BOOKS & ARTS
A chronicle
of modern times
Jon Day
Middle England
by Jonathan Coe
Penguin Viking, £16.99, pp. 423
Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane
and funny novels, but you sometimes sus-
pect he wants to write more audacious ones.
He has a long-standing interest in formally
experimental writers — Flann O’Brien and
B. S. Johnson are heroes — but it’s an inter-
est that has never really become full-blown
influence. Though The Rotter’s Club (2001)
— our first introduction to some of the char-
acters who populate Middle England —
contains a 13,000-word-long sentence and
a wonderfully complicated scene in which
a husband and wife have a misdirected con-
versation (he completing a crossword; she
reading a love letter from one of her son’s
teachers) as they each consult a dictionary,
for the most part experimentalism is con-
fined to the surface of Coe’s novels. This is
not to say that there isn’t profound pleas-
ure to be found in them, but it’s of a kind
that confirms rather than challenges
your prejudices.
Middle England is the third instalment
of a trilogy (the second,The Closed Cir-
cle, published in 2004, covered the Blair
years) that follows the lives of a group of
Birmingham school friends from the 1970s
to the present. There are three central
characters: Benjamin Trotter, the passive,
thoughtful schoolboy of The Rotter’s
Club; his niece Sophie; and his mate
Doug Anderton.
Benjamin, the centrist dad of English
fiction, has turned 50. In The Closed Circle
he lost his faith and split up with his wife,
Emily. Now we find that he has sold his
flat and retired to a country mill to finish
his magnum opus — a sprawling, multimil-
lion-word-long Gesamtkunstwerk that he’s
been tinkering with for decades. Sophie —
the daughter of Benjamin’s sister Lois, who
was traumatised in the Birmingham pub
bombings of 1974 — is an art historian who,
much to her own surprise, marries a dull but
decent man named Ian, starts hanging out on
suburban golf courses, and gets swept up
in a scandal of identity politics at the univer-
sity she teaches in.
Doug is still a successful left-leaning
newspaper columnist. His marriage to the
Hon. Francesca Gifford is on the rocks, but
he continues to live in her Chelsea mansion
while their daughter Coriander, a political-
ly radical teenager, plots his downfall. Paul,
Benjamin’s odious brother, who in The
Closed Circle became a New Labour MP
and did something unspeakable to him, is
nowhere to be seen. Neither is Cicely, Benja-
min’s first sweetheart and the mother of his
only child. But he thinks of them often, and
every now and then there’s a bit of explica-
tory dialogue to remind us that they exist.
Middle England is as historically self-
aware as the other two novels in the trilogy.
Coe covers the financial crash, the election
of the coalition government of 2010 and the
2011 London riots, and continues on through
the Brexit vote almost to the present day. In
a manner that has become something of a
hallmark of the Brexit novel, news events
and Twitter storms intrude to mark time.
Some of these are still memorable — Gor-
don Brown’s run-in with Gillian Duffy, the
‘bigoted woman’, on the campaign trail in
Rochdale — but others will be forgotten.
Does anyone now recall Trenton Oldfield,
who disrupted the 2012 boat race to protest
against something vague?
The prose is slick and precise and you
always feel in safe hands. Coe is a master of
transitions — using paragraph and section
breaks to cut the action — and his set-pieces
are perfect miniatures, stylishly engineered.
But reading Middle England can seem like
wandering around a model village: you mar-
vel at the extraordinary attention to detail,
but feel unsettled by the lack of life.The power of the poppy
Steven Poole
Milk of Paradise: A History of Opium
by Lucy Inglis
Macmillan, £25, pp. 440America has for years been struggling with
a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute
people, yet it was only in August, in Nebras-
ka, that the first judicial killing using opioids
was performed. Aside from moral questions
about the death penalty itself, the resistance
for so long to this obvious solution denotes
a particularly sadistic puritanism, as though
it’s an unacceptable risk that even the last
moments of a condemned man should be at
all pleasant.
Opium and its derivatives and synthetic
imitators constitute a miracle class of drug:
nothing else is as good for pain relief, as
Lucy Inglis’s bright and anecdote-packedhistory shows. Modern British and Ameri-
can soldiers, wounded on the battlefield, are
given fentanyl lollipops, so that if they lose
consciousness the lollipops drop out of their
mouths and they avoid overdose. And the
use of opium to treat the wounded in war
goes back as long as human cultivation of
the opium poppy, which dates from Neolith-
ic times.
The book is a long sprint, indeed, through
the last 3,000 years or so of wars, medicine,
and the drug trades, legal and illegal, from
China to Afghanistan and South America.
This vast scope means that sometimes the
reader may not be able to see the poppy forthe trees. Engrossed in some detail about
the American Civil War, one realises that
one hasn’t heard anything about opium for
many pages. Occasionally, we race along
merrily: ‘On land, as at sea, the 16th century
was a time of extraordinary change and inno-
vation,’ the author writes, which can hardly
be gainsaid. But the book’s enjoyment comes
from its colourful characters: the mysti-
cal doctor Paracelsus, who invented lauda-
num in the 16th century, or the 18th-century
American doctor and politician Benjamin
Rush, who wrote that small beer results
in ‘serenity’, but brandy encourages ‘fighting
and horse racing’, while gin begins in ‘perju-
ry’ and ends in ‘burglary and death’. (Thom-
as Jefferson, meanwhile, grew opium poppies
on his plantation.)
By the late 19th century, opiates were suc-
cessfully commercialised in products such as
Mrs Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, a morphine
concoction recommended for putting chil-
dren to sleep; and Inglis traces the line from
here, through prohibition, to the rise of the
heroin trade under the Triads and Mafia, and
up to the present ‘opioid crisis’ in America,
the over-prescribing of addictive painkillers.
This last, apparently, ‘indicates a deeper
malaise in the American psyche’; but such
powerful drugs are always political. In the
19th century, opium was associated with
Chinese immigrants to America’s west coast
and the subsequent alleged degradation of
white women’s morals, so a huge wave of anti-
Chinese sentiment culminated in California’s
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was
not repealed until 1943. Stories of drug-
crazed black men, similarly, helped pass
official prohibition of opium and cocaine
by 1922. Inglis shows persuasively, mean-
while, how Allied attempts to suppress
poppy farming in Afghanistan after 2001
were not only doomed to failure but
counterproductive in the battle for hearts
and minds.
The author’s style is perky and informal,
which can result in her writing such thingsLooking Forward
Saturdays we go to town
On disturbing buses
With exits so nar row
Two can never pass equally:
This is a portent –
O ne of us dies la st.
— Tim HopkinsThe use of opium to treat
the wounded in war goes back
to Neolithic times