Poor old Maxwell Sim isn’t in a good place. His wife Caroline left him six months ago and took their daughter Lucy with her leading to Max having a breakdown and getting signed off from work. So he decides to travel to Australia to try to reconnect with his distant father and fails at that too. Through a chance encounter, he learns about Donald Crowhurst - a real-life amateur sailor who faked his round-the-world boat trip in 1967 before killing himself - and gets a new job as a toothbrush salesman. As part of his new company’s ad campaign, he finds himself on the road to the Shetlands, all alone - except for his increasingly attractive SatNav. A mentally and emotionally unbalanced man left alone at a difficult time - what could go wrong?
I quite liked The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim but it’s a very unbalanced novel - parts of it were good, parts of it were bad, the ending is an utter mess and I’m not totally sure what Jonathan Coe was driving at (if anything)!
I liked one of the earliest scenes of Max coming back from Oz and, upon discovering almost no emails from anyone in his life, ends up trawling through his junk mail folder, pretending they’re sent from real people with a genuine interest in his life - that was very funny. And that’s important too: I liked Max as a character. He’s a totally hopeless wally but a likeable wally, and certainly not a bad person, who I did feel sorry for - he was so desperate for human connection and consistently failed to get it.
Learning about Max’s disastrous past (and, towards the end, his dad’s) through various short story interludes (one of which - The Nettle Pit - appeared previously in the Ox-Tales: Earth book from Oxfam) was fun, as well as Donald Crowhurst, who was a real person, and whom I knew nothing about before. The parallels between Donald and Max’s lives are drawn quite obviously but I thought Max’s descent into madness on his car journey up north was the best part of the book, with his increasingly unhinged conversations with his SatNav, whom he names “Emma”.
However, less compelling scenes are interspersed among these like his awkward dinner with his teenage daughter Lucy, his reunion with his childhood friend Alison, and visiting his dad’s flat in Lichfield and having tea with his neighbours. They didn’t really add much to the overall narrative, particularly that last one. And then the ending was just bizarre.
*start spoilsies*
Max’s dad coming to terms with his homosexuality wouldn’t have made a satisfying end because his dad plays such a small part of the story - but Max also being told he was a closeted gay man too? How can someone live 48 years without getting an inkling that they’re gay?! And what was the point of Jonathan Coe inserting himself into the story in the very last scene to tell him that he’s just a character in a novel he’s writing?! What was the point of the book - that a man figures out his sexuality only to be told it doesn’t really matter because he’s a figment of a real person’s imagination?!
*end spoilsies*
It’s more of a nitpick than a huge problem, but I think I spotted a plot hole too. So Max meets Poppy in the airport who gives him her number - which he makes a point of saying that this is the only thing he has to contact her with - and then his mobile is stolen in a mugging. So he can’t contact her again and the only thing he knows about her is her first name - he had her number but now he doesn’t. Then later on he’s having dinner with her family in London - how? How did he get back in touch with her to find out where to go for the dinner? Is it sloppy writing or an unreliable narrator being deliberately obtuse? Because he does remark at one point:
“... and everything else you know. Or at least, everything that I’ve chosen to tell you.” (p.107)
He breaks the fourth wall quite a bit but there’s no other example of blatant gaps in logic like this anywhere else in the narrative. Seems like a plot hole to me anyway.
Coe’s humour, pleasant characters and rambling, occasionally entertaining story make this worth a read, if you’re a fan of his, but it’s not among his best. There’s a great novel to be written about loneliness (the “terrible privacy” of the title) with regards to life in the digital age but this isn’t it.
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