Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of similes by Jonathan Coe….
Jonathan Coe is an English novelist and writer interested in political issues, satire and music. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, he taught at the University of Warwick, where he completed an MA and PhD in English Literature.
Jonathan Coe has served as a judge for the Booker Prize and won numerous awards himself, including the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for his 1994 book, The Winshaw Legacy: What a Carve Up.
This satirical novel concerns a fictitious British family, the Winshaws, during the 1980s, and concludes with the aerial bombardment against Iraq in the first Gulf War in January 1991. It is a critique of British politics under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher and of the ways in which national policy was seen to be dictated by the concerns of small, but powerful, interest groups.
Coe’s use of figurative language is limited but often very funny. Here are my favourite examples:
- I just sat there, my mouth opening and shutting like a land-locked fish.
- Patrick’s eyes were popped out like a frog’s as he looks straight past me, and he seemed to have completely forgotten that I was in the room.
- Fiona had replaced her chopsticks tidily on their cradle and, apart from a few stray grains of rice, her half of the tablecloth remained spotless. Mine looked as though it had recently been used by Jackson Pollock to form the basis of a particularly brutal composition fashioned entirely out of authentic Chinese foodstuffs.
- The smell of alcohol overwhelmed her: she thought she would get drunk just by breathing.
That said, I think I enjoyed his 1997 novel, The House of Sleep, a little more.
