For almost four decades now, Jonathan Coe has employed wit, insight and scalpel-sharp satire to deliver compulsive, incisive novels that chronicle British lives and explore facets of Britishness.
Coe’s 1994 breakthrough, “The Winshaw Legacy,” laid bare the rapacious appetites and other grotesque qualities of “the meanest, greediest, cruelest” upper-class family. “Middle England” (2018) depicted a disunited kingdom after the Brexit vote. More recently, “Bournville” (2022) tracked different generations against shifting backdrops of “royalist pomp and circumstance” and national unrest.
In his 15th novel for adults, Coe has written a typically astute, state-of-the-nation tale and fused it with, of all things, a murder mystery.
“The Proof of My Innocence” gets underway with 23-year-old Phyl. Listless and directionless after finishing her studies, she endures the tedium of home life with her parents and dead-end work in a Japanese restaurant. But things look up when Christopher Swann, a friend of Phyl’s mother from Cambridge University, comes to stay with his adopted daughter, Rashida.
Phyl instantly bonds with vibrant, enthusiastic Rashida. And she is fascinated by Christopher who, as a journalist and blogger devoted to monitoring “covert networks of power,” has uncovered the hidden agenda of a shady think tank.
Coe then switches the focus from Phyl to Christopher as he checks into Wetherby Hall in the Cotswolds to attend TrueCon, a right-wing conference. But after ruffling feathers and making political enemies, Christopher is stabbed to death. Instead of retiring that day as planned, Detective Inspector Pru Freeborne arrives on the scene and investigates — that is until Coe transforms his narrative and ingeniously and entertainingly serves up three novels for the price of one.
Coe has fun in his first section with his take on cozy crime. (Rebranding violent homicide as “cozy” is, according to Christopher, “very British, in some indefinable way.”) We weigh up the significance of secret passages, a locked room, a cryptic note, a missing flash drive, a lake with no fish and a whittled-down list of suspects (including the deliciously ghastly demagogue Roger Wagstaff), all of whom share the same initials.
More clues are scattered in Coe’s other two sections: His second is a slice of dark academia in the guise of a memoir; his third takes the form of autofiction in which Phyl and Rashida alternately recount their joint sleuthwork to learn more about an author who killed himself and burned his work in a blaze of bitterness.
