Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe, review Thomas Foley is a pen-pushing civil servant whose quietness, says Coe, is his "distinguishing feature." But he is about to undertake an exciting posting to Brussels, where a world trade fair is taking place. The year is 1958 and he has been chosen to oversee the pub at the British pavilion, designed to showcase his country's hostelry. His credentials are dubious but his cloth-eared superiors have made their minds up, and, much like the hapless William Boot in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, the young man is sent off dumbly on his mission. Expo 58 is an amiable, undemanding book, cartoonish in its brushstrokes, elemental in its themes. It is rather more intelligent than it first appears, starting slightly and becoming gradually more absorbing. The reader bumbles along at a cosy pace, one step ahead of its protagonist, one step behind its author. This doesn't, however, leave much room for nuance. Like much of Coe's fiction, Expo 58 successfully evokes a time and place, but it is cavalier with cliché. This is a Britain as lampooned by Waugh or Kingsley Amis, devoid of innovation, determinedly stodgy, with a slightly sinister undertone. The target is fair game but the satire is soft, exemplified by Coe's lazy use of simile: "This morning was as deathly quiet as only an English Sunday morning could be," we are informed. The spooks are "like something out of a cheap novel," we are told. Coe is having fun with this, but it comes across as sloppy. The characterisation is often good but generally underdeveloped. The motifs can be bludgeoning. We are constantly reminded that the country has not yet come to terms with its imperial demise; that the protagonist is a grammar school boy who must be put in his place. At key moments, Thomas realises that everything at the exhibition is fake: "He was living in a world constructed entirely out of simulacra. And the more he thought about this, the more ghostly and unstable everything around him began to appear. Coe's lightness is both intoxicating and frustrating. We feel the author reaching for something higher: a skewering of the British superiority complex; an investigation of the parallels between personal and political hypocrisy. Expo 58 is a comedy of manners fused, at times awkwardly, with the lineaments of a thriller. Coe has always enjoyed playing with different forms, but there is a sense here of the author shrinking from something more ambitious. Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe 266pp, Viking, t £14.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 (RRP £16.99)