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Jonathan Coe: ‘I was a Tory until I read Tony Benn’
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The author on getting hooked on Flann O’Brien, reassessing Kingsley Amis, and why his grandfather was outraged by Watership Down
Jonathan Coe
Friday 12 December 2025
My earliest reading memory
Not my earliest reading memory, exactly, but my earliest memory of reading with avid enjoyment: The Three Investigators mysteries, a series of kids’ books about three juvenile detectives operating in far-off California (impossibly glamorous to me at the time) under the benign direction of Alfred Hitchcock, of all people. I devoured the first 12 in the franchise.
My favourite book growing up
Like everybody else growing up in the 1970s, I had a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on my bedroom shelves – it was the law. I did love it, though. Whatever fondness I have for the English countryside probably comes from that book. I remember my grandfather – a real country dweller – seeing me reading it and being outraged. “A book about rabbits?” he shouted. “They’re vermin!”
The book that changed me as a teenager
Monty Python’s Flying Circus had given me a taste for comedy that deconstructed the conventions of television itself. It hadn’t occurred to me that a novel could be self-parodic in the same way until I chanced upon a copy of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in the school library. Multiple narratives nested inside each other? A group of aggrieved characters taking revenge on their own narrator? I was hooked.
The writer who changed my mind
When I arrived at Cambridge at the age of 19, just over a year after Margaret Thatcher had become PM, I may not have been a Thatcherite but I was still definitely a Tory. Conversations with new friends helped to change that, but so did the passion and lucidity of Tony Benn’s Arguments for Socialism.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t know what made me want to be a writer, exactly (I started at the age of eight), but I don’t believe it was a book. Years later, one of the novels that showed me the kind of writer I might aspire to be was Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, with its combination of mordant wisecracking and overwhelming melancholy.
The author I came back to
As a student I discovered Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson in the four-volume Virago edition and decided she was the British feminist Proust and it was my duty to read her. Boy, it was heavy going. Years later, I realised she doesn’t have to be read in full or in sequence: it can make more sense to take random dips and scoops which mirror the narrator’s own floating, unanchored consciousness.
The book I reread
I’ve lost much of my teenage enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse, but I still occasionally return to his first novel, Peter Camenzind. It’s a lyrical Bildungsroman that combines simplicity (and brevity) with profound moral and intellectual depths, and its evocation of Swiss, German and Italian landscapes is matchless.
The book I could never read again
In my youthful quest for great comic fiction I remember reading and enjoying Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Returning to it in middle age I found the comedy laboured and its hero’s attitudes – once considered a breath of fresh air – felt simply peevish and entitled.
The book I discovered later in life
As a film snob in the 1980s, I looked down on the Merchant Ivory EM Forster adaptations. I now consider them perfect films. And a recent re-viewing of Howards End led me to the novel that turns out – who knew? – to be a masterpiece.
The book I am currently reading
Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova (to be published in April). No other writer’s political acuity matches her responsiveness to the natural world, whose despair at the human propensity for greed and corruption is matched by her insistence on the moral necessity for hope. “Nature writing” doesn’t do justice to her range.
My comfort read
I do believe in the concept of comfort reading. Books can and should challenge us, but they don’t all have to do that. In anxious and depressing times, we all need a steaming bath of familiar certainties. For me, it comes in the form of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon: warm celebrations of male friendship which also happen to be (sometimes perfunctory) detective stories.
THE GUARDIAN
