IN brother. do. you. love. me. (Canongate, 2022), Manni Coe traced his response to a cry for help from his younger sibling Reuben, who has Down’s syndrome. Coe returned to England from his Andalusian farmstead to help to rescue Reuben from a pit of depression. Their jointly written account of this odyssey became a Sunday Times bestseller.
Little Ruins is a prequel also involving trials of the spirit and a search for healing, side by side with earthier challenges. The early chapters relate much about practicalities, including Spanish officialdom and negotiating the majestic but fierce landscapes around Archidona, in the province of Málaga.
Coe’s emphasis on his backstory sets his writing apart from the familiar genre celebrating joys and pitfalls of moving to the Mediterranean. Although there are echoes of works such as Chris Stewart’s Driving over Lemons and Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, Little Ruins has richer textures deriving from the steadily more highly charged sequence of flashbacks.
Among them is a heart-rending chronicle of sexual abuse at the hands of Coe’s vicar (now dead) when the author was a schoolboy; his later path to self-acceptance as a gay man; and his ultimately failed attempt to integrate his sexuality with a previously strong but unsophisticated Evangelical faith.
Wounded hearts are gradually mended. Coe, his partner, Jack, and Reuben form a family of three, or “trilogy”. “Two poles can’t stand up together but three can. We lean into each other and form . . . a structure. We complete each other and time appears to stop when we’re together.”
Coe is not an abstract thinker. He writes with far more insight about nature, relationships, and the impact of a friend’s suicide than about Christian faith. Some readers who haven’t given up on the Church, despite traumatic encounters with its representatives, will insist that good religion can drive out bad. Questions about the truth of Christianity are, in any case, logically distinct from the crimes of individual clerics. But the evolution tracked in Little Ruins makes sense in its own terms. Coe has followed his own lights with inspiring results.
Rupert Shortt is a Fellow Commoner of St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. He was previously Hispanic editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
Little Ruins: Rebuilding a life
Manni Coe
Canongate £16.99
978-1-83726-324-0
Church Times Bookshop £15.29
