The Daily Telegraph from London, Greater London, England • 24

I 24 FRIDAY, MAY 30, 1997 THE DAILY TELEGRAPH High ambition and low taste inform satirist Jonathan Coe's new novel, The House of Sleep. He talks to Andrew Biswell The non-literary literary man HE hardest thing with about trying Jonathan him. to As talking keep Coe we up sit to is in the cafe at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, his conversation gent, animated and often very funny leaps wildly between aspects of culture as far apart as Benny Hill and Kazuo Ishiguro. It does not take long to work out why Coe, a productive journalist as well as a is winning comic novelist, equally home reviewing Julian Schnabel's film Basquiat in the New Statesman and discoursing on German literature for the London Review of Books. Born in Birmingham in 1961, Coe is acknowledged as one of today's foremost satirical novelists, since his fourth novel, What a Carve Up! a savage and hilarious dissection Britain under Margaret Thatcher catapulted him to the notice of the reading public three years ago.

The book also won him acclaim in France, where it was voted the best foreign novel of the year. His latest fictional excursion, The House of Sleep, published this week by Viking is already being talked about as a possible contender for this year's Booker Prize. The House of Sleep most of which takes place in a clinic for sleep disorders seems a much quieter book than What a Carve whereas the earlier book dealt with the world of politics, the focus here is on the inner life of the unconscious imagination. But it not a complete departure from his earlier writing. One point of contact between the two books is his creative use of film and video.

The title of What a Carve Up! was borrowed from a 1961 film starring Kenneth Connor; one of the characters in the new book is Terry Worth, an insomniac film critic who regards the cinema as a magical place where shared dreams can take place. REVIEWS Marber lays bare the passions of betrayal WELL, he's done it again. Two years ago Patrick Marber made one of the finest dramatic debuts in recent memory, with Dealer's Choice, his corrosively funny study of an all-male poker school. Now comes Closer. Second works are notoriously troublesome but this raw, wounding drama strikes me as being even better than his first.

Though Marber's style and vision are his own, there are moments in this new piece which reminded me of both Pinter's Betrayal and David Hare's Skylight. What's amazing is that Closer can stand comparison with such magnificent plays. It is, however, necessary to enter a note of warning. Closer is a play about love, desire, sex, jealousy and guilt. There is no nudity, no simulated love-making, but the language is as violent and as graphic as you are likely to encounter outside the pages of a porn magazine.

The obscenity is entirely justified. This is how people, or at least many people, talk when they are in the grip of the most powerful or destructive emotions, or when they are engaging in sexual fantasies. In Marber's script, and the -words acquire an intensity I don't think it's pretentious to describe as poetic. The play, set in contemporary London, is a sexual quadrille. A journalist (in the obituaries department, ironically, as it turns out) meets a spunky young stripper and they fall in love.

Then, after a hilarious and riotously pornographic scene of mistaken identity on the Internet, a male doctor and a female photographer meet and they too fall in love. And then love begins to curdle. The journalist and the photographer begin an affair and hurt their ex-partners grievously. Then the stripper and the doctor have an affair which has Closer National's Cottesloe Theatre much more to do with mutual despair and the desire for revenge than it has to do with love. Then but I won't go Not the least of this play's accomplishments is that you become desperate to know what is going to happen to its anguished, vulnerable characters next.

What I love most about Marber's writing here is that he gets right down to what Yeats described as "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the Anyone who has loved and lost, anyone who has experienced infidelity or felt love die, will watch this play with stomach churning pangs of recognition. We might not have spoken as frankly as Marber's characters, but I suspect some of us will. wish that we had. The writing seems to have been ripped straight from the gut. In contrast, the construction has great formal beauty, consisting of a series of duologues which gradually move the action forward, and occasionally back, in time.

The sense of artistic control is formidable, and my only real complaint is that the play's structure seems a touch too neat for its subject matter. I have no complaints at all about Marber's bruising, deeply felt production, or the performances of Liza Walker, Clive Owen, Ciaran Hinds and Sally Dexter which all ring unerringly true. The scene when Walker desperately begs her unfaithful boyfriend to stay, the scene when Hinds, like a man picking at a scab, asks Dexter just what sex was like with her new lover, have a scorching intensity and emotional truth. be astonished if there's a better new play this year. CHARLES SPENCER Elgar Music An unEnglish IT IS always fascinating to hear Elgar played by nonEnglish performers, responding to the score rather than the tradition.

At the very least, the experience examines whether that tradition is encumbrance or enlightenment. Often the results bring Elgar more closely into the orbit of European music, amplifying faint echoes of Richard Strauss or Franck. So it was when the American pair Midori and Robert McDonald tackled the Violin Sonata. The emotion seemed portrayed by the music rather than revealed through it. To my English ears the work's intimate sincerity was missing: for example, the obsessively returning four-note violin phrase of the slow movement was varnished with so much portamento that it became a theatrical gesture.

Yet by the sonata's end, when raw emotion burst through, one could recognise an integrity in the players' conception of the piece. If we did not know it any other way, it would have convinced as a genre piece of unexpected depth. Nothing could be worse for Elgar's music than to suggest that only the English know how to play it. In Mozart's K376 Sonata, ARTS "I do think the video revolution of the 1980s retreat into a rather depressprivacy and individualism, says Coe, "whereas when I was growing up, watching films in the cinema especially comedy films was a joyful experience which you shared with the rest of the Coe's enthusiasm for popular culture may be related to his unfulfilled ambition to become a musician: wanted to move to London and become Frank Zappa, but my first novel was accepted instead." He also believes that he is part of what he calls "the first nonliterate generation" and he readily admits that the style of comic writing he favours is strongly influenced by television programmes such as Fawlty Towers and Rising about Damp. "I have no to that," ups owning up says.

"Structure and plot are what excite me. I don't like writing sentences." He is quick to reject the notion that crossing the A possible contender for the Booker Prize? Jonathan Coe dreams in Hyde Park Picture: PETER MACDIARMID boundaries between "high" and "low" culture is an unusual thing for a novelist to be up to." believe quite firmly that I get just as worthwhile an aesthetic experience from watching an episode of Morecambe and Wise as do from reading a novel by Kazuo Ishiguro," he says. This cultural promiscuity is clearly on display in The House of Sleep. The title comes from a trashy novel by Frank King, a novelist Coe rates as "right off the bottom of the scale" (and author of The Ghoul, the inspiration for the film What a Carve but one chapter is written as a clever parody of Great Expectations, littered with Dickensian quotations and allusions. One of the multiple plots in Coe's new novel (and the aspect of it most likely to land him in critical hot water) concerns affair between two women, Sarah and Veronica and the hopeless, obsessive passion felt for Sarah by Robert, the hero.

The inevitable question arising from this liaison is whether Coe feels qualified to explore the subject of female homosexuality. "I wanted to find a new angle on the love story, he Must a painter use a brush? To move forward you need to take a different view. Which is why the new Audi A6 explains, "and I decided to use gender as the brick wall Robert is banging his head against. "I wasn't bothered about the difficulty of describing a love affair between two women. I rarely write sex scenes anyway because the spectre of Auberon Waugh's Bad Sex Award is always hanging over (This is the prize awarded annually by Literary Review for the most embarrassing and gratuitous description of a sexual act in a novel.) What motivates Coe to stray into such controversial territory is his sense that there should be no limits to what the novelist should attempt: "As a heterosexual man, I have as much right to write about homosexual love as anyone else in the same way that I can write about a murderer even though I've never murdered anyone.

In the end you've got to trust your imagination, experience and observation." This sounds like more than a pre-emptive strike aimed at hostile reviewers and Coe is passionate in his defence of the novelist's freedom to invent. "If writers confined ourselves to things we'd witnessed at first. hand," he argues, "we'd be stuck in that tiny patch of experience critics want to pen us into. But the impulse to write novels doesn't come from critics or newspapers; it comes from Symphony Hall, Birmingham the violin line was animated to just the right extent when the piano was leading the conversation (McDonald phrasing warmly, with pearly tone). What was lacking was wit: the Turkish-ish rondo was rather laboured, as if nonexistent significance was being searched for.

Declamation, by the ItalianAmerican Nicolas Flagello (1928-94), made a strong impression. The pair's firmly contoured, unsentimental lyricism was thoroughly appropriate and Midori's ability to hit notes dead centre first time is thrilling. Franck's ubiquitous Sonata was approached in much the same spirit as the Elgar. This time the partnership sounded thoroughly Midori's way of throwing herself into the music, rather than at it, was most effective and McDonald clumsy pedal releases aside was similarly adept at keeping the piece smouldering without overheating. Midori and McDonald include the Franck Sonata in their Barbican recital tomorrow.

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