Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe

Abstract

Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up! lifts its title from a campy 1960s horror film, a slasher comedy the 1994 novel raids to satirize the economic and social cuts of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. The Thatcher years targeted the postwar consensus on social welfare and nationalized industries and services. These transformations were aimed at stimulating enterprise and finance sectors but severely impacted the lower and middle classes. Coe's novel uses its generic source to offer furious indictment of the prime minister and the impact her economic slashing had on Britain. The novel personalizes these wounds through the complex relations between novelist Michael Owen (Carve Up's narrator) and the aristocratic Winshaw family. Owen is hired to chronicle the Winshaws, whose Conservative members lead a vast array of Thatcherite projects in politics, finance, the media, industrial agriculture, and trade in art and arms. As Owen discovers, these projects, manifestations of Conservative slashing, are indirectly responsible for personal wounds he suffersmost especially the deaths of loved ones that bring home the realities of Thatcherism. The novel's censure of the Winshaws condemns Thatcher's policies and the social, economic, and cultural climate she brought into being. Because of their enthusiastic enactment of Tory policies-and their support for Thatcher's government-the novel's portrait of the Winshaws systematically denounces a nation focused on the bottom line drive of "value for money." This harsh judgment is delivered in a format sprawling over a wide range of forms, intertexts, and themes, a fragmented structure refracting the novel's politics and highlighting their relation to Owen as "writer" and narrator. Ultimately Owen, as a man of letters, is impacted by writing just as he crafts worlds and histories through his words, a mirroring dissolving the divide between realms of the fictional and the real. These dreamlike reflections reveal a L. Hadley et al. (eds.

Beauty and the Beastly Prime Minister

“…23 Indeed, owen's growing awareness of how global events and national economic policies have concrete, everyday consequences is the central trajectory of the second half of the novel. He ultimately recognizes that the responsibility for Fiona's death is not to be laid on the chance misfortune of illness or the underfunded National Health System, but on the totality of Thatcherism as part of a global neoliberal project-a project that he unwittingly supports in everyday activities from food choice to livelihood.…”