Jonathan Coe: intrigue at the Atomium
English author’s new book Expo 58 explores what it’s like to be British in Brussels
Tenth novel is British author’s funniest
“I was looking for a way to approach the subject of Britishness at the time,” he explains. “If I wanted to examine what life was like for an Englishman in the late 1950s, it made sense not to keep him stuck in drab, boring and monochrome London but to send him to Expo 58, where all the countries of the world come together, and see what happens to him there.” Inspired by the time and the place, Coe had the premise of his next novel.
Since the World’s Fair in Brussels isn’t a topic that’s well known in Britain, it’s quite an unusual time and place for a British novel to be set. Coe spent many hours at the Belgian National Library and talked to several local friends and others who had been to the Expo.
“I also drove around a lot and tried to get a feel for the Heizel area because it was hard to find anyone who knew where the British delegates and workers had been housed,” he says. “Apart from a sign from the Britannia pub, there’s nothing left of the British pavilion.”
With a clear picture in mind of the surroundings, the 52-year-old started writing his 10th and most humorous novel to date, a follow-up to his previous award-winning novels which include What a Carve Up and The Rotters’ Club.
More than meets the eye
Expo 58 focuses on Thomas Foley, a young civil servant living a quiet life in London with his wife, Sylvia, and their baby daughter, Gill. He is dispatched to Brussels to oversee the Britannia, the pub of the British pavilion, for the six months of the fair – but there might be slightly more to his enlistment than meets the eye. Intrigue, romance and espionage quickly ensue, creating a tangled web of deception and potential doom.
Nothing is what it seems, everyone is putting on a show
Coe is clearly a fan of Alfred Hitchcock and 1960s television, and he adds a wide array of pop culture references to the mix. “Looking at footage of people having fun at this theme park in suits and reading about the espionage between the Soviet and American pavilions, which were next to each other, reminded me of those TV shows,” he confirms.
The Expo was supposed to show off the contributing countries’ achievements in arts, science and technology and to develop “a genuine unity of mankind”. Sadly, the Americans and Russians had other ideas.
Allusions like this can also be found in Coe’s 1994 postmodern masterpiece, What a Carve Up. “I wasn’t alive in the 1950s, but I have seen a lot of movies from that period; much of the dialogue in the book is based on those movies, giving it an element of pastiche and making it quite postmodern. But that’s what Expo 58 was all about: It was a collection of national fictions. Nothing is what it seems; everyone is putting on a show.” And in Coe’s book, a jolly good show at that.
The name’s Foley
Expo 58 can be best be described as a parody of the 1950s spy genre made famous by James Bond scribe Ian Fleming, only this time an unassuming middle-class nobody saves the day. It’s a mixture of slapstick, romance and spying set at the height of the cold war. Full of humour, crime, nostalgia and amorous encounters, this period piece is in fact more lightweight than Coe’s previous novels but highly entertaining nonetheless.
“A lot of people in Britain are writing very serious books – about the financial crisis or terrorism,” he says. “So I ended up writing a book that’s more of an escape from the present day rather than a reflection.”
There is, however, a link with his other novels: Thomas Foley briefly appeared in 2007’s The Rain Before it Falls. “Despite having different settings and characters, all my books create a fictional universe that I recognise,” explains Coe. “So I started pulling minor characters from earlier novels and placing them in different contexts to see what happens. The novels aren’t self-contained; they frequently overlap. For instance, in this novel I’ve also planted several seeds, including Thomas’ children, to whom I might come back one day.”
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