‘One of the most ambitious novels I have read in years and one which has pulled off the seemingly impossible trick of managing to be both amiable and angry at the same time’
— Tom Shone in the Spectator
‘A grand blast of popular literary entertainment’—Laurence O’Toole in the New Statesman & Society
‘Something far more rich and strange than social satire … Michael, in the book, says the essential quality of good writing is “brio”. I would go along with that, and What a Carve Up! has brio to spare. I enjoyed it very much’—John Mortimer in the Mail on Sunday
‘Coe effortlessly spans fifty years of British political and social change in this hugely entertaining novel, packed full of period detail, from forties schoolboy slang to modern media wars’
— Lavinia Greenlaw in Vogue
‘A carve-up of contemporary Britain, What a Carve Up! is also a carve-up of a book, a vertiginous, exquisitely calculated collage of texts-within-texts … one of the few pieces of genuinely political post-modern fiction around’—Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books
‘An unusually entertaining novel, as well as being politically ambitious … it manages to switch from one tone to another with extraordinary deftness. It reminded me of something like Catch-22, which keeps you laughing and yet doesn’t shy away from the horrors that it’s writing about’—Nicolette Jones on Kaleidoscope, BBC Radio Four
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His most recent novel is The Rain Before It Falls. He is also the author of The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!, which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The House of Sleep, which won the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger, The Rotters’ Club, winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and The Closed Circle. His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. He lives in London with his wife and two children.
Jonathan Coe
WHAT A CARVE UP!
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Viking 1994
First published in Penguin Books in 1995
This edition published 2008
Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-191833-4
For 1994, Janine
Orphée: Enfin, Madame … m’expliquerez-vous?
La Princesse: Rien. Si vous dormez, si vous rêvez, acceptez vos rêves. C’est le rôle du dormeur.
‘Meet me,’ he’d said and forgotten
‘Love me’: but of love we are frightened
We’d rather leave and fly for the moon
Than say the right words too soon
Prologue 1942–1961
1
Tragedy had struck the Winshaws twice before, but never on such a terrible scale.
The first of these incidents takes us back to the night of November 30th 1942, when Godfrey Winshaw, then only in his thirty-third year, was shot down by German anti-aircraft fire as he flew a top-secret mission over Berlin. The news, which was relayed to Winshaw Towers in the early hours of the morning, was enough to drive his elder sister Tabitha clean out of her wits, where she remains to this day. Such was the violence of her distraction, in fact, that it was deemed impossible for her even to attend the memorial service which was held in her brother’s honour.
It is a curious irony that this same Tabitha Winshaw, today aged eighty-one and no more in possession of her thinking faculties than she has been for the last forty-five years, should be the patron and sponsor of the book which you, my friendly readers, now hold in your hands. The task of writing with any objectivity about her condition becomes somewhat problematic. Yet the facts must be stated, and the facts are these: that from the very moment she heard of Godfrey’s tragic demise, Tabitha has been in the grip of a grotesque delusion. In a word, it has been her belief (if such it can be called) that he was not brought down by German gunfire at all, but that the killing was the work of his own brother, Lawrence.
I have no wish to dwell unnecessarily on the pitiful infirmities which fate has chosen to visit upon a poor and weak-minded woman, but this matter must be explained insofar as it has a material bearing on the subsequent history of the Winshaw family, and it must, therefore, be put into some sort of context. I shall at least endeavour to be brief. The reader should know, then, that Tabitha was thirty-six years old when Godfrey died, and that she was still living the life of a spinster, never having shown the slightest inclination towards matrimony. In this regard it had already been noticed by several members of her family that her attitude towards the male sex was characterized at best by indifference and at worst by aversion: the lack of interest with which she received the approaches of her occasional suitors was matched only by her passionate attachment and devotion to Godfrey — who was, as the few reports and surviving photographs testify, by far the gayest, most handsome, most dynamic and generally prepossessing of the five brothers and sisters. Knowing the strength of Tabitha’s feelings, the family had fallen prey to a certain anxiety when Godfrey announced his engagement in the summer of 1940: but in place of the violent jealousy which some had feared, a warm and respectful friendship grew up between sister and prospective sister-in-law, and the marriage of Godfrey Winshaw to Mildred, née Ashby, passed off most successfully in December of that year.