The Closed Circle
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Review
Praise for The Closed Circle:
'Spectacular. Coe's finest achievement since What a Carve Up!' Time Out
Wonderful, hilarious … so appealing that the last cruel thing about it is the ending' Daily Telegraph
'Superbly funny, extremely readable, entertaining … keeps the pages turning' Guardian
'As funny as anything Coe has written' The Times Literary Supplement
'Richly drawn. Coe has succeeded in accomplishing that rare feat: a pair of novels that combine the addictive quality of the best soap operas with a basic cultural integrity' Independent on Sunday
Product Description
Jonathan Coe’s previous novel, The Rotters’ Club, was a novel of innocence: a nostalgic, humorous evocation of adolescent life in 1970s Britain. The Closed Circle is its mirror image: a novel of experience. On Millennium night, with Blair presiding over a superficially cool, sexed-up new version of the country, Benjamin Trotter finds himself watching the celebrations on his parents’ TV in the same Birmingham house in which he grew up. Watching, in fact, his younger brother, Paul, now a bright young New Labour MP who has bought wholeheartedly into the Blairite dream. Neither of them can know that their lives are about to implode. Set against the backdrop of Britain’s racial and social tensions and the country’s increasingly compromised role in America’s ‘war against terrorism’, The Closed Circle shuttles between London and Birmingham, taking in fat cats, media advisers and political protestors. As its characters struggle to make sense of the perennial problems of love, vocation and family in a changing world, it offers a bitter-sweet conclusion to the unfinished business of The Rotters’ Club.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I couldn't wait to get started on The Closed Circle - I've loved almost all of Jonathan Coe's books, particularly The Rotters Club, and with the TV adaptation still fresh in my mind... But oh what a disappointment. The whole thing became contrived beyond belief, coincidences here, shoe-horning contemporary issues in there (the obligatory road rage incident for example) and, most disappointingly most of the characters had become one dimensional charicatures. Coe is clearly angry about New Labour and the 2nd Gulf War, but I wanted to read a novel, not a piece of rather clumsy polemic. If you want to find out "what happened" to everyone after The Rotters Club it's all in there, but in closing the circle for us Coe has destroyed the great characters he'd created and the world he'd previously conjured up. I think I would have been happier still wondering...
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I am a big fan of Coe's work and greatly enjoyed The Rotters' Club and have looked forward to this sequel for some time.
As a follow on to The Rotters' Club it does not generally disappoint and admirably ties up the loose ends created in the first novel (although at times Coe perhaps overuses coincidence to do this). The writing is, of course, excellent and there are the usual twists and comic set pieces that are the author's trademark.
I was especially pleased at the way in which he had allowed the characters from the first book to develop into adults. It was great to see how some of the facets of their teenage personalities have, in some cases, come to dominate their senior lives.
All in all, very enjoyable and the only reason I haven't given it five stars is because I feel that Coe's handling of the book's political content is less than satisfactory.
Politics are a feature of Coe's work but in this case I think that the author's own viewpoints (especially on the second Gulf War) have been clumsily shoe-horned into the latter part of the book (usually via monologues given by individual characters).
The use of political satire has been great in Coe's other books but in The Closed Circle I felt at times as though I was reading an editorial from a broadsheet rather than a novel.
Clearly Coe's views are passionately held but I would expect somebody of his talent to be able to work them into the book a little more subtly.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
But not for the obvious reasons. In fact, a better word would probably be "painful" instead of "difficult". I am a huge fan of Coe's, I've read all of his books and I simply couldn't wait to get my hands on The Closed Circle. One thing I've always admired in Coe's books was that he seemed to find it amazingly easy to avoid cliches and contrived plots - everything in his books seemed to flow perfectly and his use of a variety of storytelling techniques always kept me hooked. In The Closed Circle, however, I noticed a tendency on the part of the author to go for the easy route by spelling it out too much. His style was didactic, often patronising, and the jokes were thick-cut. Coe's signature, subtle humour, seemed to have vanished. The other thing that I found really difficult to deal with was the ideology: because I agreed with the anti-war, anti-NF views expressed in the book, it was a real disappointment to see that the discourse didn't go beyond the average "war is evil" analysis. There was no depth. Overall, my feeling after finishing this book was that it was ok but as a huge fan of Coe's, it could have been a hell of a lot better. To me, this was a rushed effort. Too much pressure from Penguin, perhaps?
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The Closed Circle
A brilliant sequel to 'The Rotters' Club' - both thoroughly good reads which my husband and I both enjoyed. Jonathan Coe is now one of my favourite authors.
Published 6 months ago by Mary Hewes
Blair's Britain Dissected
The sequel to Coe's 1970s epic 'The Rotter's Club', taking up with our main characters (Ben Trotter, his brother Paul and sister Lois, Claire Newman, Douglas Anderton, Philip... Read more
Published 8 months ago by Kate Hopkins
Superb - A Wonderful Critique
Having never read a book by Coe before, this was one of my five choices for holiday reading. Suffice to say, it was the only book I finished. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Mr. R. A. Bould
It's a six star novel
Read back to back, "The Rotter's Club" and "The Closed Circle" shows Jonathan Coe's epic in all its glory. Read more
Published 19 months ago by Jl Adcock
The Rotters' Club all grown up....
The Closed Circle is a follow-up to The Rotters' Club. The school friends have now grown up and are taking their place in the Britain of New Labour. Read more
Published 20 months ago by Wynne Kelly
A decent sequel, though not without flaws
'The Closed Circle' is the sequel to what is perhaps Coe's best known novel to date, 'The Rotters' Club' - a nostalgic story of growing up in the 70s. Read more
Published 21 months ago by BookWorm
Superb novel
It isn't a follow-up of "The Rotters' Club" - it reads more like volume 2 of a larger work. Brilliant recollections of the 70s and 80s and excellent descriptions and analysis of... Read more
Published 22 months ago by Stephen Williamson
Loved it (but make sure you read the Rotters' Club first)
The Closed CircleThe Closed CircleThe Rotters' Club
I see that this book has received mixed reviews, but can only say that I thought it was great. Read more
I see that this book has received mixed reviews, but can only say that I thought it was great. Read more
Published 23 months ago by Susan Holbeche
Not as good as The Rotters' Club
Rather disappointing sequel to The Rotters' Club in that the author seems to get bogged down with resolving the various story strands. Read more
Published on 25 Jan 2010 by Dave Gilmour's cat
Back to the future
Jonathan Coe revisits his characters from The Rotters' Club - published in 2001, three years before this book - winds them up and sets them moving through England in the closing... Read more
Published on 9 Dec 2009 by Jeremy Walton
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