The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Closed Circle, by Jonathan Coe
reviewed by Stephen Bernstein

Vintage, 2006. 367pp. Paper: $14.00.

The Closed Circle continues, and to some degree completes, Jonathan Coe’s 2001 novel The Rotters’ Club. While that narrative was set in a Birmingham, England of the mid-to late-1970s, during the major characters’ adolescence, this one moves things ahead 25 years to the late 1990s and the early years of the current decade. In form, The Closed Circle is a mirror image of the earlier book. The Rotters’ Club consisted of three sections of 10, 28, and 1 chapters, respectively, and the new novel’s three sections have 1, 28, and 10 chapters—numbered in reverse. The circle, in other words, is closed. Circles abound in the novel: close circles of friends, closed circles of political intrigue, closed circles of historical repetition. The mysteries of The Rotters’ Club are cleared up here, some in surprising ways. The racism and IRA terrorism that were central to the first novel’s plot are still important, and Coe adds more recent historical developments—industrial plant closures, the migration of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” to the political center, September 11, the war on Iraq. Through it all his now-older characters struggle to find purpose in lives that, in many cases, haven’t fulfilled their early promise. Even though one of them says, “We’ve all ended up with what we wanted . . . We’ve all lived happily ever after,” happiness here comes highly qualified. The book is rich with Coe’s characteristic humor, and with a slow-burning anger as well, anger at the ways in which individuals, communities, and nations are manipulated for corporate and political gain. Though it includes a synopsis of The Rotters’ Club, The Closed Circle will mean the most to those who have already read the first novel. Taken together these two books comprise a remarkable alternate history of the last thirty years.