(© Tom Oldham)
Over the past few years, British author Jonathan Coe has left his beloved island several times to reconstruct an illustrious page of Belgian history. Well, reconstruct… In the shadow of the Atomium, love, ambition, and James Bond make an unintentional expat’s head spin. “I’m not even the first person to write a spy story set at Expo 58!”
Meurtres à l’Expo 58 is the name of a pulp noir novel Jonathan Coe was presented with a few weeks ago, after a lecture. The book, by a certain F. Furnes, was published in...1958. “Yes, he didn’t waste much time,” the British author of, among other novels, The Rotters’ Club, What a Carve Up!, The House of Sleep, and The Rain Before It Falls, laughs at the 55-year head-start his obscure predecessor has. Jonathan Coe really did take his time; his Expo 58 was partly written at Villa Hellebosch, the Passa Porta residence in the quiet retreat of Vollezele. “To me that’s the perfect landscape for writing: you want a place which engages your attention the whole time, but which doesn’t distract you too much. Like a very calming, a very unchanging kind of music, you want to be surrounded by a landscape which doesn’t impose itself on you. To get inspiration for a book, you need noise, life, and distraction, but once the material is there and you’re ready to write, then you need silence and emptiness.”
Jonathan Coe: stirred, not shaken
Coe’s recently published novel is anything but empty, though. The rich historical bubble he has created from cigarette smoke, male domination, and emotional illiteracy reels back and forth between spy novel and love story, reconstruction and disillusionment, fact and fiction. As the son of a Belgian mother and a British pub owner, Thomas Foley, the Junior copywriter at the Central Office of Information, is tasked with overseeing the running of the Britannia, the alcohol-suffused centre that keeps the British pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair flowing with liquid binder. To do so, the handsome, gentle, and dependable 32-year-old is tempted out of the “silent confines of suburban Tooting”, the marital grindstone, and the deadly nine-to-five with the promise of participating in “a world of ideas, movements, discoveries, and momentous changes”. The ultimate temptations, however, are hostess Anneke and the Atomium, “the cleanest and loftiest vantage point that the technological ingenuity of man could devise” which “stood for progress, history, modernity, and what it would feel like to be in the engine that drove all of these things”.
The engine Jonathan Coe starts runs on deliciously surrealist fuel, and shows Thomas Foley every nook and cranny of the hyperreal glass bell that is Expo 58. In the midst of the violently interacting forces of the past, the present, and the future, the James Bond-wannabe becomes embroiled in an absurd spy plot, and ultimately turns out to be an anti-hero who puts his family, job, and future on the line in a desperate bid for a spot in the temporary centre of the world. Jonathan Coe: “It’s as if the whole of human life is suddenly compressed and concentrated into this small geographical space and this small space of time, these incredibly intense six months, which for the people experiencing it, must have been a very disorientating experience.”
And judging from the Central Office of Information’s reactions, that disorientating experience was not looked forward to. We get our first “bloody Belgians!” on page 2.
Jonathan Coe: [Laughs] Yeah, well, you know, I just thought that the typical British establishment politician’s reaction to the idea would be to put his hands on his head and say “Oh no, this is going to be a huge headache for all of us!” Which of course it was in some ways. Like everything to do with Europe, the British were semi-reluctant participants of the Brussels World’s Fair. They felt they had to take part, so they did, but with that kind of British ironic detachment which characterises all our dealings with the rest of Europe.
And how did a right-minded Brit like you end up in the European epicentre for a novel?
Coe: I was already looking for a setting for a novel in the 1950s, because I wanted to write about the early life of Thomas Foley, who had briefly appeared in The Rain Before It Falls. I knew it was going to be a very British book about a very English Englishman. After visiting the Atomium for the first time a few years ago and finding out about Expo 58, it suddenly seemed obvious to me that the interesting thing would be to take him out of Britain and send him to Expo 58, which was far more modern, cosmopolitan, and exciting than anything happening in London at that time, to see how he coped with everything.
Well, he falls madly in love with hostess Anneke, is amazed by the Atomium, and then poor Thomas Foley gets ensnared in the nets of the British secret service. Espionage?!
Coe: Like a lot of people in my generation I’m fascinated by the Cold War. From first-hand experiences from the 1960s growing up, I remember everybody’s awareness of this political situation, constantly referenced in films and television programmes. I’d always wanted the character of Thomas to have some kind of connection with the British secret service. And as soon as I started to read about Expo 58, I realised that it was itself a hotbed of espionage: you had the Americans and the Soviets placed side by side for six months. Of course they were going to be spying on each other!
Enter Wayne and Radford, the ultra-British cousins of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson.
Coe: [Laughs] Yeah, a lot of people have said that. But I can think of at least four places where they come from, actually. They’re a little bit like the Thomson and Thompson twins. But they also have a little bit of the characters from Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes, of the two sinister interrogators from Harold Pinter’s first play, The Birthday Party, and from two characters in Diamonds Are Forever, a film I saw when I was about ten years old that made a big impression on me. In many ways they’re just meant to be archetypes of a political presence that we don’t really understand or control, but which is at all times directing our actions. There are not many intentional modern parallels in Expo 58, but to me those two have a little bit of David Cameron and George Osbourne about them as well.
The engine Jonathan Coe starts runs on deliciously surrealist fuel, and shows Thomas Foley every nook and cranny of the hyperreal glass bell that is Expo 58. In the midst of the violently interacting forces of the past, the present, and the future, the James Bond-wannabe becomes embroiled in an absurd spy plot, and ultimately turns out to be an anti-hero who puts his family, job, and future on the line in a desperate bid for a spot in the temporary centre of the world. Jonathan Coe: “It’s as if the whole of human life is suddenly compressed and concentrated into this small geographical space and this small space of time, these incredibly intense six months, which for the people experiencing it, must have been a very disorientating experience.”
And judging from the Central Office of Information’s reactions, that disorientating experience was not looked forward to. We get our first “bloody Belgians!” on page 2.
Jonathan Coe: [Laughs] Yeah, well, you know, I just thought that the typical British establishment politician’s reaction to the idea would be to put his hands on his head and say “Oh no, this is going to be a huge headache for all of us!” Which of course it was in some ways. Like everything to do with Europe, the British were semi-reluctant participants of the Brussels World’s Fair. They felt they had to take part, so they did, but with that kind of British ironic detachment which characterises all our dealings with the rest of Europe.
And how did a right-minded Brit like you end up in the European epicentre for a novel?
Coe: I was already looking for a setting for a novel in the 1950s, because I wanted to write about the early life of Thomas Foley, who had briefly appeared in The Rain Before It Falls. I knew it was going to be a very British book about a very English Englishman. After visiting the Atomium for the first time a few years ago and finding out about Expo 58, it suddenly seemed obvious to me that the interesting thing would be to take him out of Britain and send him to Expo 58, which was far more modern, cosmopolitan, and exciting than anything happening in London at that time, to see how he coped with everything.
Well, he falls madly in love with hostess Anneke, is amazed by the Atomium, and then poor Thomas Foley gets ensnared in the nets of the British secret service. Espionage?!
Coe: Like a lot of people in my generation I’m fascinated by the Cold War. From first-hand experiences from the 1960s growing up, I remember everybody’s awareness of this political situation, constantly referenced in films and television programmes. I’d always wanted the character of Thomas to have some kind of connection with the British secret service. And as soon as I started to read about Expo 58, I realised that it was itself a hotbed of espionage: you had the Americans and the Soviets placed side by side for six months. Of course they were going to be spying on each other!
Enter Wayne and Radford, the ultra-British cousins of Tintin’s Thomson and Thompson.
Coe: [Laughs] Yeah, a lot of people have said that. But I can think of at least four places where they come from, actually. They’re a little bit like the Thomson and Thompson twins. But they also have a little bit of the characters from Hitchcock’s film The Lady Vanishes, of the two sinister interrogators from Harold Pinter’s first play, The Birthday Party, and from two characters in Diamonds Are Forever, a film I saw when I was about ten years old that made a big impression on me. In many ways they’re just meant to be archetypes of a political presence that we don’t really understand or control, but which is at all times directing our actions. There are not many intentional modern parallels in Expo 58, but to me those two have a little bit of David Cameron and George Osbourne about them as well.
Unlike James Bond, Thomas Foley likes to stir his martini.
Coe: That’s in the book? I hadn’t realised that! Well, there’s a kind of fashion in Britain now for novelists to write new versions of James Bond novels. Sebastian Faulks did one a couple of years ago, and now William Boyd has published one. Somebody once said to me jokingly: “They’ll never ask you to do a James Bond novel. Your characters are too weak and indecisive. They never drive the action, the action always drives them.” But I think that would have been an interesting way to write a James Bond novel in a way, to have a totally indecisive and confused James Bond, a kind of Thomas Foley, who couldn’t even decide whether he wanted his martini shaken or stirred. [Laughs]
Thomas has these fantasies of being a James Bond figure. He believes that he’s playing a significant part in an international intrigue, but by the end of the novel he realises that he has misunderstood the situation. His destiny is not to surprise himself, it’s to settle for what he’s got, and to accommodate himself through the life that suits him best. I think this is what happens to the main characters in a lot of my novels, and it’s what happens to most of us in our lives. We’re not heroic, most of us are kind of ordinary. We’re not really James Bond, we’re more like Thomas Foley.
You know, the film series hadn’t started when Expo 58 took place. I didn’t want to make the mistake of making James Bond the cultural icon he has become. But I know Ian Fleming's novels were being read in the British secret service, so I thought it would make sense that Radford and Wayne were aware of them in conversation. And as soon as I thought about it, I realised it would be interesting to have Thomas read one of them and reflect on how different he was from Fleming’s hero. They really are the antitheses of each other. So much so, that my German publisher is actually going to call the book From Brussels with Love.
Expo 58 is much more than a spy story, it's also a very sharp and moving portrayal of relationships, love, and society in the late 1950s. The people in question are defined by circumstance, whether those circumstances are welcome or necessary.
Coe: I suppose the book asks fundamental questions about what we’re capable of and who we are. At heart it’s a very emotional novel and if you want to take away everything – the whole of the setting of Expo 58 and the spy story – what it’s basically about is the relationship between Thomas and Sylvia, a sort of bad compromise in an era when feelings, emotions between husbands and wives were not really verbalised or discussed out loud.
The 1950s as a male-dominated society? Even art and poetry are seen as something feminine.
Coe: Yes, those gender roles were much more set into stone than they are now. I think that’s reflected in the dynamics of the marriage between Thomas and Sylvia as well: it’s very traditional, he goes out to work, she stays at home, she accepts his decisions, basically, and Thomas would probably consider himself to be quite a progressive person.
It’s the first novel I’ve written where the whole action is set in a time before I was born, and what I was constantly trying to tell myself not to do was to impose my own modern values and perceptions onto the 1950s. A couple of times I found myself on the point of writing a piece of dialogue where one character would ask another character how they felt about something. I always stopped myself when that was about to happen, because that wasn’t a question that really got asked. People were not as open about discussing their feelings as they are now, particularly British people. I think the British have become an emotionally much more open people in the last 15 or 20 years. The death of princess Diana is often seen as a kind of watershed in this respect. But people like Thomas and Sylvia would have kept their feelings to themselves. Which you can see in their exchange of letters in the middle of the novel.
Coe: That’s in the book? I hadn’t realised that! Well, there’s a kind of fashion in Britain now for novelists to write new versions of James Bond novels. Sebastian Faulks did one a couple of years ago, and now William Boyd has published one. Somebody once said to me jokingly: “They’ll never ask you to do a James Bond novel. Your characters are too weak and indecisive. They never drive the action, the action always drives them.” But I think that would have been an interesting way to write a James Bond novel in a way, to have a totally indecisive and confused James Bond, a kind of Thomas Foley, who couldn’t even decide whether he wanted his martini shaken or stirred. [Laughs]
Thomas has these fantasies of being a James Bond figure. He believes that he’s playing a significant part in an international intrigue, but by the end of the novel he realises that he has misunderstood the situation. His destiny is not to surprise himself, it’s to settle for what he’s got, and to accommodate himself through the life that suits him best. I think this is what happens to the main characters in a lot of my novels, and it’s what happens to most of us in our lives. We’re not heroic, most of us are kind of ordinary. We’re not really James Bond, we’re more like Thomas Foley.
You know, the film series hadn’t started when Expo 58 took place. I didn’t want to make the mistake of making James Bond the cultural icon he has become. But I know Ian Fleming's novels were being read in the British secret service, so I thought it would make sense that Radford and Wayne were aware of them in conversation. And as soon as I thought about it, I realised it would be interesting to have Thomas read one of them and reflect on how different he was from Fleming’s hero. They really are the antitheses of each other. So much so, that my German publisher is actually going to call the book From Brussels with Love.
Expo 58 is much more than a spy story, it's also a very sharp and moving portrayal of relationships, love, and society in the late 1950s. The people in question are defined by circumstance, whether those circumstances are welcome or necessary.
Coe: I suppose the book asks fundamental questions about what we’re capable of and who we are. At heart it’s a very emotional novel and if you want to take away everything – the whole of the setting of Expo 58 and the spy story – what it’s basically about is the relationship between Thomas and Sylvia, a sort of bad compromise in an era when feelings, emotions between husbands and wives were not really verbalised or discussed out loud.
The 1950s as a male-dominated society? Even art and poetry are seen as something feminine.
Coe: Yes, those gender roles were much more set into stone than they are now. I think that’s reflected in the dynamics of the marriage between Thomas and Sylvia as well: it’s very traditional, he goes out to work, she stays at home, she accepts his decisions, basically, and Thomas would probably consider himself to be quite a progressive person.
It’s the first novel I’ve written where the whole action is set in a time before I was born, and what I was constantly trying to tell myself not to do was to impose my own modern values and perceptions onto the 1950s. A couple of times I found myself on the point of writing a piece of dialogue where one character would ask another character how they felt about something. I always stopped myself when that was about to happen, because that wasn’t a question that really got asked. People were not as open about discussing their feelings as they are now, particularly British people. I think the British have become an emotionally much more open people in the last 15 or 20 years. The death of princess Diana is often seen as a kind of watershed in this respect. But people like Thomas and Sylvia would have kept their feelings to themselves. Which you can see in their exchange of letters in the middle of the novel.
That's a beautiful part of the novel. It's just as much about what's not being said.
Coe: Exactly, they’re both tearing themselves up with jealousy about what the other one is getting up to, back in London or over in Brussels. But they’ll never come out and say it. It’s all done in a very passive aggressive way. Even by the standards of their time they are quite repressed about expressing their feelings for each other.
Another part of the book that struck me was the very rapid overview of recent history near the end of the novel.
Coe: I always try to draw the reader very closely and very intimately into the world of my books. The reader enters a sort of fictional, historical bubble. I wanted that illusion to be complete and for the reader to forget about the present day. Of course I am writing the book in 2013 and the late 1950s look different from a distance of 55 years than they would at the time, so I wanted to bring the reader quite quickly but gently back into the modern world at the end of the book. To kind of indicate that the illusion of being back in 1958 is over now. And so I give the reader a very quick, a very brisk guided tour through some of the most significant political developments of the last 50 years and also the personal developments in the life of Thomas and Sylvia. Also to try to give a sense of something that I have started to notice already - although I’m only in my early fifties - this sense of how time seems to speed up the older you get.
There's another aspect we have noticed entering several of your novels: the music of Arthur Honegger.
Coe: He’s been one of my favourite composers, if not my favourite composer, ever since I discovered his music in my late teens. I’ve written ten novels now and while not everybody who reads my books will read all of them, or will understand the relationship between them all, to me they’re starting to feel less like a series of disconnected books and more like a kind of continuum. As if each book is a chapter in a longer story. Semi-consciously I’ve started to use motifs which are threading the different novels together, and the music of Honegger is one of those. It’s not like mentioning Beethoven in all of your novels, because that would be an unremarkable thing to do because he’s such a great and well-known composer, but the mentioning of a more obscure composer like Honegger creates little sign posts that will make attentive readers see the universe of the books. Honegger is a linking motif, a figure I keep coming back to.
And you know, parts of his symphonies we’re written in Brussels, but I couldn’t find a way of alluding to that in the book. That concert that Emily and Thomas go to, actually is one of the few instances in the book where I’m ashamed to say that I deviated from history. Although there was a concert of music by Honegger that day, it wasn’t the Pastorale d’été, it was his piano concertino. But that didn’t seem to me to be as resonant or as interesting a piece to write about. I stick to the facts as much as I can, but that time I did twist them. But I think I can be forgiven...
Of course! Do you find it essential to stick to the facts?
Coe: The facts are usually more interesting than anything you could make up, so it’s always interesting to find out what they were and work around them, take your inspiration from them. I usually find that what I discover in real life is much more suggestive and inspiring than anything I dream up out of my own head, so I prefer facts to fiction, if at all possible.
And the fact of the matter is that Expo 58’s grand promises turn out to be a bubble?
Coe: We’re not able to see what the future holds. In 1958, the Atomium must have seemed a very impressive symbol, a great statement of faith in the future and technology. When I saw it in 2010, I felt all of that, but at the same time, I felt an incredible nostalgia for that era and for that kind of optimism, that uncomplicated faith in technology to save us and improve our lives. It was forward-looking and nostalgic at the same time.
When the novel fast forwards to the last chapter and we are dragged very rapidly into the future, what we find there is not what we expect. That’s why I couldn’t resist including what now seems this rather comical article that I found by a Russian scientist predicting what life is going be like in 2058. We would all be living an incredibly healthy life, we would have developed superb powers of protection and so on, and now here we are, much closer to that date, and instead we find ourselves faced with climate change and overpopulation. It’s not quite the utopia we were expecting.
All photos © Tom Oldham
(Check out more of his amazing work: www.tomoldham.com)
READ & MEET @ PASSA PORTA 1 (THE ROTTER’S CLUB) • 15/10, 20.00, €5/7, passa porta, rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 46, Brussel/Bruxelles + MEET THE AUTHOR: JONATHAN COE • 16/10, 20.00, €5/7, atomium, square de l’Atomiumsquare, Laken/Laeken, www.passaporta.be
Coe: Exactly, they’re both tearing themselves up with jealousy about what the other one is getting up to, back in London or over in Brussels. But they’ll never come out and say it. It’s all done in a very passive aggressive way. Even by the standards of their time they are quite repressed about expressing their feelings for each other.
Another part of the book that struck me was the very rapid overview of recent history near the end of the novel.
Coe: I always try to draw the reader very closely and very intimately into the world of my books. The reader enters a sort of fictional, historical bubble. I wanted that illusion to be complete and for the reader to forget about the present day. Of course I am writing the book in 2013 and the late 1950s look different from a distance of 55 years than they would at the time, so I wanted to bring the reader quite quickly but gently back into the modern world at the end of the book. To kind of indicate that the illusion of being back in 1958 is over now. And so I give the reader a very quick, a very brisk guided tour through some of the most significant political developments of the last 50 years and also the personal developments in the life of Thomas and Sylvia. Also to try to give a sense of something that I have started to notice already - although I’m only in my early fifties - this sense of how time seems to speed up the older you get.
There's another aspect we have noticed entering several of your novels: the music of Arthur Honegger.
Coe: He’s been one of my favourite composers, if not my favourite composer, ever since I discovered his music in my late teens. I’ve written ten novels now and while not everybody who reads my books will read all of them, or will understand the relationship between them all, to me they’re starting to feel less like a series of disconnected books and more like a kind of continuum. As if each book is a chapter in a longer story. Semi-consciously I’ve started to use motifs which are threading the different novels together, and the music of Honegger is one of those. It’s not like mentioning Beethoven in all of your novels, because that would be an unremarkable thing to do because he’s such a great and well-known composer, but the mentioning of a more obscure composer like Honegger creates little sign posts that will make attentive readers see the universe of the books. Honegger is a linking motif, a figure I keep coming back to.
And you know, parts of his symphonies we’re written in Brussels, but I couldn’t find a way of alluding to that in the book. That concert that Emily and Thomas go to, actually is one of the few instances in the book where I’m ashamed to say that I deviated from history. Although there was a concert of music by Honegger that day, it wasn’t the Pastorale d’été, it was his piano concertino. But that didn’t seem to me to be as resonant or as interesting a piece to write about. I stick to the facts as much as I can, but that time I did twist them. But I think I can be forgiven...
Of course! Do you find it essential to stick to the facts?
Coe: The facts are usually more interesting than anything you could make up, so it’s always interesting to find out what they were and work around them, take your inspiration from them. I usually find that what I discover in real life is much more suggestive and inspiring than anything I dream up out of my own head, so I prefer facts to fiction, if at all possible.
And the fact of the matter is that Expo 58’s grand promises turn out to be a bubble?
Coe: We’re not able to see what the future holds. In 1958, the Atomium must have seemed a very impressive symbol, a great statement of faith in the future and technology. When I saw it in 2010, I felt all of that, but at the same time, I felt an incredible nostalgia for that era and for that kind of optimism, that uncomplicated faith in technology to save us and improve our lives. It was forward-looking and nostalgic at the same time.
When the novel fast forwards to the last chapter and we are dragged very rapidly into the future, what we find there is not what we expect. That’s why I couldn’t resist including what now seems this rather comical article that I found by a Russian scientist predicting what life is going be like in 2058. We would all be living an incredibly healthy life, we would have developed superb powers of protection and so on, and now here we are, much closer to that date, and instead we find ourselves faced with climate change and overpopulation. It’s not quite the utopia we were expecting.
All photos © Tom Oldham
(Check out more of his amazing work: www.tomoldham.com)
READ & MEET @ PASSA PORTA 1 (THE ROTTER’S CLUB) • 15/10, 20.00, €5/7, passa porta, rue Antoine Dansaertstraat 46, Brussel/Bruxelles + MEET THE AUTHOR: JONATHAN COE • 16/10, 20.00, €5/7, atomium, square de l’Atomiumsquare, Laken/Laeken, www.passaporta.be
Read more about: Expo
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