Jonathan Coe in Conversation

20th May 2010 The celebrated novelist Jonathan Coe came to Birkbeck to give one of the very first readings from his new novel The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim (2010). The event was part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week and also part of the Summer Term provision for the MA in Modern & Contemporary Literature; it attracted an audience of current students, Birkbeck alumni and the general public. Coe read a characteristic passage of comedy from his novel, before answering questions in conversation with Birkbeck’s Joseph Brooker. Topics of discussion included the social change that Coe’s novel depicts, and his vision of contemporary Britain. He remarked that Lindsay Anderson's film O Lucky Man! (1973) had been an inspiration, and that an American romance of the road was countered in Britain by our more bathetic experiences of motorway service stations. Coe commented on the dense formal patterning of his novel, and on the combination of the mundane and the bizarre in his fiction: the mundane, he remarked, is never really mundane. The book bears an epigraph from Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982 Janine (1984): Coe said that he was very happy for readers to connect his work to Gray’s, and that he had come to realize an affinity between the two novels. Before signing copies of the new book, Coe expressed his intention to keep writing about the times we’re living in.   Tweet   Image by Elliot Brown, used under a CC BY-NC-ND...