Divide and rule

It might appear perverse to have chosen the present moment to willingly read a book about the antics of venal, unscrupulous, manipulative, self-serving, power-crazed bullies. And yet I'm glad to have finally got around to reading What A Carve Up!, Jonathan Coe's scathing satirical takedown of the Thatcher era.

The novel centres on the cousins of the Winshaw dynasty: Dorothy (a formidable farmer and, I would venture, precursor to Chicken Run's Mrs Tweedy), Thomas (a single-minded merchant banker), Henry (a slippery politician), Mark (a callous arms dealer), Roddy (a devious sex-pest art dealer) and Hilary (an outspoken tabloid columnist who has opinions for money). 

Collectively, the cousins enjoy class privilege and nepotistic advantage, but they aren't the dimwitted bounders, cads and rotters of a Wodehouse novel; on the contrary, they're utter shits - conniving, corrupt and cynical through and through. Mortimer Winshaw, Roddy and Hilary's father, goes so far as to brand them "the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth".

Through the narrator figure of Michael Owen, engaged by the cousins' eccentric aunt Tabitha to write the family biography, we are shown how they're able to bend reality to their will, conspiring with each other to further feather their nests.

Owen is in many ways a pitiable, tragic figure - a reclusive author suffering from writer's block who finds himself increasingly drawn into the Winshaws' world, initially through Tabitha's commission and then through grim fascination and more - and you can sense Coe's genuine fury at the carve-ups, cover-ups and collusions of the 1980s bubbling just beneath the surface, particularly with regard to the mismanagement and underfunding of the NHS.

But, this being a satire, it isn't bleak. Coe evidently relishes the opportunity to create caricatures (the cousins, primarily, but also private detective and cottaging enthusiast Findlay Onyx), takes delight in inventing titles put out by vanity publisher Peacock Press (see in particular The A-Z Of Plinths by the Reverend J. W. Pottage) and transforms the final section of the book into a gloriously hammy Midsomer Murders-style whodunnit.

In some ways, from the vantage point of 2026, What A Carve Up!'s chronicling of nefarious activities seems almost quaint, a reminder of a time before the internet and social media in particular upped the ante. And yet it's a prescient book too, foreseeing (in the figure of Hilary) how public opinion can be swayed and harnessed and how rage can be manufactured through the media, and (in the figure of Mark) how weapons can be flogged with government approval but without a shred of conscience or concern as to the consequences.

There's an element of score settling and wish fulfillment in What A Carve Up! - Coe taking revenge by imagining the cousins' comeuppance. Sadly, though, there's little sign of their real-life 2026 counterparts meeting a similarly satisfying fate.