The Closed Circle

Johnathan 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 Tony 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 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 ongoing 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 protesters, and lifts the lid on an era in which policy and presentation have become almost indistinguishable. 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.

Author: Jonathan Coe

Publisher: Viking

Released Date: 2004

ISBN: 0670892556