bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

SCMP Reporter

The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

Vintage $230

At the close of Jonathan Coe's  last novel, The Rotters' Club, readers were left with a number of loose ends. The Closed Circle catches up with the cast of Birmingham schoolboys 25 years later, on the eve of the new millennium, and ties up those stray plot twists.

Time hasn't been kind to Benjamin Trotter. The aspiring teenage novelist is now an accountant, trapped in a loveless marriage and still working on his never-to-be-published novel, which runs to more than 10,000 pages. As he sits in front of his computer making back-up files to beat the Y2K bug, his brother Paul, now a New Labour MP, is mouthing along to Auld Lang Syne in the Millennium Dome, eager to come  to the attention of Tony Blair.

Elsewhere, budding socialist Doug Anderton, now a political columnist, has married into minor aristocracy and is living in a swish  London pad with children named Coriander  and Ranulph. 'I haven't given up on the class war, you know,' he tells Benjamin. 'I'm behind enemy lines, that's all.' Phillip Chase is a news reporter, Steve Richards is a family man and research scientist, and Sean Harding - well, that would be giving too much away.

In the manner of a 19th-century novel - Dickens  comes to mind - multiple plots twist around each other and, through coincidence  and a common past, the characters' paths  cross once again. Like Dickens, Coe has a  talent for combining political comment with an entertaining plot and characters you  care about.

While The Rotters' Club tapped into a rich seam of 1970s nostalgia and was awash with cultural reference points from punk to kipper ties, The Closed Circle is set in present-day Britain, a world of microwave-ready meals,  spin-doctors and Starbucks - a dumbed-down society where reality TV makes instant icons of ordinary people and politicians forge a name for themselves not in the debating chamber but  on satirical quiz shows. But if Coe's vision  of modern Britain sounds bleak, and his protagonist Benjamin mired in failure, the book manages to be warm and funny. For all his flaws - perhaps because of them - Benjamin, 'the Emile Zola of the double-entry system', is a man for whom you can't help but feel affection, and even the pompous Paul with his shameful politics and wandering eye is hard to dislike.

Rather than being separate stories in their own right, The Rotters' Club and The Closed Circle are very much two halves of the same novel and, despite the inclusion of a plot synopsis, you're  at a disadvantage if you haven't read the first instalment. There are numerous sub-plots  that conclude incidents from the characters' schooldays (from the fate of a missing young woman to the long-lost love of Benjamin's life).

The main flaw of the book is that, whereas The Rotters' Club was a period novel set in the 1970s, its sequel takes the same style, and a period novel set in the present day simply doesn't work. Rather than providing the backdrop for the action, the cultural references - mobile phones, road rage - stick out like a sore thumb  and simply hamper the flow. Once you're over that hump, it's a hugely enjoyable novel. But you can't help but feel it might benefit from being put back on the shelf for a few years to be savoured with a seasoning of nostalgia.



The Closed Circle