BOOK REVIEW / NOVEL : Elaborate Orwellian Satire Savages ‘Capitalist Piggery’ : THE WINSHAW LEGACY OR WHAT A CARVE UP! <i> by Jonathan Coe</i> Alfred A. Knopf $24, 501 pages

“The Winshaw Legacy” is an Orwellian satire on the near future--if we conceive of the near future, as Orwell did, as a “now” that only a few can perceive.

For most of us, “now” is the recent past we are trying to get used to. We fight the last war, make the last peace, the bus is what we have just missed, and what we catch is a bus that no longer goes where we want to arrive.

“Animal Farm” and “1984” date nearly a half-century and several stylistic revolutions ago. Orwell wrote in pared-down, direct and crystalline English.

Jonathan Coe writes from this side of the post-modern boom after successive jangling waves of British proletarian satire (“Lucky Jim” and “Oh What a Lovely War”) and hallucinogenic satire (“Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and “Fawlty Towers”), as well as Andy Warhol and the exhilarating film collages of Pedro Almodovar and his American cousin Quentin Tarantino.

Coe’s book is an elaborate hubbub of styles and genres. It is a Baroque detective story and a parody of all such stories. It is a juggling of reality, in the form of an old B-movie (the “What a Carve Up!” of the subtitle) that bleeds into and finally takes over the quite unreal real-life story. It is a succession of mordant cartoon pamphlets on some of the evils that Thatcherism--read “capitalist piggery”--has, in the author’s savage view, brought to Britain and the world.

Coe’s Winshaw family is a many-tentacled monster that has strangled England. There is Thomas, the financier and corporate raider, who deviates from the bottom line only to pursue his own itchy bottom line: investing in film companies so he can ogle the actresses and collect the sexy out-takes.

There is Mark the billionaire arms dealer who negotiates nerve gas for Saddam Hussein, and Dorothy, who ruins small farmers by establishing a giant agribusiness empire.

There is Henry, a Conservative MP, who guides legislation to further his cousins’ interests.

There is Hilary, a tabloid columnist who rakes muck exclusively to conceal the family dealings, and Roddy, a dealer who rules the art market and sleeps with aspiring artists.

On the other side there is Michael Owen, a blocked novelist who spends reclusive days watching film videos. In particular, he watches “What a Carve Up!” in which a man visits a mansion where the family members are murdered one by one; and where, at one point, he wanders into the bedroom of a warm and beautiful young woman who invites him to stay. Being a gentleman and a hesitater, he backs out.

Michael, also a hesitater, and the equivalent of a gentleman--he still believes in literature; hence, his blockage--gets an offer to write the story of the Winshaws. It comes from Tabitha, a mad Winshaw great-aunt who is convinced that an act of fratricide is at the root of the family wickedness.

Michael alternately pursues and postpones the project, helped and stymied by a hilarious collection of Tabitha’s agents. At the same time he falls in love with Fiona, a young woman whose belief in life begins to rouse him from his recessive cynicism. She dies, though, after a nightmarish course of neglect and mistreatment in a national health system starved and crippled by Thatcherite cost-containment.

It is the emotional heart of the book--horrifyingly believable and heartbreaking. Thereafter Michael resumes his pursuit of the Winshaw story. He is no longer even a person, though; Fiona’s death has ended his brief effort to be one. Instead, Coe makes him into a movie: “What a Carve Up!” of course.

The book’s final section, told in the brief sequences and catchy titles of an old silent film--”Nearly a Nasty Accident,” “Carry On Screaming”--puts Michael and the Winshaws into a derelict mansion on the moors. There is thunder and lightning, the reading of a will, a sinister butler and, one by one, the grotesque and satirically appropriate murders of the entire lot.

Such a mess of wit, emotion, pamphleteering and reality-bending, will, of course, raise a question about “Orwellian” as a comparison. The target--what is happening to society and the individual--may be similar. The weapons are not.

Orwell made you want to think out the truth and do something. Coe’s jangling swirl proclaims the post-modern instability of truth, despite or even because of, the denunciatory absolutism that is almost reassuring in its hint that no one will really listen. Yet like Orwell, and in an oddly similar way, he elicits our impulse to do something.

The grief-stricken voice of Snowball, the betrayed revolutionary; and the sad destruction of Winston Smith’s private life and love are, finally, Orwell’s public point. The violated, improbable tenderness between Michael and Fiona arouses us, despite the pyrotechnics--and what is more pacifying than a fireworks display?--to a yearning for action.

In one corner of Coe’s 17-ring circus, a Pierrot weeps; the dancing bears, aerialists, tumblers, bladder-popping clowns and strident bands lead us up to the tears.