08 Sep 2013 04:54:10
Not only could Coe have scarcely made it up, the 1958 World's Fair, and Britain's role in it, is spookily attuned to the novelist's imaginative territory. From the satire of What a Carve Up! to the autobiographical comedy of The Rotters' Club, Coe has put his fiction to the service of a mind fascinated – even obsessed – by the rare idiosyncrasies of British life, at home and abroad. Periodically, in various registers, this subject has attracted the attention of Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, Maggie Gee and even the late John Fowles. In literary terms, it's the equivalent of pinning the tail on the donkey, and fraught with risk.
The World's Fair of 1958, however, gives Coe the jump on the tricky subject of Britishness. The cold war is arctic. Europe is once again a battleground. As the capital of the European project, Brussels is in the frontline of the struggle for the soul of the west, and Belgium, as every schoolboy knows, is the pistol pointed at the heart of England. There's plenty at stake.
Put a quiet, unassuming English civil servant at the crossroads of superpower conflict, the apex of the quest for modern life, and you have the makings of both a thriller and a comedy. Expo 58, triumphantly, is as compelling as it is entertaining. With the exception of Graham Greene in Our Man in Havana, no one has managed to marry these genres. But Expo 58 is quite the equal of Greene's "entertainment". Thomas Foley, a humble desk officer at the Central Office of Information (COI) is the classic Englishman abroad: well-meaning, apologetic, and a martyr to misunderstanding.
But he's not a total duffer. Leaving his wife, Sylvia, at home with their baby daughter in Tooting, Foley begins to revel in his secondment to Brussels. Once he meets Anneke, his Flemish hostess at the fair, the plot begins to thicken nicely. Foley has already told his bosses that Britain must present its new face to the world "under the shadow of the Atomium and rise to the challenge. We must," he has declared, "move forward."
In the peculiar world of the official mind as it grapples with becoming "continental", any forward movement must involve Foley's monitoring of the Britannia, the replica pub that is the centrepiece of his country's commitment to the fair. This puzzling task, whose true meaning remains tantalisingly opaque until the closing pages, becomes further complicated by the arrival from Wisconsin of Emily Parker, an American agent. Foley's minders (a comedy duo named Mr Wayne and Mr Radford) want their man to distract her from the attentions of the sinister Russian, Chersky.
Coe is too keen a student of British popular culture to pass up the opportunity for many delightful allusions both to the films of Alfred Hitchcock as well as the mazy frolics of Ealing comedy. Part of the devilish cunning of Coe's delicious imbroglio derives from the simple historical fact that the Belgians, in the spirit of schadenfreude, have placed the Soviet and American pavilions adjacent to each other, not far from the Britannia.
Inevitably, Foley finds himself swept up in a hilarious superpower standoff involving packets of Smith's potato crisps (the Salt 'n' Shake variety with the little blue sachet of salt). More humiliating for national pride, Britain's scientific coup, the ZETA programme's announcement of nuclear fusion, turns out to be premature. Foley is left, with virtually no operational raison d'être. Bereft of purpose, he goes home to Tooting to find that Sylvia appears to have been having an affair with the next-door neighbour, Mr Sparks. Suddenly the opportunities presented by sensible Anneke and the wilder, more mercurial Emily seem strangely appealing. Perhaps he can emulate his hero, James Bond, after all.
The climax of Expo 58 brings the personal and the political into a brilliant and satisfying conclusion, ravelling up some apparently disparate strands into a satisfyingly antic tapestry. So neatly is Expo 58 constructed that, reaching the final page, the reader's first impulse will be to go back to see exactly how Coe has executed his myriad sleights of hand. This is entertainment of a very high order, and all the more delightful for being grounded in the more bizarre dimensions of reality, the inspiration of all the best fiction.
