Voices carry, and a writer listens

JONATHAN COE (Caroline Irby)

Jonathan Coe's dazzling 1995 novel, "The Winshaw Legacy," brilliantly satirized Margaret Thatcher's England and introduced American readers to one of Britain's most perceptive, versatile, and graceful writers. It was followed by "The Rotters' Club" and "The Closed Circle" (completing the political trilogy) and "The House of Sleep." Now in "The Rain Before It Falls" (Knopf, $23.95), Coe tells the story of three generations of women through the recollections of genteel, dying Rosamond, who attempts to explain to a blind, perhaps lost, relative how their lives were shaped. Quiet, elegiac, never straying into sentiment, it is perhaps the most spare yet poetic of Coe's novels.

Coe spoke from his home in London.

Q. Are there preoccupations that recur in your fiction?

A. I do notice an emerging obsession with family, the way we're defined, to a certain extent, by our relationships with our parents, grandparents. And, enlarging upon that, a preoccupation with the passing of time, the way that long periods can seem to collapse and conflate, so that something that happened decades ago appears as though it happened yesterday.

Q. Did you set out in this novel to write about women?

A. This book was written mainly out of instinct; it wasn't as pre-structured as my other novels. I wanted to keep it simpler and cleaner. One way of doing that was by concentrating on the perspective of one gender, not sidelining the men, exactly, but giving them a less distinct voice. I was also partly inspired by many of the writers that the Virago Modern Classics list rediscovered in the early 1980s in Britain. Neglected writers from the early part of the 20th century, like Dorothy Richardson, Rosamond Lehmann, May Sinclair.

Q. What writers previously influenced you?

A. Henry Fielding, Flann O'Brien, B. S. Johnson. I have pretty varied tastes . . .

Q. The "Winshaw Legacy" trilogy was very political. Have you said all you wanted to say in that way?

A. Those last words of yours are important. I've said what I had to say about that period, the 1980s, and in that particular, satiric way. At the moment I feel a bit flummoxed by the global course of political events, and my last couple of books are on a more intimate scale. But I very much want to return to politics. I'm just waiting for a bit of perspective, I think.

Q. Will you confine yourself to Britain?

A. I don't think that's possible anymore, the destinies of nations are so intertwined. I'm beginning to touch on this in the book I'm writing now, which will be about family with a political theme sketched in at the fringes.

Q. But "The Rain Before It Falls" is hardly a retreat from reality.

A. Well, domestic life is very political. If you want a perfect microcosm of a particular power structure, then the nuclear family is as good as any. To go back to your question about recurring themes, I suppose power is a recurring theme in my books; what gives us power and what makes us powerless. Children, it seems to me, are very powerless, and in a way this book is about their situation.

Q. Doesn't that tie into class, which you often convey with descriptions of dwellings?

A. The buildings we inhabit say everything about our assumptions. They're very eloquent. It was a new thing for me to write so visually, because I've usually revealed character through dialogue, and there's very little dialogue here. I've been fascinated by looking through family albums and realizing how much information those pictures contain, about class, politics, economics, as well as emotional history.

Q. Is that why you decided to have Rosamond on tape, describing family pictures?

A. It was more than that. I've been thinking about this book for a long time, and I always wanted it to be very episodic. I liked the idea of a story unfolding not smoothly this time but quite abruptly, so I conceived it as a series of distinct, fairly static tableaux. Then I started to see these episodes as pictures rather than stories. I also became interested in the discipline of audio description for blind people. It was a great pleasure, by the way, to inhabit Rosamond's voice for a year or two. [Laughs.] I was struck by how comfortable I felt as a 73-year-old lesbian.

Q. In "The House of Sleep" didn't you also play with the notion of time and of how we receive information?

A. Yes. I think this novel has a lot in common with "The House of Sleep," not just the interest in psychological processes that you're mentioning, but quite specific things. Both books have a central scene where a sexually ambiguous couple are on a beach with a young girl who isn't biologically theirs but belongs to them. And emotionally, both are books about regret, missed opportunities.

Q.Did I hear echoes of Thomas Hardy's poetry in your descriptions of the countryside?

A. Well, I love Hardy both as a novelist and as a poet. Any English writer who describes the rural landscape is going to echo him to an extent. In this case it is Hardy twice removed, in a way, because I mention the writer Mary Webb, who is often described as the Shropshire Thomas Hardy. So perhaps you're getting echoes of Hardy via echoes of Mary Webb.

Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. She can be reached via e-mail at ama1668@hotmail.com.