WE are living through one of the worst crises of capitalism globally, and in Britain we have consecutively experienced several of the most incompetent and callous governments in living memory. But where are the contemporary novelists tackling this rich seam of material? I don’t see any Jonathan Swifts or George Orwells, not even anyone like US authors Philip Roth or Barbara Kingsolver.

There is, however, a lone exception and that is Jonathan Coe. He is the only contemporary English novelist I know of who grapples viscerally with the political and social crisis we are experiencing.

Born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1961, he has long been interested in both music and literature. 

Coe documents the destruction and disintegration of Britain’s post-war society, beginning with Thatcher. His characters experience the political and social crisis on a daily basis, whether it is the privatisation and collapse of the NHS, a dysfunctional railway service or zero-hours working. 

This is particularly true of his series of what we can describe as the “political” novels, beginning with What a Carve Up! (1994), then The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004) and Middle England (2018) to his most recent, The Proof of My Innocence (2024).

In The Closed Circle (Penguin, £9.99) he covers the famous strike at Longbridge in Birmingham where a quartet of businessmen known as the Phoenix Four “came to the rescue” of the failing factory, but were in fact taking enormous sums of money out of it in the form of pensions and payments for themselves, £42 million according to some reports.

Rare among contemporary novelists, Coe manages to deal with political realities without resorting to didacticism or being patronising. He creates finely drawn characters to pilot us through the political mess we are living through. And he does this using a combination of sharp satire, interlacing real figures with fictional ones, and in a riveting narrative style as good as any whodunnit, with wit, a smattering of sex, black comedy and even melodrama. 

They might not be everyone’s idea of what a political novel should be, but Coe is certainly very much aware that it is not much use writing a worthy social-realist tome that few will read.

One of the pleasures of reading Coe is admiring his skill in organising a large cast of characters. In What a Carve Up! (Penguin, £9.99) he reworks the plot of an old 1960s spoof horror film of the same title. It is set within the “carve up” of Britain’s industrial heartlands carried out by Thatcher’s Tory governments of the 1980s, and has won several literary prizes. 

Michael Owen, the protagonist and occasional narrator of What a Carve Up! is a novelist and therefore inclined to try to make events follow a plot. When the obnoxious Henry Winshaw, a Thatcherite politician, appears on Newsnight in 1985 to discuss NHS reform, Michael is convinced that there is a right-wing conspiracy at work in the country. 

One Winshaw or other is involved in everything bad that he observes. If he buys some junk food, it has been manufactured by Dorothy Winshaw’s factory-farm conglomerate. If his local hospital is chaotic, it is because of Henry Winshaw’s privatisation agenda. The Winshaws are, as one of them says, “the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing, penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.” But they are symbolic of many of the so-called political movers and shakers of today and are responsible for much of what is rotten at the heart of British society.

In his latest and 15th novel, The Proof of My Innocence (Penguin, £9.99), the narrative flows with total confidence, combining keen analysis and sharp satire. The result is a riveting whodunnit, combining literary and philosophical speculation about the nature of reality with an exposure of credible right-wing conspiracies.

It is set in 2022, and Phyl, after completing her university degree, returns to the parental home in the village of Rookthorne, from where she commutes to her zero-hours job at Heathrow airport. She is unclear about her future, but meeting an old friend of her mother’s, who is researching the evolution of right-wing politics for his blog, gives her a new sense of direction. 

At a conference organised by British TrueCon, a pressure group with links to “the most Trumpian extremes of the Republican Party,” he is murdered, just as he is on the cusp of uncovering evidence of the plot to deliver the NHS into the hands of US big pharma. Sound familiar?

Revolving around this murder at the conference, held in a crumbling stately home in the early days of Liz Truss’s premiership, the novel takes us on an exploration of how and why things fell apart, and traces the history of US neoliberalism and its importation here.

His descriptions of the British ruling class is acerbic, even vitriolic at times, and he has little sympathy for the right-wing parasites who are now in control of the Labour Party. And in that respect, of course, we recognise it because we’re living it! 

What a Carve Up! and The Rotters’ Club have been adapted as drama serials for BBC Radio 4, and Middle England is currently available to hear for free.