London Doubts: Wellsian Undersides and Undertones in Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 (2015)

Abstract

Coe’s latest novel surprisingly revisits some tropes of H. G. Wells’s scientific romances. This article studies what Number 11 owes to the dystopian cityscapes of the ‘London under’ we find in The Time Machine (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells’s second obvious influence has much to do with the supernatural (in the epigraph from the short story ‘The Door in the Wall’ [1906] chosen by Coe for the section ‘The Crystal Garden’). My contention is that such intertextuality is woven into the cityscape and the narrative fabric of the novel. Literary cityscapes may thus redefine the identity of contemporary fiction. I show that these undersides and undertones provide Coe with new tools to reshape the mode of satire he is now so wary of and to experiment with new facets of political narrative. Edwardian doubts and anxiety have pride of place in Coe’s novel too. This facet of the Edwardian mind and arts are now seen as marking a specific transition to modernismm. May its reactivation by Coe today lay the foundations for what is now sometimes studied as metamodernism?

Keywords

• Coe (Jonathan)
• Wells (H. G.)
• London
• cityscape
• dystopia
• satire