On Literature and Teaching

Are there books that are good, that are actually very pleasant to read, that have a lot of obvious literary qualities with a solid narrative architecture…and yet that flatter to deceive? Are there novels that, once finished, feel less than what they could – or perhaps should – have been? I first read Jonathan Coe many years ago, with his Dwarves of death (1990), then went back to his first novel, and finally hit the jackpot with what I still think is his best novel, What a carve up! (1994). That last started a sort of series where novels are not necessarily linked except through a family (the Earnshaw), the epitome of everything Coe obviously feels is wrong with England: rich, entitled, greedy capitalists with no regard for others, certainly not for the poor – in a word, for all those who are not like them. Them? Eton-educated, nepotists, exploiters, leeching from the top, sucking the life and money and happiness from those below them, all without the merest sense of morality. All ...