Customer Reviews

The Closed Circle

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To truly enjoy this sequel, first read "The Rotter's Club", which introduces the main characters as teenagers attending British public school in Birmingham during the Thatcher regime of the 1970's. It was an era turbulent with labor disputes, IRA bombings, and countless sacrifices from the working class. "The Closed Circle" opens on the eve of the Millenium and continues to the present. The times are ostensibly more liberal with Tony Blair as PM, but has anything really changed? The problems of the working class continue, as the closing of a Land Rover factory threatens the lives of 50,000 workers. Suspicion of immigrants has intensified and led to increased activity by white supremacist groups. Following the tragedy of September 11th Britain joins in a misguided, increasingly unpopular war in Iraq. "The Closed Circle" picks up with the same characters, now 20 years older and struggling with mid-life self-scrutiny, doubts, and re-evaluations of the lives they've chosen. Benjamin Trotter, once brilliant, sympathetic, and full of promise has disappointed himself, his peers, and the reader by becoming a bland accountant. He is suffocating in a loveless, childless marriage to Emily who knows that she was a second choice. She has always been aware that Benjamin never got over beautiful Cicely, the most desirable girl in school who made love to him and then disappeared to America. Everyone expected multi-talented Benjamin to publish books and music scores. After a 20 year obsession with the lost Cicely, we find him blocked, indecisive, and unable to create so much as a haiku. His brother Paul, a smugly precocious 13 year old in "The Rotters Club" is now an MP in Tony Blair's government. He is single mindedly self-serving and careless of how his actions impact the lives of others. He always serves his interests, whether it's meeting the needs of his constituency to garner publicity for himself, ignoring his conscience while casting his vote to enter the Iraq war, or notifying his wife by text message that he is leaving her and their two daughters for his young mistress. In fact, he votes for war knowing that his journalist brother-in-law will be assigned to Iraq, which will free up his London apartment for Paul's recreational use with Malvina, his former media aide, now mistress. Secondary characters from the first book play significant roles in "The Closed Circle". Doug Anderton, Phil Case, Claire Newman, Steve Richards, Lois Trotter, and the once insanely funny, anarchic Sean Harding are all here, their lives mysteriously, and often hilariously intertwined. What happens to this cast of characters plays out against a backdrop of Britain's current social and political issues. "The Closed Circle" clears up the unsolved mysteries of "The Rotter's Club", including what became of Cicely; who sabotaged Steve, the school's only black classmate, in his A-level exams and subsequently his career; and most poignantly, what happened to beautiful, promiscuous Miriam Newman who ominously disappeared 25 years earlier. "The Closed Circle" is not unlike other "millenium" era stories like Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" and Ian McEwan's "Amsterdam". However, "The Closed Circle's" multiple story lines tie up more cohesively, the characters are much more human, and Coe is the most hilarious writer. I can't fathom why McEwan and Smith are nominated for Man Booker prizes and not Coe. Having read "House of Sleep", "The Winshaw Legacy", "The Rotter's Club", and "The Closed Circle", I can honestly say that Jonathan Coe has become my favorite comtemporary writer. The only disappoinment in finishing "The Closed Circle" is having to wait for Coe's next creation.

Absolutely compelling. Coe is a rare novelist--someone equally concerned with (and in control of) style and storytelling. This novel has humor, wisdom, anger and soul. Unlike Martin Amis, Coe is never guilty of empty pyrotechnics. Unlike McEwan, his characters are human. Yes, Coe and his subject matter are as British as...I dunno, really British stuff. And yes, you should definitely read the Rotter's Club first. And you should absolutely read the Winshaw Legacy, which is probably one of the best British novels of the last 20 years. Get this book now. Do it. Do it.

Claire Newman has just returned from a sabbatical in Italy, she has spent years looking for her sister Miriam, who inexplicably vanished twenty years ago; Doug Anderton is a journalist who is somewhat frustrated with his stalled career; Benjamin Trotter- the brilliant one - is a writer, accountant and composer, who has never got over his love for Cicely; Paul Trotter, Benjamin's little brother- is a self absorbed MP for Tony Blair's New Labour Party, weak and yet creepily ambitious.

The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe's sprawling, epic and satirical British soap opera begins in 1999 and ends in sometime 2003, covering the years of England under New Labour. Union strife, the closure of Longbridge BMW factory, the domination of the free markets, the culture of celebrity, September 11th, the Iraq War, all form a complex historical, political, and social background to the loves, losses and heartaches of a cast of fully realized characters.

Paul Trotter remains at the center of the novel and is perhaps emblematic of all the opportunism and selfishness of the West's love affair with materialism. He's an up-and-coming Member of Parliament, a go-getting sycophant who sucks up to Tony Blair at every opportunity and is happy to subvert his political conscience for personal gratification. He's dashingly attractive and his love affair with the media is matched only by his obsession with his young and ravishingly pretty media adviser, Malvina.

But Paul's older brother Benjamin also has eyes for Malvina. Caught in a childless marriage to Emily and resenting his lot in life, Benjamin, a successful accountant, is a deeply unhappy man, who still struggles with his huge magnum opus that combines prose and music, and still mourns his one high school love, Cicely Boyd. Doug Anderton has been demoted from political editor to literary editor, but remains unashamed of his working class roots. The son of a union man, he married into the "posh set," and now breed's children with names like Coriander and Emerald.

Coe's book is a big, broad state-of-England saga, a brilliant, and hugely entertaining story that is also an expression of the countless forces, personal and political, rational and irrational, which drives us, occasionally resulting in powerful events that are beyond our control. Coe perfectly skewers the pretensions of the middle class, Paul eventually learns some hard lessons about sex and commitment even risking and sacrificing his marriage and his career.

Coe absolutely nails his characters - their flaws, insecurities and their disappointments. The Closed Circle is a big, bold, and intricately plotted novel where the characters are forced to confront their affectations, and timidity, their perfectly orchestrated public facades, resulting in secrets being unveiled and lies eventually revealed.

The social convulsions of the Seventies, the global upheavals of the new millennium and the vulnerability of human attachment are at the heart of this story, and although the novel ends in a burlesque bout of disclosure and happenstance, one can not help but admire Coe's sweeping and all-encompassing vision of England - and the world - today. Mike Leonard September 05.

This book is slightly more soapy (or, as some prefer to say, Dickensian) than "The Rotter's Club" and the adult predicaments of the characters a bit less charming, but my admiration for it only falls slightly below my enjoyment of the first book. And to be fair, I think much of my lowered esteem for this novel is because it takes place during the past seven years, years that I have experienced for myself and therefore it gives me less of an outsider looking in perspective and more of a groaning, "Oh god, he's certainly nailed that."

Part 2 in the saga of Ben Trotter and friends finds them in the age of Starbucks, cellphones, Tony Blair and alienation. Paul Trotter, more of a marginal troublemaker in the first novel, has a bigger role here and that proves to be a bit of a stumbling block on Coe's part as Paul's rather unsympathetic. Many of the characters are the same, just older but some of them, like Sean Harding, have developed in rather odd and almost unbelievable ways. To be fair, Coe alluded to this change in the very first pages of "Rotter's Club" but it still seems bizarre. The good news is that Benjamin is still as funny in his ineptness as ever.

The short three-year gap between this and "The Rotter's Club" would have me infer that Coe was probably writing these books in his head simultaneously. Questions from the first book are answered, and long simmering tensions come to a head. The book ends on a bleak, pessimistic note; am I happy with the way things turned out for everybody? Not really, but that's life. The characters are only in their 40s, and if Coe wanted to one day write more about them, I'll be one of the first in line in the States to get it.

It completes the story began in The Rotters Club, but is a
less compelling read.

Yes, but read The Rotter's Club first, which will throw you into Coe's 1970s in Birmingham, England. Then move on to this sometimes funny, sometimes melancholic, and always entertaining sequel that paints a disturbing portrait of British life up to 2003. Fiction and reality begin to merge as the overpowering political and economic events of our time, topmost being the American invasion of Iraq, begin to press onto the lives of these complex characters. No question that Amis and McEwan present contrivances, whereas Coe gives us real life in all its messy, comic, and tragic details. Nostalgia and the past play critical roles for Coe's generation of characters as they strive to deal with their personal histories, the persistence of which continuously shapes present events. And Coe labors to point out that the larger issues of terrorism, the disastrous American and British Iraqi war, and the grossness of corporate greed are also shaped by unresolved events of the past. In the end, the circle closes on the lives of everyone here in this novel as they resolve or understand what happened before. It will be interesting to see what Coe will write about, now that these characters seem to be written out of his system. And it's true, as one of the reviewers said here, The Winshaw Legacy, or What a Carve Up! is a terrific work! Read Jonathan Coe! Do it now!

For those who don't know, this is a sequel to Coe's outstanding book The Rotter's Club, which chronicled pre-Thatcherite '70s Britain through the adventures of four Birmingham boys who enter into and pass through teenagerdom over the course of the story. Coe provides a summary of the first book's relevant plot elements at the end of this one, so that it can read this installment independently of The Rotter's Club. However, a lot of depth and richness will be missing without the full backstory. This book starts twenty years later, at the cusp of the millennium, and we find the protagonists muddling along toward middle-age. The first book was about the end of innocence and the demise of old Labour, this one's about the disappointment of growing up and the vacuousness of new Labour. In the former, the mining strikes formed the dominant backdrop and influenced the characters' lives, here they are buffeted by the Blairite ascendancy. But while the political backdrop to the first book felt organic and integral, here, issues like globalization and Gulf War II are equally important, but handled more clumsily than one can credit.

Our hapless hero Benjamin Trotter is a rather unhappily married accountant who still carries a torch for his teenage crush, and toils at the 1,000+ page Great Novel/Hypertext in his desk drawer. His younger brother Paul is now a good looking, smarmy, striving Labour MP determined to catch "Tony's" eye. Doug Anderton and Philip Chase are journalists of varying success. Claire Newman is returning from six years in Italy and a dead relationship, still mourning her missing sister. The book starts with her writing words in her journal that essentially sum up all that has changed in Birmingham over the two decades: "My first impression is that there are vast numbers of people who don't work in this city any more, in the sense of making things or selling things. All that seems to be considered rather old-fashioned. Instead, people meet, and they talk... Underneath is something else altogether -- a terrible, seething frustration." It is this frustration which consumes most of the story, as many of the characters are frustrated by where they are in their lives. Frustrated that they're still insecure, frustrated that they don't "have it all", frustrated that they have no sense of self, and frustrated by a nagging sense that life used to be much better, or at least just simpler. Of course, all of this is Coe's metaphor for the British national psyche and the state of modern politics.

Alas, it has to be said that as excellent as The Rotter's Club is, its sequel is a searing disappointment. The characters that were fully-realized, heartbreakingly bumbling teens are now barely recognizable two-dimensional adults. They've been stripped down to the bare minimum so that Coe can let loose his satirical hounds upon them in all too predictable a manner. The one significant new character (Malvina, a beautiful quasi-goth who completely implausibly ends up as Paul's media advisor) is both a representative of the next generation and an ridiculous addition. The sharp, believable dialogue of the first book is nowhere to be found, replaced here with wooden monologues or trite soap opera exchanges. And the intriguing plot twists that remained shrouded in mystery in the first book are here paid off in rather tepid fashion. Perhaps most disappointingly, the sharp political tone of the first book is replaced here with the most banal of satire: politicians who have no beliefs, parties which stand for nothing, secret policy groups, greedy corporate directors, and so forth. The entire enterprise is so far removed in quality from The Rotter's Club that one almost has to keep checking the cover to verify Coe is the author. In many ways, the book is about nostalgia, so it's somewhat ironic that what it perhaps most evokes is a sense of nostalgia for The Rotter's Club. If you liked that one, go ahead and read this, because like attending a dreadful 20-year reunion, it's it's worth it just to see how everyone turned out.

Coe does a wonderful job weaving the lives of his characters with seamless and interesting transitions. He captures the mundane everyday details of life and mixes them with extraordinary situations. He paints his characters similar to those who surround you in your own world which keeps the novel rooted in reality. Very good follow up to The Rotters Club.

This excellent 2004 novel is the sequel to Coe's even better 2001 novel "The Rotters' Club". The first novel covered a group of schoolmates and their families in 1970s Birmingham, England: this second one features most of the same characters but is set in the 1990s. It is filled with references to "The Rotters' Club" and resolves several intriguing matters from the first volume. Coe also blends more political and social commentary into another entertaining plot. I highly recommend this pair of books to most fans of modern fiction and plan to explore Coe's other works.

In Birmingham on the brink of the new millennium, senior accountant and wannabe author Benjamin Trotter has never forgotten the one that got away, Cicely Boyd, though two decades have passed. His frustrated wife Emily knows she still compares unfavorably to his teen love. However, he has a new secret interest, Malvina, who works as media guru for his parliament member younger brother Paul, who shares an attraction.

Other friends from their 1970s ROTTERS' CLUB also have come complete circle. Claire Newman has returned from years in Italy. Her ex husband Philip Chase has become a journalist; so has Doug Anderton. All have moved on in Blair's new world order yet never quite matched their dreams.

As he did with the ROTTERS' CLUB, Jonathan Coe takes a swift acerbic bite out of this time Blair's English society excesses, which have gone full circle from the welfare state to let the eat cake as long as someone else pays the tab. The story line is satire at its most cutting, which means the key cast members though heading into middle age remain caricatures representing a stereotype. No protagonist including the ROTTERS' CLUB alumni are fully developed in spite of having troubles, which adds to the feel that society is changing, but its members are bushed from the changes. Not for everyone, THE CLOSED CIRCLE is a Monty Python look at Blair's England through a post Iraq 9/11 altering lens.

Harriet Klausner