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the complete review - fiction

The Closed Circle

by
Jonathan Coe

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : entertaining, and does close the circle, but not entirely satisfying

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Enjoy it, but most find some weaknesses

  From the Reviews:

• "Messy and brimming. The Closed Circle owes nothing to minimalism's sleekly competent aesthetic. With a nineteenthcentury novelist's discursiveness and reach, Coe gives us a meditation on the consequences of terrorism, an examination of the post-9/11 political zeitgeist (...), a satire of everything from book reviewers to modern parenting, and a contemporary version of Anthony Powell's sprawling masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, which he has acknowledged as a model." - Elizabeth Judd, The Atlantic Monthly
  
  
• "Coe and his publishers have included a handy synopsis of The Rotter's Club at the back of the latest volume, but this reads rather like the pitch for a telly series about the mildly worried middle classes and is probably best avoided. A better plan is simply to dive straight into The Closed Circle and start swimming. One of the glories of Coe's writing is a magically buoyant narrative technique that makes you feel as though you have been fostering a comfortable intimacy with all his characters since they, and you, were young." - Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Du chaos, il a sculpté peu à peu une forme reconnaissable. Avec tous ses défauts. Humaine." - Manuel Carcassonne, Le Figaro
  
  
• "The story is certainly well populated, and one thing just keeps happening after another. (...) It is all extremely readable and often entertaining. There is a consistent level of narrative facility and prose comfort that keeps the pages turning. But the major problem is that the novel feels rushed. (...) Too much of The Closed Circle reads as though it were one of those epilogues where the rest of the lives of a novel's characters are summed up in a few paragraphs." - Steven Poole, The Guardian
  
  
• "But even those who loved The Rotters' Club may feel a twinge of disappointment. This is partly because disappointment is intrinsic to the story. (...) Here you can get some sense of the novel's central problem: it is too predictable, in its target and in its plotting." - Robert Hanks, The Independent
  
  
• "In a novel this richly drawn, it's easy to forgive the odd instance of automatic phrasing (...) and the occasional clunky piece of character development. (...) It's easy, because 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." - Richard Mason, Independent on Sunday
  
  
• "Les personnages donnent le sentiment de dévorer sans fin la madeleine: il suffit d'un hasard (ou d'un romancier) pour qu'ils replongent dans une adolescence qui ne les a jamais quittés." - Philippe Lançon, Libération
  
  
• "(T)he writing is frequently absent-minded. Nevertheless, The Closed Circle is -- as always with Coe -- a strangely likeable performance. Even at its corniest it has a direct and unpretentious narrative drive." - Christopher Tayler, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Not hard to put down -- hard not to. We need to draw breath for the next episode, to allow the complex connections to settle, to realize on page 240, say, what was suggested 100 pages before, and to let each additional colored piece slot itself in to work its transformation. And we need to make it all last." - Richard Eder, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Une articulation subtile entre le public et le privé, des allers-retours incessants entre le grave et l'insolite, et bien sûr de l'humour, jamais trop d'humour: telle était la méthode Coe, que l'on retrouve intacte dans Le Cercle fermé." - Florence Noiville, Le Monde
  
  
• "The Closed Circle feels like a return to more conventional territory. My guess is that it will read much better when the events it describes have receded; when, as Doug the columnist might put it, the 2000s have become the new 1970s." - Mark Lawson, New Statesman
  
  
• "The symmetries developed between this novel and its predecessor appear more intricate and abstract the longer you reflect on them, and yet, around these axes, much of the novel has a free-form, improvised quality. The effect is odd but also charming: sometimes bathetic, sometimes sublime." - Jenny Turner, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The Closed Circle is satire of a high order -- and often laugh-out-loud funny -- but Coe has also fashioned a movingly human novel with a cast of fully realized characters and an immense narrative tapestry of events beginning with the last month of 1999 and ending in late 2003. It's by far the best novel to date for this talented author," - Timothy Peters, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "The Closed Circle is terrific. (...) It is very satisfying to find this book concluding where the first book began -- even to read a few of the same sentences, tucked away in the final pages. But while the action of the book is neatly completed, the reader is not encouraged to relax: this is no ‘happily ever after’." - Olivia Glazebrook, The Spectator
  
  
• "I should say immediately that The Closed Circle is a wonderful book; but sometimes it feels like a cruel one. (...) The Closed Circle is so appealing that the last cruel thing about it is the ending. Still, I suppose there has to be one." - Tom Payne, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Part of the appeal of The Closed Circle is that of the soap opera: the reader wants to know what happens to familiar characters. (...) The Closed Circle is a gratifying sequel. Coe's characters have developed, the ironies play out cleverly, change and continuity are shown in various manifestations. As a contribution to the author's oeuvre, however, it represents an exercise in treading water." - David Horspool, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "What comes across most clearly is a sense of dampened hopes -- a disbelief that substantial change is even possible. (...) Although these characters are well drawn, they're really just a sideshow to the novel's real protagonist: the stagnant state of Tony Blair's Britain." - Joy Press, The Village Voice
  
  
• "This is, in many ways, a book about the function of nostalgia, about what's remembered and misremembered, which makes it a particularly easy sequel to enter." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Closed Circle doesn't so much continue the story of The Rotters' Club as pick it up again, twenty years later; part of Coe's game is in how he reveals what has happened in the intervening two decades. Where The Rotters' Club was a swan-song of sorts for Old Labour, the dark shadow of the Thatcher years already looming, The Closed Circle, which takes place between late 1999 and 2003, is entirely set in a New Labour world (which almost none of the characters, insofar as they are at all political, seem at all enthusiastic about). Again, the threat of a car-plant closing plays a role, and while the book is Birmingham-centred, the characters are much more dispersed than in The Rotters' Club -- leaving the novel as a whole also literally all over the place.
       'The Closed Circle' was a group at the school many of the characters attended, King William's, and Paul Trotter -- grown up to become a Labour MP -- , eventually forms a new club with the same name. It's also a good description of the novel: more than anything, Coe ties up the loose ends -- or rather, brings everything full circle. All the mysteries from the original novel, from the swimming trunks Benjamin found to what became of Miriam, are resolved, allowing many of the characters to move on. (The Closed Circle includes a fairly detailed synopsis of The Rotters' Club for easy reference and reminder.)
       The Closed Circle is also how one of the characters describes the current situation in Britain:

     "I mean that the entire system nowadays is only geared to accommodating a tiny minority of political opinion. The left's moved way ovr to the right, the right's moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle's been closed and everybody else can go fuck themselves."

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Links:

• Penguin publicity page
• Vintage publicity page
• Gallimard publicity page
• Interview at Three Monkeys Online

• The Believer
• Daily Telegraph
• The Guardian
• Independent on Sunday
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Modern Novel
• n+1
• New Statesman
• The New York Times Book Review
• The New Yorker
• People
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Socialist Review
• The Spectator
• Sunday Telegraph
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Post

• The complete review's Jonathan Coe page
• Official site

• The Accidental Woman
• Bournville
• The Dwarves of Death
• Expo 58
• The House of Sleep
• Like a Fiery Elephant
• Middle England
• Mr. Wilder and Me
• Number 11
• The Rain before it Falls
• The Rotters' Club
• The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
• A Touch of Love
• What a Carve Up ! (also: The Winshaw Legacy)

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       Born in 1961, Jonathan Coe attended Cambridge and Warwick universities. He is the author of several novels.

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© 2005-2023 the complete review

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