Novel value ... Eileen Atkins in The Sea at the Theatre Royal. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Which is best - fiction, drama or poetry? James Wood's new book, How Fiction Works, unequivocally ranks the novel first. I'd argue that it's a fascinating, though slightly fruitless, debate in that each form has its virtues and handicaps. But, having argued in my own book, State of the Nation, that theatre provides a rich and reliable guide to post-war Britain, even I would admit there are times when the novel outdoes drama for sheer breadth and depth.
I'm thinking specifically of the 1980s: the Thatcherite decade. Having initially been stunned into near-silence by grant cuts, the theatre strenuously fought back with a number of plays on aspects of the Thatcherite revolution: Hare and Brenton's Pravda, Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, Jim Cartwright's Road, Alan Ayckbourn's A Small Family Business. But nothing that I've come across quite matches Jonathan Coe's novel, What A Carve Up!, with its devastating portrait of what Alan Watkins called "that uniquely detestable decade." Although it was published in 1994, I've only just caught up with Coe's book. And, although I may be leaping onto a bandwagon long after it has rolled past, I can only record my astonishment at Coe's mixture of moral rage and satiric verve.
What Coe pins down better than anyone is the thin dividing line between greed and madness. Even our tolerance of greed, the defining quality of the 80s, is seen as a form of insanity. But Coe doesn't just tell us. He also shows us, with a wealth of hard-nosed information. His book charts the rise and fall of the symbolic Winshaw family, as seen through the eyes of their official historian, who embody all the horrors of the decade. Illegal arms-dealing, factory-farming, parasitic merchant banking, media bullying, the depletion of public services: it's all there in Coe's book proving that greed, when sanctified and blessed from on top, leads to a form of national nervous breakdown.
Many dramatists I know would agree with Coe's argument. But he uses the temporal freedom and panoramic scope of fiction to reinforce his point. He also lends the novel a dream-like structure with its constant reference to movies ranging from Kind Hearts and Coronets and Cocteau's Orphée to the comic horror film (co-written by Ray Cooney) that gives the book its title. The hero's desperate attempt to sex up his story through the use of erotic trigger-words also made me laugh aloud in a way I haven't since I last read Lucky Jim.
Not to beat about the bush, Coe's book strikes me as a masterpiece. This doesn't, of course, prove that fiction is better than drama. A play, by virtue of its public performance, can re-arrange consciousness in a way that the novel rarely does: a great piece of theatre leaves you changed as well as spiritually re-charged. But the novel's great weapon is time; and Coe's book ranges widely over a decade to show how Britain descended into madness during the Thatcherite revolution. If you've already read it, forgive me for stating the obvious. If you haven't, I suggest you do so to remind yourself of how Britain was once overcome by a collective mania.
