What a Carve Up by Jonathan Coe

Another entry in the humour strand of our book club and one that I'm a bit ambivalent about to be honest. 

The story starts with a potted history of the Winshaws of Yorkshire, an extended family with a crumbling stately home, secrets and more money than they know what to do with. There's a helpful family tree in the prologue showing who is related to who, which serves a similar purpose to those maps in the front of fantasy novels. After an account of one of the family being shot down as an RAF pilot during World War II and the disturbing events of a family gathering in 1961, the story takes an unexpected turn with the introduction of Michael Owen who was taken to see an old black and white horror comedy called What A Carve Up as a treat for his 9th birthday on a rainy trip to the seaside. However, the film (and one memorable scene in particular) proved to be unsuitable viewing for a child and he was taken out of the cinema before the end in tears.

The main part of the book then moves forward to the 80s and 90s, skipping around in time as the lives of each of the deplorable Winshaws is examined. Michael now has access to a video recorder and a copy of the film that evidently had a profound effect on him as a child, and he can now pause and rewind *that* scene to his heart's,  or other parts of his anatomy's, content. He gets to know his neighbour Fiona and forms a bond with her as she tries to understand what is driving him.

It transpires that he was employed to write a family history of the Winshaws some years previously, after an apparently chance encounter on a train with a literary agent. He gets to know the various branches of the family tree, who are all of course doing very nicely out of the Thatcherite 80s. By turns there's Hilary - a sneering newspaper columnist,  a backstabbing politician called Henry, Dorothy - a brutal factory farmer, Roderick - a predatory art gallery owner,  investment banker Thomas and Mark, happily dealing arms to Saddam Hussein and anticipating the gulf war as a business opportunity. 

Michael struggles to form any sort of narrative sense from the despicable behaviour of this family, and it looks like his project is doomed to flounder with him just sending half finished chapters to Tabitha Winshaw who it turns out was responsible for commissioning the book. However, a private detective called Findlay Onyx gets in contact with him with vital clues that start to draw everything together before the final section of the book where Michael is summoned to Winshaw Towers for the reading of a will and a series of events that bear an uncanny similarity to the plot of What a Carve Up.

This book is billed as a satire of the Thatcher years, but the humour is a bit hit and miss. Some sections are nicely done, but other bits feel very forced and not at all funny - there's a tragic twist in the story dealing with the effects of deliberate NHS underfunding by the tories, and the actions of arms dealer Mark are similarly stomach churning. The various strands of the mystery do come together but this feels at odds with the farcical finale. I think my main problem is that we now know that there were much worse people than the Winshaws during that time and up to now, and by and large they are still getting away with their crimes against humanity. Maybe when this was written in 1994 it seemed that we would see the rich being held to account, but I don't think it's ever going to happen.