The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

Paperback, 2006

Status

Available

Call number

PR6053.O26 C57

Publication

Vintage (2006), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 384 pages

Description

Set against the backdrop of the Millenium celebrations and Britain's increasingly compromised role in America's war against terrorism', The Closed Circle lifts the lid on an era in which politics and presentation, ideology and the media have become virtually indistinguishable. Darkly comic, hugely engaging, and compulsively readable, it is the much-anticipated follow-up to Jonathan Coe's bestselling novel The Rotters' Club, and reintroduces us to the characters first encountered in that book. But whereas The Rotters' Club was a novel of innocence, The Closed Circle is its opposite: a novel of experience.

Media reviews

The Believer

Coe bemoans the collapse of any vestige of civic solidarity in the new gilded age as forcefully as the Australian Elliot Perlman or the American Thomas Frank, and deploys Doug Anderton as a lone voice of protest at the euthanasia of Old Labour by New: “The left’s moved way over to the right,

the right’s moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle’s been closed and everyone else can go fuck themselves.”

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User reviews

LibraryThing member wonderlanded

Liked the sequel to 'The Rotters' Club' much more than the original -- perhaps I caught the zeitgeist more, or perhaps this one just felt more closed and satisfying. Dougie Anderton was excellently drawn as a lefty journalist, Paul was a convincing answer to his junior self, and Claire a refreshing

contrast.

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11 more

LibraryThing member jennyo

First of all, let me say that Jonathan Coe is one of my favorite authors. He, David Mitchell, and Kate Atkinson are in my Pantheon of Marvelous Young British Authors. I'll buy anything these guys write. In hardback. They're that good.

This book is the sequel to The Rotters' Club. The Rotters' Club

tells the story of a group of kids growing up in Birmingham, England during the 1970s; The Closed Circle tells what happened to those kids thirty years down the line. Both books have excellent political and social commentary which, assuming you're a liberal, you'll find yourself nodding your head at in agreement. And both books are funny, though this one didn't have the laugh out loud moments that The Rotters' Club did. And both books have Coe's usual intricate plotting. The Closed Circle has a short summary of The Rotters' Club in the back of the book; I highly recommend reading it before you read the novel, as several plot lines from the first book are resolved in this one.

I'm definitely keeping this book on my bookshelf, right next to my copy of The Rotters' Club. Though I almost never reread a book, these are two that I might someday.

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LibraryThing member uryjm

Hmmm. I liked this, really enjoying it, until I read some stinging criticisms of it on Amazon. And they were so true. The unbelievable coincidences; the near desperation to close circles left open from The Rotter's Club; the shallowness of some of the characters who seemed to be fleshed-out as

opposed to fleshed-in from the first novel; the political posturing; the neo liberalism. All true. Once I was aware of them, the book went limp in my hands. It was all wrong. Fortunately I had only fifty pages to go by then, so I finished it. I'll read more Jonathon Coe, there's no doubt about that, but if there's a further novel about this set of characters it will be passing me by.

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LibraryThing member Greatrakes

The Closed Circle brings the characters from The Rotters' Club forward twenty years to the turn of the millennium. The books are well written and the characters entirely believable, but I don't like them. In fact I disliked them in the first book, and loathed them in the second. There is something

about that generation of New Labour fellow travellers that makes me want to sneer, and this gets in the way of the book for me.

Worth reading though, for the mystery of the missing girl uncovered, and the epiphany of the Benjamin Trotter - himself possibly the most tedious and annoying character in Literary Fiction.

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LibraryThing member theforestofbooks

The characters from The Rotters Club continue in this sequel but now we follow them in middle age, looking back on their lives and their mistakes. The past is as much a character in this book as that of Benjamin, Doug, Philip or Claire and reading how their lives have progressed is a reminder of

the fragility of time. How your dreams and aspirations don’t always turn out how you think. The interlinked stories of each character are interwoven with a backstory of world and political events and blends into the story effortlessly. And yet, both books aren’t particularly plot driven, they are stories about people, love and life. And perhaps too a statement on our lives. Both remarkable and wonderful.

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LibraryThing member isabelx

Doug scratched his head, genuinely baffld by the direction the conversation was taking. 'Paul, the years haven't made you any less weird, you know. What do you mean "friends"? How could we ever be friends? What would this friendship consist of?'
'Well . . ' Paul had already worked out the answer to

this. 'Malvina thought, for instance, that since you and I had children of about the same age, we could maybe introduce them and see if they wanted to play together.'
'Let me get this straight,' said Doug: Your media advisor is suggesting that your children and my children should play together? I've never heard anything so ridiculous!'

Starting when the teenagers of "The Rotters Club" are in their mid-thirties, this book follows them through the next few years. The story unfolds as New Labour ditches its socialist principles in favour of the 'third way' and BMW threatens to close Rover's Longbridge plant at Birmingham, where some of the characters' fathers used to work.

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LibraryThing member LARA335

Clever structure, and the characters are all comically familiar.

LibraryThing member florasuncle

I don’t read blurbs, but sometimes its impossible to avoid adjectives when they’re put on the front cover. As a general rule I find that “hilarious” means “not remotely funny”. This book does nothing to change my mind. It is a perfectly good novel of a certain section of English society

in the early 2000s, but “hilarious” it certainly is not. Mildly amusing on a couple of occasions, but that’s about it. So it fails in what it purports to be. The publisher (Penguin) are guaranteeing their readers will be disappointed. Strange.

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LibraryThing member kairih

Now, first of all I think we should separate the first 3/4 of the story from the last quarter, because they were very different since it’s in the last quarter that the circle closes, and it makes you see everything that has happened before in a new light.

There was this heavy, even kind of gloomy

atmosphere all throughout the first 3/4 of the story, and actually the only ray of sunshine in the pale lives entwined in the plot was Sophie, who represented everything that Benjamin, Lois and the others once were. Young, curious, bright and with everything still ahead of them... but that was because the circle was still open, and I think that’s why from the beginning I kept thinking “there’s much more to this story than what I’m reading”.

I found Paul and Sean Harding intriguing in The Rotters’ Club: I hated them in The Closed Circle. Or, more precisely, I hated Paul in the first 3/4 of the story, and there was a moment in the second half where I really despised him and I couldn’t believe he was the same boy described in The Rotter’s Club, even if to be honest there were hints that he would become a person of the sort, but I always found him interesting nonetheless, and let’s say he got better in the last quarter of the story, at least more decent in some ways, not so much in others.

Benjamin made me smile in The Rotters’ Club: he completely broke my heart in The Closed Circle. Even if once again the last quarter was a different story. But the fact that at the end we only hear of how his story continues/ends from other sources kind of disappointed me, because I wanted to read more of him directly.

For some reason I feel like the climax was in the few lines that showed Benjamin decorating the Christmas tree with Susan and the girls, I think this is the one scene that sums up all the intense, sometimes desperate feelings involved up to that point.

The atmosphere of the story was very different from the one in “The Rotters’ club”, so I feel it’s not right to compare the two of them. The only thing I know is that I adored them both. The way the story was told was always perfect, and really captivating, and maybe it got even more refined in The Closed Circle.

I think the bottom line of this story is “the past always repeat itself. The past never lets go of you, but at the same time you’ve got to move on”, and that’s why at times this book was heart-wrenching.

Also, I know I probably said this before when talking about one of Coe’s books (or all of them actually) and it’s not very witty but.. wow.

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LibraryThing member thorold

Coe catches up with the characters from The Rotters' Club and fills in the blanks we need to get us back to the puzzling Prologue of the earlier book, with the previously unexplained Sophie and Patrick sitting in the revolving restaurant in Berlin and telling each other the story.

It's twenty-five

years after Benjamin and his friends left school, and we're rolling over into that damp squib that Victoria Wood unforgettably reinvented as the "Minnellium". It's the age of public-private partnerships, Blair's Bush-fetish and his crazy colonial war, celebrity culture, expensive restaurants, BMW's abandonment of Longbridge, and all the rest. Benjamin's brother Paul is now an up-and-coming MP, morally vacuous even by the standards of New Labour, Clare is a translator, just back from a long stay in Italy, and Phil and Doug are both journalists, but Benjamin himself is getting nowhere with his writing or his music, stuck in a second-choice marriage and a second-choice career. The key plot events of The Rotters' Club are still working out their destructive influence, and nothing has been resolved.

Coe's a great storyteller, and he is very good at evoking periods and places, but I found that this book didn't grab me quite as much as The Rotters' Club did. Obviously that's in part due to simple nostalgia - this book didn't overlap with my own experience in the same way that the first one did - but I also felt that this book was a bit too structure-driven. Circles needed to be closed, and several potentially interesting characters and plot lines that didn't happen to contribute to that closure were left out in the cold to fend for themselves.

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LibraryThing member Enya31

I can't believe how disappointing of a follow-up this is. Never would have I wished for it to focus on the most annoying character in The Rotter's Club, Paul, yet Jonathan Coe decided to do so instead of sharing with us the infinitely more interesting story of Benjamin. A shame...

LibraryThing member zmagic69

Part two if you will to The Rotters Club which was definitely 5 stars. The Closed Circles is beyond 5 stars.
I have often wondered when did the world turn into such a shitty greedy place, and from this book it started at the end of the 20th Century. Coincidently this book starts at the same time

1999 and let’s the reader know what happened to the characters in The Rotters Club.
Benjamin, Claire, Philip, and Doug, and Lois, and Steve and Harding and Culpepper, and of course Paul.
It’s a new world, buckle up, kids!
Like with the first book the writing is so far beyond what many authors are capable of. It is pure joy to read this authors work.

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