That is but a sliver of the cast and the plotting. The most pertinent information about the characters is their ages, and how their generational reflexes create political tensions among them.

Image Jonathan Coe, whose latest novel is “Middle England.” Credit... Caroline Irby

Benjamin’s dad, Colin, has voted Conservative in every election since 1950. “I don’t think I heard a word of English spoken on the way here,” Colin complains after arriving at a restaurant in London. His granddaughter realizes that “the thing he was complaining about was the very thing she most liked about this city.” Another character’s mother quotes from an infamous anti-immigration speech, and is suspicious of the Lithuanian woman who cleans her house.

Politics are thorny in the novel, but Coe still makes space for playful humor. He imagines an award-winning writer named Lionel Hampshire, whose latest novel, a failure with the critics, is a feminist science fiction tale called “Fallopia.” He describes a professor of European history who specializes “in the role played by flax in Britain’s trade deals with the Baltic in the early 17th century, a subject on which he had so far written four books.”

Sometimes Coe is a bit more wacky than he’s been in the past. (See: a pair of feuding children’s party clowns who perform under the names Baron Brainbox and Doctor Daredevil.) But on the whole, his touch retains its delicacy.

Creating this of-the-moment milieu requires some believable set pieces, and Coe is good at them: In one, we see Birmingham during the London Riots of 2011. In another, various characters in different locales watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics on television — the ceremony in which Queen Elizabeth II and Daniel Craig appeared in a sketch together.

Sohan, a friend of Sophie’s whose parents are Sri Lankan, becomes obsessed with representations of Englishness after he sees the ceremony. He eventually thinks that the country’s essence may have been most “powerfully expressed” by Tolkien when he “created the Shire and populated its pastoral idyll with doughty, insular hobbits, prone to somnolence and complacence when left to their own devices but fierce when roused.”

“Middle England,” which hews most closely to the perspectives of Benjamin and Doug, two men more or less at Coe’s stage of life, can certainly be read with pleasure as a novel about middle age — needing to take care of one’s parents, befuddled by one’s children, increasingly curating one’s own memories and regrets. But its ambitions to encapsulate the political moment are obvious, and central to any assessment of it.