My son Chris and his wife Celeste are visiting, and yesterday evening we all went out to dinner at Lucy’s. After the meal, we walked across Coolidge Corner to the Brookline Booksmiths, our favourite local independent bookshop. I’m not sure why, but I picked up a new book by an author I didn’t recognize: The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe. Although it focusses on Blair’s Britain in the period 1999-2003, the story begins a generation before that: it follows the lives of the characters in Coe’s earlier The Rotters’ Club. That book was about a group of teenagers in Birmingham, growing up in the strange world of the 1970’s – Heath, Wilson, Callaghan, strikes, IRA bombings, platform shoes, punk, and so much more. OK, now I was hooked. Clutching The Closed Circle firmly, I headed to the back of the store to find a copy of The Rotters’ Club.
When we got home, I settled down to read The Rotters’ Club. As the San Francisco Chronicle reviewer put it: “A thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love’s mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned.” And I was hooked. After the “surprise”, I put the book down, stunned, and went to bed. This morning I picked it up immediately after breakfast and read the next 300 pages without a break. It was one of those rare stories with which one has no choice in the matter; I felt as if I was being swept down a turbulent river, clinging onto a branch for support, and then finally being deposited on the bank, breathless. The last 32 pages are a stream of consciousness that is at once urgent and timeless.
Having finished, I did two things. First, I ordered an audio CD edition of the book for my mother in England; even though she is blind, I couldn’t let her escape this tour de force of a story. And I went out to buy the necessary supplies to prepare enough gin and tonic to fortify me for the next chapter in the lives of these characters….