Jonathon Coe - recommended reading

Off the top of my head there was the disappearance of the girl. that was heavily signposted as being the guy from the office who forged notes. (vague huh! i read it months ago) then there was the spiked drink during the exam -- i'm pretty sure that mystery as it was solved in the book was not the correct solution.

RC = sadly disappointing... and yet, much of this is because it's part of a sequence: so closure isn't really achieved.

I think Nicky D slightly overrates that sentence, but am not seeking fundamentally to disagree with him.

Other books: would very much like to read.

I don't really agree with you. I agree, on the whole, with what I said upthread. I am quite surprised at N's reaction to the sentence, but maybe it's a N. kind of thing, or the kind of thing that he used to like but has now grown too cynical to like.

I just finished rereading the book. It still does lack closure, shape, etc, but I was expecting that. What still strikes me, though, is the flatpack nature of some of the sentences. Our old friend the rustle of language is not easy to hear in those pages, save in some of the decent parodies perhaps. I am sorry to have to be so negative; I feel that what JC has attempted is a good idea with its heart in the right place, and all.

But on the day I finished that rereading, Steven Poole, of all people, holes the sequel below the waterline:

Squaring the circle

It's readable, it's entertaining... but Steven Poole is not satisfied by Jonathan Coe's The Closed Circle

Saturday September 4, 2004
The Guardian

Buy The Closed Circle at Amazon.co.uk

The Closed Circle
by Jonathan Coe
433pp, Viking, £17.99
How do you incorporate contemporary events and culture into fiction? It is a question that much exercises one of Jonathan Coe's characters in The Closed Circle. Benjamin Trotter, last seen as a schoolboy in The Rotters' Club, is now in his mid-40s; he works as an accountant and has for decades been working on a novel that runs to thousands of pages and is to be accompanied by his own musical compositions. But he is haunted by self-doubt: "Am I not just raking over the embers of my little life and trying to blow it up into something significant by sticking a whole lot of politics in there as well? And what about September the eleventh? How do I find room for that kind of stuff in there?"

Well, quite. For Coe, whose narrative runs from Millennium Eve to early 2004 and beyond into a (politically undescribed) future, there is a lot of that kind of stuff to cram in. Demonstrations against the threatened closure of the Birmingham Rover factory, a smashed-up McDonald's in the City of London, the resurgence of far-right politics in Britain, September 11 itself, war in Afghanistan, debates about war in Iraq and the war's prosecution, and so on. Such events are cunningly blaring from televisions or newspaper headlines while Coe's middle-aged, comfortably-off glum people wander around being glum or talking glumly to one another.

Further to convince us that we are reliving British life over the past four years, there are constant references to TV programmes - which, however, are never named, but described in maddeningly arch terms. Here is (we infer) Nigella performing fellatio on kitchen utensils, there is Have I Got News For You?, whose place in the culture is explained in this remarkably clumsy sentence: "It was considered a great coup for an MP to be invited on to this programme, even though he (it was rarely she) would often find himself subjected to a barrage of mockery from the other guests, and could sometimes scarcely be expected to leave with his reputation intact." Sometimes scarcely, eh? The way such programmes are explained as though to a Martian must be some attempt at a sort of Augustan literary coyness, but it's just annoying.

While we're at it, we should also have our characters commentate on the absurdities of modern life as though they were tired feature columnists: people driving sports-utility vehicles to supermarkets ("a vehicle more suited to transporting essential food parcels along the treacherous supply roads between Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul", ho ho), or mobile-phone users wearing earpieces ("you really do think they must be care-in-the-community cases"). All this feels dutiful rather than necessary.

The story is certainly well populated, and one thing just keeps happening after another. Benjamin, whose marriage is failing, meets a young woman, Malvina, in a bookshop and falls in love with her. She, unfortunately, falls in love with Benjamin's brother, Paul, the Labour MP, whose own marriage is thereby threatened. Benjamin mooches off to a monastery to find himself. Meanwhile Claire, freelance translator and lover of Italy, is trying to find out what happened to her sister Miriam, who disappeared in The Rotters' Club. And political columnist Doug is given a new job by his editor, for which, mystifyingly, he doesn't feel much gratitude: "LITERARY - FUCKING - EDITOR... The cunts. The fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking CUNTS !"

Among a large cast of supporting characters are Rolf, a German BMW executive who flies in via helicopter to deliver a homily on how free-market fundamentalism is not always good for ordinary people, a child amusingly named Coriander, and Sir Arthur Pusey-Hamilton, the fictional alter-ego of another character who makes a welcome reappearance in a superbly funny castle guestbook entry.

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. Coe, it seems, is in a hurry to tell us directly what his characters are thinking and feeling, rather than letting them behave and speak in more subtle, complicated ways. 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.

The entire novel, really, is but epilogue to The Rotters' Club, paying off that novel's promise of a sequel. But it has none of the great comic set-pieces for which Coe was justly celebrated in its predecessor or in what is still his best novel, What a Carve Up!; nor are its political themes as well integrated. Instead, it relies on heavy portentousness, exemplified by the way characters and the narrator keep banging on about circles being closed. Eventually one is driven by this repetitive GCSE symbolism to suggest that maybe, without being closed, a circle is not a circle at all.

In the end, this is more glum than Coe's other work, without succeeding in being what it apparently wants to be: more serious. It is to be hoped that now he has "closed" this circle, Coe's next novel will live up once again to his considerable talent.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,1296751,00.html

has anyone read the bs johnson biography? i've got a copy but have yet to open it.

I am amazed that N. said he was 'obsessed' with Jonathan Coe.

I am reading The House of Sleep, and I dare say it's his 2nd best book.

When Nabsico says 'English-author quality' I first think: yes, there is something here that waits to be nailed.

But his claim, it appears, turns out to be either tautological or unconvincing. a) Insofar as those authors are all English, then, yes, they must all be representatives of the character of the contemporary English novel, or b) No: I don't think I see the specific 'English' link between Coe, Curious Incident and Amis.

The mystery of the quality thus remains, I think, unsolved, or as yet unphrased.

Dwarves of Death - not recommended.

Surprised how poor it is and that it managed to get published.