Families in literature: the Winshaws in What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe

A banker, an arms dealer, a corrupt politician and a tabloid hack... we begin our new seasonal series with the despicable dynasty from Coe’s 1994 black comedy about privilege and greed

You don’t want to read about happy families at Christmas, feasting and carolling and blessing each other, every one. Whether as a pleasing contrast to your own idyllic circumstance or a toothsome reminder that things could be worse, you want to read about a family who are, by the admission of one of their own members, “the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of back-stabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth” – the Winshaws in Jonathan Coe’s brilliantly plotted and bitingly angry black comedy about privilege and greed, What A Carve Up!

Investigating their misdeeds, and the wartime tragedy that links him to them, is literary novelist Michael, who has been commissioned by dotty Tabitha Winshaw to write a family history that will shake all the skeletons out of their closets. Dreamy and uncertain, Michael comes from a humble background, and is inclined to hide from the world; the Winshaws, on the other hand, are inclined to devour it. There’s banker Thomas, making money out of nothing by speculating on the stock market in the wake of Thatcher’s Big Bang; arms dealer Mark, punting nerve gas to Saddam Hussein; politician Henry, ostensibly left-wing at first but dedicated only to the entrenchment of the establishment and his own advancement; farmer Dorothy, putting profit before health and animal welfare to build a ready-meal empire; Roddy, an art dealer with zero interest in art; and Hilary, a tabloid columnist cynically confecting toxic opinions for a fat paycheque.

‘the usual sort of rubbish… Cheap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written by a computer. Probably was written by a computer. Empty, hollow, materialistic, meretricious. Enough to make any civilised person heave, really.’ He stared ruefully into space. ‘And the worst of it is they didn’t even accept my bid.’”

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