A glance at the blurbs of Jonathan Coe’s previous novels will show that his most beloved and belabored subject is Britain. There have been excursions to Brussels and Hollywood, but his native land has been his favored setting, whether now or back then, and his themes have often been national rather than strictly personal or universal. His can be contrasted with the more cosmopolitan careers of his rough coevals Kazuo Ishiguro, Deborah Levy, and David Mitchell. If his bibliography looks a little quaint, something like a patchwork quilt of herringbones and paisleys, he surely knows this, and knows too how to use this quaintness for his own purposes.
Thus, in his latest, The Proof of My Innocence he has used the “cosy crime” genre for one section and also for the template of his larger plot. This genre is nestled alongside “dark academia”—think of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History—and autofiction, and all of this is contained within another frame, that of vaguely postmodern pastiche. Because the whodunnit is constructed with great skill and extends into the other sections, I suspect Coe’s novel will be remembered primarily as a mystery, whether he intended this or not. Had the culprit and the crime been less intriguing, the other two genres might have asserted themselves more, and the framing of the whole thing might stand more clearly in the memory. Instead, the reader is drawn most by the comforts of cosy crime, which one character calls “deeply British, in some indefinable way”, and the bookishness of the book (not literary density, but the sense in which it is about books) is also concentrated around the mystery. This reader, easily satisfied by such things, has almost no complaints, and much to praise.
Serious thinkers who dislike puns should be warned against this novel. Starting with the punning title offers a way into some basic exposition of the plot: the “Proof” is an uncorrected proof copy of a book, and “My Innocence” is that book. My Innocence is the last novel by a minor British author named Peter Cockerill, who, thanks to the efforts of the academic Richard Wilkes, is finding a new readership. Professor Wilkes gives a talk on themes of renewal in Cockerill’s work at TrueCon (another pun, you’ll notice), a conservative conference held at a country home in the Cotswolds, Wetherby Hall, which has been converted into a hotel by Lord Wetherby. Notable guests include Emeric Coutts, famed for his Cambridge Seminars in the 70s, and one of his best students, Roger Wagstaff, founder of the think tank the Processus Group, which is thought to have the ear of the likely next Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
The conference is first disrupted by news of Queen Elizabeth’s passing, and then by a murder. Inspector Prudence Freeborne is called in from the verge of retirement. Also involved are a few people who knew Coutts, Wagstaff, and more briefly, Cockerill, at Cambridge. These are the journalist Christopher Swann, a parochial vicar named Joanna Reeves, and the psychiatrist Brian Collier, who wrote a memoir about those Cambridge years. Swann’s daughter, Rashida, and Reeves’, Phyll, are also caught up in the story.
These two younger characters, Rashida and Phyll, never quite live and breathe properly. Instead, they read as if they’ve been assembled from opinion pieces on millennial trends. Phyll thinks of writing some kind of novel, whereas Rashida is more practical, but everything they do or say corresponds to some commonplace understanding of their generation. They watch Friends, for one thing, and Rashida has read somewhere that this shows how they pine after a pre-smartphone age. This is okay, because most of the novel is spent away from them, however important they are to the setup and the conclusion. Once they and their parents are introduced, the mystery plot previewed in the cold opening can begin.
At dinner, Rashida’s adoptive father Christopher announces, “Tomorrow is when real life stops, and fantasy begins.” He mocks what he sees as the delusions of British conservatism, but also heralds the start of the mystery section, which is introduced with a vignette illustration as Murder at Wetherby Pond. Coe is a dab hand in this genre. The narration has that sturdy, slightly stiff sound to it, and it gets a little pedantic in the way only genre writers do over local details such as the “dark, coppery local bitter, Thruxton’s Old Undrinkable” available on the way to Wetherby Hall. The plotting is too neat, just as it ought to be, and the suspects too suspicious. It stays cosy and nostalgic despite the insistence of the topical: the grand old house hosts columnists for the Spectator and UnHerd gathering ideas for yet another piece denouncing wokeness, and the old Wetherby line’s associations with historical injustices might be fodder for the other side, but this still feels like the world of Agatha Christie.
The other two sections, Brian Collier’s Cambridge memoir and the “Essay in Autofiction” co-narrated by Phyll and Rashida, are less appealing. Still, they ably carry what has become a very enjoyable story, first delving into a haunted past, and then going on the road, pushing at high pace through to the resolution. Coe is good-humored, humorous (not the same thing), clever but not irritating, and never commits a bad sentence to the page. He welcomes all readers, including some whom the blurb might not entice. One finds glinting shards of probable metatextual import early in The Proof of My Innocence, in Phyll’s discussions with her father on forgotten writers versus those rewarded and remembered so well as to cause resentment, like Martin Amis. Coe has his own place in all this, which his steady readers will be ready to surmise. Some might only tolerate the hectic, nearly up-to-date politics or the quick and easy cultural comments, but they will be able to enjoy Coe’s novel as a book about books, because it is genial and gameful enough to be treated that way. If you turn your head and squint to read the novel, it won’t mind.
There are literary lines and angles to be studied, and accompanying them, inside information about publishing, reviewing, and the rare books trade for any bibliophile to savor. Failing that, you can just try to work out who the killer is. If the novel’s thoughts on the state of England, the kids today, or The Novel itself don’t interest you, this is a strong fallback option, and so it seems that something very ingenious is going on, like a game where you choose your own adventure. Whodunnit? When someone scores a clever goal or wins on a nine-darter, the commentator says, “He’s done it!” So too the book reviewer: Coe has done it, he really has.
