Jonathan Coe is one of my favourite authors, a witty and wise chronicler of British mores, foibles and eccentricities who, in terms of book sales, is apparently appreciated even more on the Continent than he is at home – but isn’t that always the way with satirists who hit too close to home? This seems especially relevant here as this is one of those books about an Englishman abroad, a typically clever and beguiling mixture of character, thrills, comedy and movies …
“Your man?” said Thomas, his eyes slowly coming back into focus.
“Our man, yes. Our man in Brussels”
Some encounters are of course destined to change your life in meaningful ways and some of these tipping points come to define one’s personal history – the trick is to recognise them for what they are at the time and act on them. Alas, for most of us, this only becomes clear with hindsight, thus we are only able to impose a shape on our personal history in recollection, when everything in the telling tends to conform to the needs of what one might term, gerentologically speaking, anecdotage. But there are moments when you know, you can feel deep down, that this just such a turning point – it can be frightening and exciting. But too often we let the moment slip by, too intimidated to commit to the unknown and instead retreat to the devil we know. This is the theme explored in Coe’s new novel, a comic extravaganza based on fact telling a story of Cold War intrigue during the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.
“We don’t really know who we are, until a new circumstance comes along to reveal it to us”
The first thing to say is that, like his previous book, The Extraordinary Privacy of Maxwell Sim, this is a fairly short and compact work (my edition is under 300 pages long) and is not especially expansive. It also pretty much eschews Coe’s trademark postmodern flourishes in favour of a more straightforward telling of an ironic Cold War story very much in ther style of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, a work incidentally that was also a big influence on John le Carr’s The Tailor of Panama. In all three cases we have a milquetoast protagonist, here named Martin Foley, who gets involved in events bigger than himself, putting pressure on his domestic life in the process.
“When you go home at the end of the Expo, you will forget all about me. The pull of your own country, and your own culture, is much too strong.”
Foley works for the UK’s Central Office of Information, the government’s propaganda and publicity department, and leads a very suburban life in Tooting – he has nice wife and young baby daughter and puts up with a neighbour he doesn’t like very much – so far so average. But he was brought up by a mother who fled Belgium during the first World War, and who has refused to go back as the rest of the family, including Foley’s father, was killed. Due to this background Foley is picked to look after the British pavilion, at the Expo, which mainly consists of a mock-up of a traditional pub named, inevitably, ‘Britannia.’ His wife is not that happy about his being away for up to six months, but the opportunity for career advancement is too good to miss. Right away Foley makes friends with Anneke, a sweet young Belgian woman who works as a guide at the Expo and we assume that the two might start an affair, but the Cold War background keeps getting in the way such as the intrusions of two british spies Naunton and Radford, a journalist who may be a KGB spy, a british invention, the Zeta Machine, that goes missing overnight and so on. But the meat of the book is to be found in some splendid set pieces such as when Foley is cleared by the secret service in a new style coffee bar, a discussion at high levels about whether the British invention of the water closet will or won’t become a part of the pavilion exhibit, a kidnapping in which the getaway car is much too small for both passengers; and best of all, a long exchange of letters between Foley and his wife in which the tone changes quite noticeably from loving support to acidic rebuke though not, apparently, to the participants
“Of course I’m Mr Foley. Do we have to go through all this palaver? Do you see anybody else reading De Standaard in this corner of the park?”
“You’re reading page twenty-three. I told you to open it as page twenty-seven.”
“There are only twenty-four pages.”
“Oh, really? I should have thought of that. Blast.”
When it comes to fiction I can still remember being shaken and stirred by such masterpieces as Wuthering Heights (1847), Anna Karenina (1877) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Of the great books published in my lifetime, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), The World According to Garp (1978) and Midnight’s Children (1980) remain personal milestones, as does Jonathan Coe’s extraordinary evocation of Thatcher’s Britain,What a Carve Up!
This book can’t live up to that extravagant masterpiece, it’s too fact-based for one thing and has too restricted a cast of characters for that matter to expand beyond certain set confines. But it has much too offer and is very typical of the writer’s output. For one thing, Coe is a great movie lover – The House of Sleep is full of references to Billy Wilder’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for instance while Coe’s What a Carve Up! is named after the little-known British comedy of the same name starring Shirley Eaton and Sid James that obsesses one of the characters.

Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne
In Expo 58 what we are offered is an amusing look at Britain at a time of transition, when it was having to adjust to the loss of the Empire, couched in the form of a light, Hitchcockian spy thriller. Therefore it makes sense that there be an hommage of sort, which is to be found in the two spymasters, Naunton and Radford, who are named after the actors Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford who played the cricket-obsessed gents in Hitchcock’s 1938 classic The Lady Vanishes and who were subsequently paired in several other films (over a dozen in fact), playing variations on the same characters. They are two classic comedy creations and I’d love to see them turns up in new Coe novels.
Expo 58 mixes high and low humour, history and fiction, to lead us to a somewhat melancholy extended finale that just might leave you with a lump in your throat as we consider the perils of the road taken. Cow ultimately provides us with everything we will need to know about Foley and his family – it’s up to the reader to the decide if ultimately he made the right choice, or if he really had quite as much choice in the matter as he thought he had. To read more about Coe and his books, visit his blog at: www.jonathancoewriter.com/
Oh interesting, I was so glad to read what you had to say about What a Carve-Up!, to me it was one of the great book of its era, it was a stunning book, and one of the best combinations of entertainment and politics that I have read. But I have liked his subsequent books much less, apart from the sleep one, and didn’t read the last one, I wasn’t at all attracted to the descriptions I read. I wonder if I should try this one….
Well, I think the world is divided into those who prefer Carve Up and those who think The Rotters Club is better, but I love his stuff – this is quite a light book but full of good things – not on the scale of Carve Up in any way shape of form, but that’s to be expected!
A delightful review of a book I’d very much like to read. The combination of humour and history against the backdrop of Britain’s transition after WWII and its subsequent involvement in the Cold War is right up my alley. A world trade fair as a setting is ingenious although the Cold War did play out in all kinds of global fora, political or otherwise. Some of the “great books” you mentioned are my favourites too, particularly MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN which I still marvel at after all this years, for the power of Rushdie’s prose as well as the story that begins in the midnight hour of India’s independence. I liked THE TAILOR OF PANAMA book a lot more than the film which was rather boring in spite of the very amiable Geoffrey Rush. Thank you, Sergio.
Thank you Prashant – Midnight’s Children did pretty much rock my world when I first read it and I know lots of people my age who felt the same way. Le Carre is actually quite hard to transpose on screen – I do like the Panama film as I thought it was a decent effort, but I know what you mean abotu preferring the book.
Lovely write-up. I haven’t read this book yet but agree with CiB that What a Carve Up! is fantastic, perhaps my favourite all-time novel in fact, so anything Coe writes is pretty much instantly on my to-read list. Plus anything that references Charters and Caldicott has to be all right, doesn’t it?
Thanks Mike – well, exactly! To me thris was irresistible and I really enjoyed it.
Coe is one of those writers I’m aware of but have never actually read, probably because satire doesn’t always work for me. Nevertheless, this sounds like a winner. That Cold War setting, and the film references you talk about too, grabbed my attention.
It’s great fun, very well done, a smart mixture of old and new (inluding the jokes) – But What a Carve Up! is ablooming masterpiece – if you lived through Thatcher’s Britain it should be compulsory reading fankly.
Another to add to the list then.
Well I certainly think so! I think I’ve handed it out as gifts to about 15 or 20 people – and besides, it’s got Shirley Eaton on the cover!

Which is as good a selling point as any!
🙂
Sergio – I always respect an author who can hold up a mirror to society as well as tell a good story. Thanks for this excellent reminder that Coe is one of those authors. I must read his work *hanging head in shame because I haven’t.* I’ve heard a lot of good things about it and you’ve given me a welcome nudge that I must give it a go.
Thanks Margot – hope you get round to reading him – well worth the effort!
Not only have I not read this author, I don’t know a thing about him. And he sounds very interesting. The book sounds good.
I went and checked his website and found this quote there (from comments on The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim): “That, I suppose, is the real ambition of the novel: to find a kind of mystery and romance and strangeness at the heart of the deeply ordinary.” Wow, that is just what I want from every novel, crime fiction or not. So, thanks for the introduction and I will try to make up for lost time.
Thanks TracyK, my pleasure – hope you enjoy his work as much as I have.
I’ve only read THE HOUSE OF SLEEP (I mentioned this in a comment long ago…somewhere, if not here) and enjoyed it very much. Don’t recall any of the allusions to Wilder’s film in that book though. I was working for a pediatric sleep specialist at the time and was interested in reading any book that involved sleep labs.
Over here What a Carve Up! was retitled The Winshaw Legacy. I thought I’d mention that for any US readers hoping to find a copy. It should be easy to find at a cheap price. I see it a lot in used bookstores.
This review is certainly enticing. Hope I can find a copy of EXPO 58 at the library. Book purchases are on hold for about six months because I was very indulgent with my book buying in March. A few books in the $100+ range. When I will I ever learn…?
Thanks for the info on the US title John (what a lousy title they gave it though) – oh yes, tone of Private Life of Sherlock Holmes references in that one (must re-read it) – well, I can’t complain as I love reading your reviews especially for books I couldn’t possibly afford them – so classic mystery appreciation by proxy!