THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE, by Jonathan Coe
Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, “The Proof of My Innocence,” is an attempt to fuse the polemic with the postmodern experiment. Its central concern is the murder of a left-wing blogger in his early 60s, Christopher Swann, during a conservative political conference at an English country-house hotel. Some of the guests are Swann’s old Cambridge acquaintances, and any one, it seems, might wish to do him in. But Coe isn’t content to unfold a straightforward whodunit. He tracks the case across a trilogy of manuscripts, each written in a different genre by Swann’s acquaintance Phyl, a recent university graduate who has taken up writing to stave off boredom.
The opening pages offer a brisk portrait of Phyl’s millennial existence — she works in an airport sushi restaurant, plays Wordle, binges “Friends” — but the majority of the novel is devoted to her three writing exercises. It’s crucial to the book’s success that these texts provide parodic humor, however mild, while retaining the native qualities of their respective genres.
This ploy comes off best in the first section, a pastiche of soft-boiled mysteries often categorized as “cozy crime.” It portrays Swann’s murder at TrueCon, the right-wingers’ conference, and introduces us to such pleasurable gargoyles as the conservative philosophy don Emeric Coutts and his disciple Roger Wagstaff, leading light of a shadowy think tank called the Processus Group. The novel’s weary detective, Prudence Freeborne, is of course heading to her retirement party when the call comes through. Four consecutive chapters end with a potential culprit giving Swann a murderous look.
Coe’s strategy is less effective in the following section, a slice of “dark academia” set in the 1980s, partly because Cambridge doesn’t feel much less cozy than what came before. Things break down comprehensively with the third manuscript, a foray into autofiction. A sendup of a mystery can get closer to the real thing than a sendup of a form that emphasizes fact, or at least an intriguing proximity to it. Since this section is inevitably concerned with the resolution of Swann’s murder — or the solution Phyl comes up with — the only thing that brings it close to the terrain of autofiction is the use of the first person. This is really metafiction, with the author entering the text as a character. Coe also makes the slightly odd decision to give narrator duties to both Phyl and Swann’s adopted daughter, Rash.
The author’s desire to write a story that works as pastiche and the real thing is not the only tightrope Coe is eager to tread. He also wants to find the common ground between gimmickry and sincerity, the cerebral and — to borrow one of his favored words — the “accessible.” His faith in a broad or bridging sensibility was formed by exposure to the 18th-century novel, which developed before what he calls a “modern polarization,” and deepened by the success of writers such as Milan Kundera, Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, who displayed some of that old freedom and flexibility. The use of genre materials to “explain the world,” as Phyl puts it, recalls a sentiment from Eco’s novel “Foucault’s Pendulum” that Coe has highlighted in the past: “Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the true measure of reality.” And like Eco, Coe places his genre exercises in a knowing — and clarifying — framework.
“The Proof of My Innocence” touches on debates about novel-writing via the career of a novelist called Peter Cockerill, a version of B.S. Johnson, the British avant-garde writer who killed himself in 1973 and the subject of Coe’s celebrated biography “Like a Fiery Elephant.” Johnson’s legacy is relevant here because, in his dismissal of fiction as “lies,” he anticipated contemporary autofiction. But in order to slot a Johnson figure into Phyl’s story, Coe gives Cockerill a different life span and — in a somewhat more radical change — presents this forlorn experimentalist as a hero of the British right, who is celebrated in the present day as a special guest at TrueCon. (The book’s title refers in part to a “proof” copy, or galley, of Cockerill’s final book, “My Innocence.”)
Coe’s analysis of literary movements and practices is not an end in itself, or merely a plea for his populist-highbrow aesthetic. “The Proof of My Innocence” is a descendant of his breakthrough book, the macabre anti-Thatcherite farce “What a Carve-Up!” (1994), a strain of his work he felt obliged to revive, after the Conservatives regained power, in “Number 11” (2015) and “Middle England” (2018).
Coe’s own ideals are implicit in his portrait of Tories as, in Swann’s words, “out-and-out racists and sadists” and reflected quite directly in the social-democratic attitudes Swann espouses. These ideals are also embodied by his approach. He mounts resistance to polarization in the realm of civil and political discourse by pitting disparate traditions in what he once called “friendly combat.”
“The Proof of My Innocence” certainly falls short of total success. Coe’s light touch is overexerted, the conceptual intricacy undermined by a slight laziness when it comes to descriptions and observations, jokes and conceits. But the novel is part of a larger project, and the deficiencies of a single book can do nothing to obscure the validity of his ambition.
THE PROOF OF MY INNOCENCE | By Jonathan Coe | Europa | 396 pp. | Paperback, $18
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