Jonathan Coe
What A Carve Up!
Viking pbk, 502 pgs
Review by Gerald Houghton (1995)
Well connected, sweating money, and possessed of a remote Yorkshire family seat, the Winshaws are a breed of the old school. One of their number, Hilary, pens one of those tawdry, right-wing newspaper columns, informed solely by her own contradictory and ill-educated opinion; Henry is an ex-Labour MP whose politics use the party and everyone around him to further his own, less than left-wing motives; Dorothy is a callous factory farmer to whom animal welfare is a alien concept; and yet another, Mark, is an arms dealer growing rich from peddling his inventory to Iraq. Which is not to mention Thomas who, uninterested in more orthodox sexual relations, collects the more risqué outtakes from cutting room floors.
Pity then Michael Owen, the not-so-holy-innocent employed by a vanity publisher at the request of mad Aunt Tabitha to pen the warts and all The Winshaw Legacy. Fixated on the old Kenneth Connor/Sid James country house comedy-horror What A Carve Up! since a formative cinema visit as a boy, and with a failed marriage behind him, Michael is almost as big a fuck-up as any of the Winshaws. Then someone steals his manuscript from the publishers and things start getting very peculiar indeed.
"Part personal memoir, part social commentary, all stirred together into one lethal and devastating brew," says Tabitha of Michael's work; a self-review by author Jonathan Coe of his own magnificent book.
Connection and coincidence are at the very heart of this huge, and hugely readable saga. Bookended by the tangled death of pilot Godfrey Winshaw in the last war (was it a simple shooting down, or betrayal by one of his own family?) the elaborate weave of events begins to suggest cabals and conspiracies whose backstage shenanigans are such as to inexorably fuse biographer and subject. Structurally the book boomerangs with abandon between the 60s and 90s, riddling the text with intricate ties and tethers that consistently pull ever bigger rabbits out of ever smaller hats: enduring boyhood memories of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin; the researching into Mark's shady international deals by an investigative film-maker who gets more than he bargained for; Phoebe, a young painter and nurse, called by the Winshaws' tune; Michael's neighbour and friend, the tragically ill Fiona; and even an irascible Sid James.
Enough would be enough, but not content with limiting his horizons, Coe paints the whole in a razor-sharp, angry satire on both the desperate plight of the NHS and the duplicity of The Gulf War. It is a measure of his skill that he succeeds brilliantly. Somehow the book runs the full gamut from absurd comedy to acute political animal to melancholy to outright farce without once fumbling the ball.
With an almost Dickensian sweep of morality and scale, What A Carve Up! has a point to make beyond being simply superior entertainment, and makes it well. The divide between greed and madness, as some says near the end of these 500 pages, is narrow indeed, and thank god that someone out there has found a way to tell it with such humour, anger and, well, necessary brio.