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Rating: The Winshaw family is Evil.
The Winshaw family boasts in its genealogy politicians, bankers, journalists, con artists, TV producers, madmen, entrepreneurs, military men: it is a concentration of cynicism, malice, opportunism, envy, hypocrisy. It is the most extreme result possible born from the lust for power and money. The family saga, which encompasses the events at the political and media peaks of England over half a century (particularly in the '70s and '80s), at times becomes a pretext to analyze capitalism and its consequences on what, in many pages, we struggle to define as a "human being."
Coe's skill lies in forging a pact with the reader from the very first chapters, whereby reality and fiction blend and blur in a masterful weave of third-person narratives and entirely plausible excerpts taken from journalistic chronicles, television broadcasts, diaries (replete with historical notes on real events) and every tool useful to best characterize the protagonists. The continuous parallels between the various characters and the time leaps provide a variety of perspectives on the events that few writers can orchestrate without confusing the reader. Coe is a skilled director, melding historical treatment, mystery, (bitter) humor, psychological and cultural analysis into a single grand portrait that in its almost Ariostesque heterogeneity, ultimately proves to be absolutely homogeneous.
Running in constant parallel with the Winshaw events is the story of Michael Owen (a footballing namesake that feels a bit like a premonition), once a writer of great promise, who, due to his low earnings, accepts the well-paid task of becoming the official historian of the family: a task offered by Tabitha Winshaw with the aim of unveiling the family's secrets and especially shedding light on the death of her brother Godfred, an officer officially shot down by German anti-aircraft during World War II, but according to Tabitha's theory, murdered by the hated brother Lawrence. An obsession that will drive Tabitha to madness and internment. Owen thus finds himself entangled for years in the depravity of the Winshaws, experiencing a creative crisis and depression that lead him to isolate from the world, in a sort of vegetative state, until his neighbor Fiona knocks on his door, reigniting in him the will to live and the hatred for the Winshaws...
The only flaws of the novel, some passages are a bit too rhetorical (in Henry Winshaw's diary pages, Coe's more than hostile attitude towards conservatism, although understandable, is at times excessively evident and unnerving) and a second half that frequently winks at the genre of mysteries with gothic atmospheres (while still remaining two or three notches above bestsellers à la The Da Vinci Code) leaving a taste of sycophancy at the end.
It's a pity, it could have been a 5.
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