Middle England started well but ground to a halt for me at around 30% read. I haven’t read anything else by the author. I lost interest, so it wasn't for me sadly.

I haven't read the previous books about these characters and I think it affected my understanding at times. I found it all very confusing and given the period in British history that is probably understandable. It chronicles the great changes in the history of Great Britain from 2010 to 2018 and jumps around amongst the characters.

This was very difficult to get into. I couldn't relate to the characters and the Brexit material had little to add to the debate other than to rehash stereotypes.

Probably one for hardened Coe fans only.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC without obligation.

Stuck in cartoons

I have loved, much, some of Coe's earlier writing, where he combines finger on the cultural pulse with complex characterisation, dark humour and a sense of the complexity of lives.

Perhaps Brexit fee;s too close and raw yet, because, even though we do meet some of the characters again from those earlier set books, I missed complexity here. The general awfulness of almost every Brexiteer who crosses these pages merely reinforced the prejudices I already have. In our horribly divided country I would like to better understand those whose sense of identity is different from mine. In some ways, I felt Coe was deepening the problem of superior metropolitan middle class smugness which I admit to being prone to.

And I missed, for the most part, his humour.

I have read, and loved, all of Coe's previous novels and Middle England is no exception. However, I almost didn't read it because I am so depressed by the Brexit news everyday I just couldn't face a 'Brexit novel'! I am so glad I did though.

Middle England forms a trilogy with previous books The Rotter's Club and Closed Circle. And what a trilogy it is! Middle England brings us back in touch with the same characters twenty years on, as they reach middle age. I did feel that the Brexit element was a little heavy-handed in parts of this novel (I know, I know, it's a Brexit novel but even so...) but as usual his characters were sharply drawn, sometimes cartoonish but only in a way that reflects the real-life political buffoons that have been inflicted on us, and his depictions of the ups and downs of long-term friendships and relationships had real pathos at times.

Coe's writing is a pure joy to read.

Welcome catchup with the characters from The Rotters Club and The Closed Circle. If you like people based novels with current themes you will certainly enjoy this.
I’d like to thank the author, publisher and netgalley for providing me with an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased review.

It’s a brave move to take on Brexit in a novel as things are still playing out. Hat tip to Ali Smith who managed to get Autumn up and running less than six months after the ballot boxes were emptied in June 2016. Here, Jonathan Coe brings back the cast of his earlier works The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. Ben Trotter is now firmly anchored in late middle age and living next to a river in the Midlands. As in other works, such as the richly comic What A Carve Up!, Coe marshalls a cast of characters that deftly play out contemporary mores. Ben’s neice marries a man she meets on a speed awareness course. They split up later, citing, among a litany of incompatabilities, their voting on the two different sides of the referendum. That’s after she’s been suspended from her academic job for making what is perceived (though not necessarily by its subject) as a transphobic remark. There’s a (Tory) politician who is aggessively hounded by social media and who is having a relationship – and middle aged sex - with a world-weary, left leaning journallist. There’s a character who has to resort to using a Foodbank. There are also, in a marvellous and reference to Psychoville, aggressively warring clowns.
This is all good fun, but the satire feels gentle. I was left wanting something more acerbic, less cosy. As the domestic news (now, in mid February 2019) gets more desperate with each passing day, I can’t help wishing Coe had deferred ending his book for just a few more months. It would have been interesting to see how the fictional Trotters and their friends weathered whatever version of Brexit we end up with, or don’t.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

After an interesting and balanced beginning this book drifted into a disappointing re-hash of anti-Brexit prejudices and half truths. As a committed Remainer I find it embarrassing to read narratives like this one that so egregiously turns unseeing eyes and wax-filled ears towards the unwelcome truths that the Brexit vote revealed. This book missed the one fundamental truth that should be seared onto the political consciousness - we can regret the vote by all means, but we ignore the unwelcome truths about the state of our disunited Kingdom at our peril. In fairness, from a literary perspective this was an excellent book - well-written, fluent and compelling. Although I was not familiar with the earlier books in the series, and despite the length of the book, there was an imperative to get quickly to the end. But readers and authors must understand the dangers of putting words representing just one set of views into the mouths of their characters if their works are to be seen as better than 'propaganda porn'. Overall - disappointing.

One of my favourite books of all time was The Rotter's Club; a brilliant depiction of social class in 1970s industrial Britain. Middle England reminds me of how you get amazing first albums but the follow ups never quite live up to the greatness of the original. The Closed Circle (despite so many coincidences) was enjoyable but didn't resonate as much as the Rotter's Club. Here, in Middle England, we are up to date in the midst of the political nightmare that is Brexit. I was quite disappointed with the lack of depth of the characters here. Maybe my expectations were too high. I did enjoy the way it related to fairly recent events but I thought it was just too focused on a minority of the middle classes.

Unfortunately I was disappointed with this book and found its quite formulaic. All of its references to Brexit are very topical but it just didn't grab me. I wonder if reading the previous books by Jonathan Coe would have made a difference. I felt the characters needed a bit more depth to help create more empathy. Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for an ARC.

Hard for me to rate this latest book by Jonathan Coe, whose Rotters’ Club and Closed Circle I really enjoyed. The same characters now appear in a third tale which seeks to put our Brexit vote to leave the EU in context.
Sadly, I found much of the first half of the book insipid and it would have been abandoned if it hadn’t been by Coe.
Despite being of personal interest (I went to the real life girls' part of King Williams School in the class of 1978) I also couldn’t help wondering how much the detailed descriptions of Brum would really be of interest to someone not familiar with the area.
But I did persist with the book and its second half was a much better half for me.
The Brexit story thread lines came together, the commentary on the state of the nation seemed more developed, the story flowed better.
By the end of the novel, I at last felt connected with the characters and was almost sorry it was the end. After a rocky start, nostalgia and the bones of a five star novel made me give the book four stars.
Many thanks indeed to netgalley and the publishers for a copy of this book in return for a fair review.

I am afraid that this one never really took off for me. Whilst it was topical and reflects we'll the situation in Britain and I totally agree with some of the opinions of the characters - as the population of a book they were almost unanimously bland, it was impossible to feel anything for them. I am not sure if I should have read the books that precede these with the same characters but I am not sure i could have got through more of them.

After the break-up of his marriage Benjamin is living in the Midlands in a large house funded by the sale of his flat in London and trying to make it as a writer. His sister Lois is unfulfilled and working away from the family home and her daughter is trying to make it in academia. Over the next 8 years events around the work and close to home impact on them all.
This is both an ambitious and yet very insular novel. I read it as a stand alone, not have read the previous two books about the characters and yet I did not need to. Coe is a talented writer who can write about the most profound subjects in a gently humorous and always entertaining fashion. Of course the whole idea is that middle England is both a place (away from the Capital) and also a description of the 'ordinary' populace. Here the ordinary populace spreads from the very right wing to the very left wing with the expected consequences. The overt Nimby-ism and covert racism is juxtaposed against the extremes of the politically correct brigade and each is found wanting. There is so much to love here, the failed children's entertainer with the unspoken love for his partner's daughter, the thoroughly nice chap whose views are to the opposite of his wife, the political spin doctor who loses it completely, the financial wizz who decides to put something back into society and the fact that nowhere seems are alien to middle england as Hartlepool. Who can't fail to love a book which has Brexit as a main character!

An interesting subject to write about but one where the author, if not careful, may infer their personal leanings in to the characters as they are slowly revealed.
I liked the description of shared oneness whilst watching Morecambe and Wise but had to wait until much further in the book to read of the unrest at that time. The rose tinted scales having been pulled from the eyes.
For the main part, privileged characters set out their views of what was wrong with British society. The less privileged, the ones who hadn't the means to make a change in their circumstances, took the brunt of inferred derision. Except Grete and Lukas who were taken under Lois and Benjamin's wing in their escape to sunny Provence. I wonder if Lois and Benjamin donned the gilets jaunes and manned the barricades in support of their poverty stricken French neighbours? Perhaps in their choice too they had rosé tinted spectacles?
The King William's school which a number of the characters and author attended was plainly KES, a fee paying grammar school not to be confused with the King Edward VI Camp Hill school which is nearby where entrance is by examination only.

Haven't read any of Jonathan Coe's books before. Written about years leading upto Brexit.
Didn't find it interesting and didn't like the style of writing at all. Thanks to Netgalley for an arc.

A disappointing follow on from The Rotters Club. In attempting to cover all the historic events since then to the present day each event is glossed over. It is disappointing that none of the topics are covered in detail.
It presents a very monied, London centric viewpoint of life in Britain. It had very little relevance to my life.
I felt no empathy for any of the characters - in fact the whole book ended up being quite annoying.

There might be a wonderful read here for the right audience, but I'm not it. I've not read the prior books with these characters, and don't really intend to, but more importantly this is just a yack-fest, a book about the chattering classes that doesn't want to admit to belonging to the chattering classes itself.

As a fan of Jonathan Coe, I was excited to read this book. It is absolutely of the moment and, although Brexit has become a very tedious subject for many of us, I was not bored by this story. The range of characters and their relationships to each other are sensitively and cleverly constructed so that the reader is bound to empathise with at least some of them, and/or their respective plights. It is no secret that the political backdrop of this book is Brexit-focused, the moral of each storyline being that Brexit has brought no good to anyone. I personally was quite moved by and had empathy with the idea that personal relationships have been adversely affected, damaged and even destroyed by Brexit, before it has even happened. I would say that this book may not be so palatable to avid Brexiteers. For me, however, another win for Jonathan Coe for both storytelling and socio-political commentary.

Sometimes it feels that all conversations in the UK eventually turn to Brexit. Literary conversations are no exception.

Jonathan Coe might be the ideal chronicler of the current Brexit-obsessed moment. His previous big, ambitious, state-of-Britain novels include the scathing Thatcher-era satire What a Carve Up! and the post-millennium Number 11. Middle England comes only three years after Number 11, yet in that short period so much has changed.

The Brexit commentary in Middle England can be too on-the-nose at times. At points the characters seem to be delivering soundbites rather than dialogue. But even in these places, what they’re saying has a poignant clarity, as when one elderly man expresses nostalgia for World War II:

“Making armaments, they were, munitions, aeroplane parts. Can you imagine! Can you imagine what it was like, hundreds of people, working together like that, for the war effort? What a spirit, eh? What a country we were back then! ‘Whatever happened to all that? It was bad enough when I was working here. Every man for himself, survival of the fittest, I’m all right, Jack. That’s what was starting to take over. But now it’s even worse, it’s just . . . fancy clothes and Prosecco bars and bloody . . . packets of salad. We’ve gone soft, that’s the problem. No wonder the rest of the world’s laughing at us.’”

When another character says, “Go on, tell me how fucking privileged I am. Tell me that people like me haven’t become victims in our own country,” the sense of grievance that led to Brexit is laid clear.

And though it might feel trite now, it’s still hugely important to talk about how Brexit revealed generational and geographical divides, and fault lines of class and race. Coe expresses this well when referring to:

“the unspeakable truth: that Sophie (and everyone like her) and Helena (and everyone like her) might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes, and these universes were separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable, a wall built out of fear and suspicion and even – perhaps – a little bit of those most English of all qualities, shame and embarrassment. Impossible to deal with any of this. The only practical thing was to ignore it (but for how long was that practical, in fact?) and to double down, for now, on the desperate, unconsoling fiction that all of this was just a minor difference of opinion, like not quite seeing eye-to-eye over a neighbour’s choice of colour scheme or the merits of a particular TV show.”

It’s significant that Middle England ends not in the UK, but in France. There, the central family have gathered to find some optimism about the future. It’s only a short distance across the English Channel, but the symbolic distance matters. This leads to some bittersweet reflections about Britishness, as:

“Benjamin had always assumed that he would grow old and die at home; that he was bound to end his life by returning to the country of his childhood. But he was starting to understand, at last, that this place had only ever existed in his imagination.”



MORE READING RELATED TO BREXIT:
“Books about Brexit, the European Union, and the UK”

“50 Must-Read Books about Modern Englishness”

“Books to Help You Deal with Brexit”

“A Brexit Reading Syllabus”

I loved this book. The pages are filled with interesting, clever characters who are caught up in the extraordinary political events of recent years, just as all of us are. It is written with great humour and the characters are drawn with such sensitivity that (apart from a couple of obvious and notable exceptions) I found myself sympathising with them even when their views are the opposite of mine.