Jonathan Coe Meet the Author

In this week's Meet the Author Rebecca Jones talks

to Jonathan Coe about his new book Number 11.

Jonathan Coe is a novelist whose books impressed the critics, wind

awards but also appear regularly on the bestseller lists. He is best

known for writing serious novels that are also very funny. He made

his name with What a Carve Up! , a satire. Then came the Rotters Club,

followed by the sequel that scrutinised new Labour. Then it

becomes his 11th novel, Number 11, turning its gaze on Britain today.

Jonathan Coe, the Number 11 is a recurring theme in the book. Tell us

why? Like many of these things it happened kind of by accident. I was

making my first notes towards the book, I didn't have a title and I

knew it was my 11th novel so I wrote in about 11 at the top and started

making my notes and it stuck. I couldn't think of a better title and

immediately, to me, it evoked Number 11 Downing Street, obviously,

because the economic state of the country is a background theme in the

book. I also knew I always liked to do different things with form with

each book and I knew the form of the book was going to be five short

stories or novellas, linked by a certain theme and the Number 11

seemed the perfect linking device. One story is set in a house that is

Number 11, another is a bus, another a restaurant table at Number 11 so

it became a very useful hook. The story is structured into five

separate but intellect sections, with characters disappearing and

appearing again come together they cohere into a portrait of Britain

today. Why modern Britain? Well, more than 20 years ago I wrote

highly -- I wrote a highly political novel, What a Carve Up!, he reaction

to the Thatcher revolution. I suppose as a concerned citizen,

rather than anything else, I was looking around me at Britain today,

how the policies of hers, the changes of hers have evolved and

been carried on by successive governments over the years and had

eagerly how austerity policies are impacting people on the country

after the 2008 crash, and it seemed like the right time for another

novel looking at the state of written today. And you take aim at

tax havens, the conditions endured by migrant workers, reality

television, Internet trolls. The picture you paint of Britain is

somewhat depressing. Are you pessimistic? I try not to be. Novels

thrive on conflict. You have to put your characters through difficulty

or there is no story so there is a tendency to emphasise the more

difficult elements of life but there is a gentle optimism in the book as

well, I hope. It is essentially the story of a friendship between two

girls who we meet at the age of about eight or nine and by the end

of the book they are in their early 20s. And the book ends on a kind of

note of hope because of the strength of feeling between them really,

despite the way circumstances have pulled them apart during the course

of the narrative. There is an underlying optimism and faith in the

resilience of human nature, I suppose. The book is very funny and

there are some very funny comedic set pieces. Clearly, you have

decided to write about serious themes in a comic way. Is that

because you think we all need cheering up? We do need cheering up,

as a reader and a viewer of films and television, there is a dearth of

cheering entertainment around at the moment so I wanted the readers to

have a good time while they were reading this book as much as

anything else. One way of looking at an unsatisfactory situation, be it

political or personal, is not to say it's wrong but to say it is absurd

and to see the ridiculous and as of certain situations. That is what I

try to do a lot of the time in Number 11, although it is also in

some ways one of my darker books and one of my more horrific books and it

pushes a little bit more in the way of horror and sci-fi than I have

done before. It is subtitled tales that witness madness. Why is that?

The structure of the book, as I said, is five interlinked stories

and I took that from an Ealing film from the 1940s called Dead of Night.

The fourth story in that is therefore comic relief, almost

exactly what I've done in this book. That set in train portmanteau horror

movies, which thrived in the 1960s and 1970s and one of them was called

Tales Which Witnessed Madness. It starred Joan Collins and I liked the

title, gesturing towards the form of the book and my indebtedness towards

are movies. It is my guilty pleasure. You mentioned the female

friendship at the heart of the book and one thing that struck me about

the novel is how much of it is told from a female standpoint. Was that

deliberate? And why do you like writing as women? Like many writers,

I write to escape myself and when I write about men they are usually

comes a point when I realise I'm writing about myself and that is

exactly what I didn't set out to do so I took a decision very early on

that the French, the core friendship in the book would be between two

women and -- that the friendship. As it panned out I didn't use any major

male characters in this book at all. It wasn't really deliberate but, you

know, it was an instinctive choice. You do bring back some characters

from the book. You have already mentioned What a Carve Up!. In some

ways, Number 11 can be seen as not a sequel but a companion piece to that

book, although it can be read as a stand-alone novel. Why did you want

to revisit the OP 's -- those people? I realise although What a

Carve Up! Ends in carnage and everyone is killed off, there are a

couple of survivors from the massacre in the end and I was

wondering what they were doing 20 years on so I revisited them and

wrote them back. Does it get you that it is the book you are most

associated with, giving you have written all sorts of novels since

then? No. A lot of people said, when are you going to write a sequel to

What a Carve Up! ? And I always said I wouldn't and couldn't because so

many of the characters die at the end. I realised recently that Number

11 is not a sequel to What a Carve Up! It is actually a spin off so

this is the George and Mildred to the original man about the house,

maybe that is not the way to select on television but that is how I

think of it now. Jonathan Coke, it has been a pleasure to talk to you

about Number 11. -- Jonathan come. Good evening. We have had some

changeable weather over the last few days and more of it to come. Here

are contrasting scenes from today. These guys from Chatham in Kent

earlier on today, contrasted further