. She has turbulent feelings about him which go back and forth. At the end he is set to die and she says, no, she doesn't need to go and see him, she has her life to get on with. I am reminded of the old widow at the end of THE CORRECTIONS who is happy to restart her life.

* a few Irish people appear in the book and they are treated as having a charming brogue which is unconvincingly rendered. I'm surprised that Wilson couldn't do better than this.

In 'The Wrong Set', a young lad called Norman has moved to London as a student. His aunt, nightclub piano player Vi, goes to visit him. We see the seedy nightclub world: here lesbians are glimpsed and Jewish people are also talked about, with a predictable undertow of anti-semitism. When she finds Norman's place, he has gone out to a rally with Communists. The landlady remarks that they're rallying 'to make trouble for the Government they put into power' - Attlee's. This is one of the book's interesting elements, the occasional remarks about the Attlee government, usually not especially positive. When Norman returns, Vi complains that he is 'mixing up with a lot of Reds and Jews'. The snti-semitism becomes explicit and Vi regrets this. But she complains to Norman's mother that he is in 'the wrong set'.

This title phrase does correspond to something about the book. Much of it is about class, cliques, manners, people's distaste for others. It's an accurate sort of title but not one that indicates anything pleasant or encouraging.

'Crazy Crowd' shows young couple Peter and Jennie going to visit Jennie's family in the Cambridgeshire countryside. The family is very eccentric (including reactionary brother Hamish), in a way that is difficult for Peter to handle. The reader sympathises. Eventually he snaps and Jennie makes an effort to stop him leaving. The eccentricity is quite vividly drawn; it's one of the most effective stories.

In 'A Visit in Bad Taste', a couple is visited by the wife's brother, who has just been released from prison after a charge of 'offences against children'. The couple tell him that he must move on; the wife even says that perhaps he should commit suicide. Nothing else happens; basically it's a tale of distaste and distanciation.

'Raspberry Jam' is about a boy who is taken up by two very eccentric sisters, who eventually get drunk and kill a bird. The boy won't go to see them again. As I write down the content of these stories I notice how minimal it is. It would be good to say that this is compensated by fine writing and thought, but it isn't really. Once again a clear recurring pattern can be seen of distaste and separation.

'Significant Experience' tells of one Jeremy, remembering how in 1936 he had an affair in France with an English (and partially Irish - leading to the same slack idea of Irishness) woman 13 years his senior, and how this was perhaps a romantic education for him. The woman is unpleasant, they quarrel, the relationship isn't nice to read about. The odd thing is that the story is prefaced by a brief scene among firewatchers - thus presumably early 1940s - but then ended with a scene among young men at an Oxbridge college. This doesn't seem a good piece of composition. It doesn't work to interesting effect.

'Mother's Sense of Fun' shows one Donald experiencing the oppressiveness of his mother's personality, until, or even after, she dies. The sense is of a negative feeling about family.

'Et Dona Ferentes' shows a family in the countryside who have a vistor, an 18-year-old Swede called Sven who is proud of his good looks and wants to seduce someone - possibly the father, Edwin. (Sven's thoughts and speech are again treated quite crudely, a poor pastiche of foreignness.) The mother, Monica, thinks with panic of Edwin's past of gay liaisons. These are only alluded to without quite naming them, in a way that must have been period-specific. But the panic about gay desire is plain. It's the one place in the book of this gay author where the theme becomes central. In the end Sven is sent away and Edwin and Monica try to restart their marriage as if nothing has happened.

The story's title is in some other language - I don't know what it means. Google Translate says it means 'and bearing gifts'. Titles like this usually remind me of my view that (while knowing as many languages as possible is excellent in lots of ways, good for the mind and for thought) writing in one language shouldn't and needn't borrow phrases from others, in this particular way - it's evasive and pretentious. I think Orwell said this long ago and I tend to agree. If the title means 'and bearing gifts', then why not say that? It would be unimpressive? So why does it look better in another language? I think this kind of thing is a case of the fake prestige of the unfamiliar because you can't make up something that works better in your own language.

I can see thematic coherence across THE WRONG SET, but not in a way that's appealing. The coherent themes are class, division, distaste, disdain or even disgust, detachment, separation. The people are mostly bitter, unkind, snobbish, occasionally bigoted. The book presents quite an unpleasant view of the world. It doesn't really redeem this with great writing. I can't very much see why this first book should have been acclaimed. However, I think there is more to Wilson than this and maybe his later books are better.

That title is part of a famous Latin expression, originally from the Aeneid; it has been Englished as “beware Greeks bearing gifts” but I don’t think the title “bearing gifts” would point the reader as directly to the particular expression. It’s really the opposite of evasive though it does expect you to know a thing

there's an element with this type of move (which orwell in fact may have been getting at) of establishing (bcz also limiting) the readership wilson felt he wanted, who will also be a "set" (i guess the "right set") among whom the this exploration of wrong-setness is taking place. middle-class education in the first half of the 20th century included some years of latin, and imperial myth-making included the aeneid: the voyages and settling of aeneas are a foundation tale for the roman empire and the british empire was openly and loudly following the roman model -- shared knowledge of latin, as well as marking out people who were likely good with languages (handy in the colonial civil service), functioned as a kind of intellectual (or better say memetic) ligature for that class and that world. this particular motto was easy for clubbable types to recall bcz it contained a little pellet of bigotry-as-advice.

(adding: as wins says it's from the aeneid but it was also no longer i think quite "of" the aeneid: ppl could roll it out as an easyread shared joke w/o necessarily recalling where it came from… )

i haven't read these stories and my memory of reading angus wilson in the past is "why i am doing this again?", but i think i recall enough about his being seen as a sardonic commentator to believe that the concept-reveal is that the "right set" is also pretty awful (you the reader, perspicacious and in on the joke, naturally excepted)

Good analysis, Mark S. Thanks.

I'd say I'd like to see your take on the actual story / stories but then I've already indicated that they're not great, and you've already said you didn't get much out of Wilson, so not much rationale for inflicting that on you.

I have a friend who’s always pushing the old man (men?) at the zoo so I’ll probably get around to that one at least

Peter Stanfield A band with built-in hate : The Who from pop art to punk
pretty decent Who biography that takes them up to the late 70s.
Think I'll be reading some more of him if I can get hold of some. This was his only title in the Irish library system .
I had came accross him being interviewed on Ugly THings podcast.

The hidden treasures of Timbuktu : historic city of Islamic Africa John O. Hunwick,
coffee table sized photobook talking about the manuscripts etc held at the ancient University town.
Quite gorgeous.

19th-century fashion in detail Lucy Johnson
garment porn. Book on details in garment items in the Victoria and Albert museum in London.
a book I'd love a copy of. Another one from Irish library system.

Witchcraze Anne Llewellyn Barstow,
Book on the craze of Witchunting in the 16th & 17t6h centuries. Particularly fixated on the perseccution of women.
I noticed the author is writing as though whatever wicthcraft the witches were accused of has a factual basis which I wasn't sure how to take. I was thinking more that I would say allegedly or something similar since I would be thinking this was pretty exaggerated at the very least. & a ruse for persecution.
I'm just reading a chapter on how women were pushed out of the workforce in teh 16th century after having been more closely involved traditionally. Oh well up the patriarchy burn the witch like.
I think this is a decent book but I am having some problems with that , since I would think a lot of what women were accused of were male projections. & the lore and methodology of what was thought of as witchcraft were outside of the experience of thsoe doing the accusing. Certainly all the satanic orgies sound pretty fictive.
Oh well, bibliography has turned me onto some titles I'm looking forward to reading.

Darker than blue : on the moral economies of Black Atlantic culture Paul Gilroy
transcripts of 3 lectures done for W.E.b. du Bois conference.
one on car culture, one on Bob Marley and other musical artists and one on citizenship and consumption. Prett interesting.
Bibliography has pointed me at some books on the history and practise of Human Rights that I will have comingto me next week I think.

I ordered a number of books through the interlibrary loan system thinking that in the past they have taken an age to come through and now it seems 8 titles have already been sent out to my library. Seems the efficiency of teh system has improved also, I think, how long it takes for a book to reach me once sent out. So just about to be inundated with decent reading on top of the stack of decent reading I already have out. Hope I am going to get through everything.

I conclude Jonathan Coe, BOURNVILLE (2022).

The novel is a family saga that tells a version of the story of England 1945-2020 through several key historical moments. The moments are VE Day, the Coronation, the World Cup Final, the Investiture of the Prince of Wales, his 1981 wedding, Diana's funeral. The frame, either end of the novel, is 2020, the first 3 months or so of the pandemic.

To a degree Coe renders these historical events. But he extensively does so by quoting radio and TV commentary on them, presumably from actual recordings and transcripts. So the voice of Dimbleby et al is intercut with characters commenting on what they see on screen. In a way this is lazy, an easy writing job for Coe. In a way maybe it's an authentic way of writing about how people experience big events. The most intellectually interesting thing about the novel might involve media, and the fact that history is experienced as media events, though still by specific people in their own places and groups.

Coe's writing is mostly plain, orderly; you could say flat or bland. He is not a Nabokovian writer. Except, in a way, when he writes pastiches of other styles and genres - that is when he can come to life as a writer. He has most verve when he is copying someone or something else. He doesn't do that so much in this novel, except in a pastiche of a report of an EU committee. The EU is presented, by this very anti-Brexit writer, as well-meaning, broadly a good thing, but bureaucratic, slow and obstructive.

The novel features characters who have appeared in other novels, including THE ROTTERS' CLUB / THE CLOSED CIRCLE / MIDDLE ENGLAND. But Coe's final note states that it belongs to a different sequence, called 'Unrest', which includes EXPO '58, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS, MR WILDER AND ME, and he hopes to write a 5th. So a trilogy and a quintet are linked. Whether WHAT A CARVE UP! and NUMBER 11 are also linked to these, I don't quite recall.

The novel seeks to espouse progressive values and open-mindedness. One white character Geoffrey Lamb, is viewed as a closed-minded racist. A black character, Bridget, condemns him after his death, and states that others are also guilty for not standing up to him. Coe seeks to write the issue of 'race' in a particular way by not openly signalling it, and not highlighting the ethnicity of non-white characters. (As I recall, his novel NUMBER 11 partially centred on black characters.) Non-white characters, eg from India and Iran, gradually appear during the novel and the implied sense is of England changing for the better as it becomes more open. Meanwhile, a character very predictably turns out to be gay - this point is telegraphed from early on.

Perhaps some of the characters are not very vividly drawn. In fact Coe doesn't really provide much visual description of characters. It's as if he just wants us to go by personality. But the personalities are sketchy too. I think this is somewhat deliberate; we're meant to have an impression of character traits, without a direct lengthy account of them. The character Bridget is meant to be from Glasgow, but this aspect of her (eg in her voice) is surprisingly little demonstrated. The novel is somewhat more interested in Wales, where certain scenes are set (as they were in the ROTTERS' CLUB trilogy).

In a way the novel is ambitious. And in developing characters over a long period of time and 350pp, it builds some poignancy, especially around mother Mary Lamb who turns out to be, ultimately, the central figure. On the other hand, you could feel that Coe is coasting here. At least, it often feels as though the novel wasn't very hard to write.

I think in Family Sayings what may require patience is the idea of getting to know a family by what it says. The sayings acquire force and weight through repetition; everything outside of what is said is not completely known but only gradually sketched in, and it takes time to figure out what is said means what it does.

(That is where I am hoping the book will take me. Right now it seems like the echo chamber of a loud family.)

lol the ep of morse i just watched is called "greeks bearing gifts" (in english not latin) and morse ponderously morseplains virgil and the reference to the ever-patient lewis at the end

I haven't had much time for Coe outside of What A Carve Up and The House of Sleep. The earlier stuff is juvenile. The later stuff (pretty much from The Rotters Club onwards) seems to be, like you say, coasting. I think at some point Coe decided his metier was The Great English Politics Novel, but I don't think that's his strength - his dialogue is too cornily on-the-nose, and his politics are as middle of the road as mine are, and therefore not particularly interesting to me.

Where he Ceo excel, IMO, is in writing excessively byzantine and sellf-referential thriller plots (as in the House of Sleep). But it seems like he exhausted himself early on and stoped writing those sort of books, which is a shame.

A PS on Coe:

c.2001, when he was becoming quite famous or notorious, James Wood reviewed THE CORRECTIONS and complained that Franzen's critique was "telling the culture what it already knows" (or similar phrase).

I have never been totally convinced by that critique of that particular novel. But it is much more evidently true of this Coe novel.

When Coe writes about the death of Diana, he literally writes a passage like "The public wondered where the Queen was. The national mood of grief was turning restive". When he writes about Covid-19, he writes things like "With lockdown, people were trapped in their houses. They could only communicate on screens. It was as though human connection was cruelly taken away".

In other words, he repeats things that were immediately said about these events in the most mainstream media; ideas about the events that almost literally everyone heard as soon as they happened. This doesn't seem a great vocation for an imaginative fiction.

Maybe Coe could say that what he's doing is creating an archive of living history, in fiction, for posterity. Maybe one day his novels will be useful in this way as Victorian novels might be now. His record of eg lockdown *is* quite accurate.

But even if this is useful for posterity, it's not very enlightening to read now.

So I do think that his novel falls heavily under Wood's old stricture. He tells us things we already know all too well.

I commence Jonathan Lethem, BROOKLYN CRIME NOVEL (2023).

I also start on Cordwainer Smith, THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF MANKIND, ed. Frederik Pohl (1979), stories 1958-1963.

Conversation: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/books/naoise-dolan-megan-nolan-nicole-flattery.html🕸🕸 We've talked about Flattery, are the other two good?

I like Dolan. Haven’t read Megan Nolan’s prose. Did you like Flattery?
― ydkb (gyac), Friday, 11 August 2023 bookmarkflaglink

About to start collected short stories, will report. Also intrigued by mentions of the novel.

― dow, Saturday, 12 August 2023 bookmarkflaglin

Been reading a bit about this:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/aug/08/a-smorgasbord-of-unlikability-the-authors-helping-sad-girl-lit-grow-up

William J. Mann - Katie: The Woman Who Was Hepburn
John le Carré - The Mission Song
Charles Olson - Collected Poems

finished Eric Sneathen’s Don’t Leave Me This Way, a book of cut-up poems about Gaëtan Dugas, the AIDS crisis, and the voices of those lost. References to The Odyssey abound. Great book.

also read a bunch of William Bronk poems, as well as new shorter collection of poems by Ed Roberson about his time working in an aquarium.

The only Coe I've read is the Rotters Club trilogy.

Absolutely love The Rotters Club, think it fits this odd template I often fall for - ridiculously ambitious completely failed comedy. The comic sections are awful and should have been left out entirely, especially the "hilariously" naff 70s dinner party, unfortunately the shit TV version leaned heavily on this aspect. News events do not at this point seem shoehorned in, but are important to the plot. The wonder and delusion of being a precocious arty sixth former, framed within this unmanageable series of plot devices, shifting perspectives and styles, with that closing internal monologue (I guess inspired by Joyce), that's where the gold is here, and I can forgive all of the flaws, including the larger framing device which also should have been left out.

The Closed Circle was less good. It has interesting(ish) new characters and some strong sections, but the overall effect is essentially wheel-spinning, until we get to the shock twist. The political satire of New Labour seemed to be dull and ineffective. Not a bad book, just a very average one.

Middle England was quite a different book, but in the end would rate it about the same as The Closed Circle. The story follows the same characters across the coalition / Brexit years and unfortunately resorts to increasingly simplistic characterisation with the new characters introduced. There's one - a rich teenage girl who becomes a Corbynite and is implied heavily to be antisemitic - who nearly ruined the whole thing for me, though she doesn't feature much. Overall it seemed like a failed experiment, if he wanted news impacting real lives then austerity would have been a much better place to go. The novel ends quite well, but think I'm done with the series at this point.

Camaraderie: I found THE CLOSED CIRCLE disappointing. I found MIDDLE ENGLAND much more effective overall. Aspects of it remain memorable for me.

It's entirely true that he introduces the one socialist character and implies that she's bigoted, and I was naturally troubled by this also, but fortunately it's only one line in about 400pp. But it's also symptomatic that he can't take the socialist revival of these years seriously, says nothing at all about, for instance, the 2017 election result.

He does write extensively about austerity in another novel, NUMBER ELEVEN.

Another problem I had with Middle England's politics was the nice moderate Tory MP girlfriend, of course there is no such thing IRL, she would have voted for every benefit cut, and not even acknowledging that seemed like a huge error.

I'd forgotten her! and still don't remember her clearly, whose gf she was, or anything.

I think you're right to imply that this looks like 'centrism', and it's slightly puzzling that Coe got here after having once been politically sharper.

Coe is my age and my cohort: just over a year younger than me and was actually for a while in the late 80s a fellow reviewer at the wire, stopping at the time I became editor lol (tho not by my command). A thing I have glumly and grimly noticed a lot of is a *lot* of ppl from the same cohort swerving from a sharper 80s politics to a crappy 00s centrism. I suppose we could just handwave it as "getting older, kids and mortgages blah blah", but it seems to manifest in quite a particular way. So instead I'm going to blame the abolition of the GLC and the vanishing of the alt-terrain of e.g. City Limits.

it may be the cosy champagne-socialist hummus-eating latte-drinking guardian-reader cultural elite to blame. or else he just hasn't encountered any young working class people outside of a service setting in the last few decades. or those might just be the same thing.

in 1984 he played keyboards for a "short-lived feminist cabaret group, wanda and the willy warmers"

orwell was right

I think it's been pointed out before that one group of bad 'centrists' is middle-aged UK rock critics.

Another is UK stand-up / TV comedians. The odd thing here is that in NUMBER ELEVEN, Coe specifically attacks / satirises that particular group.

Now I want to read this Number Eleven.

What I want from Coe (or somebody else) is a UK 20th/21st century Les Rougon-Macquart (which if anything gets more radical as it progresses, Germinal is book 13 or 16 depending on how you count and ends with a demand for Communist revolution) but I'm never going to get it.