Confronting Blair's brave new Britain
The Closed Circle
By Jonathan Coe
Knopf, 367 pp., $25
Jonathan Coe's latest novel, ''The Closed Circle," opens on the eve of 2001 in Birmingham, England, where the Trotter family is watching television and toasting the millennium with ''supermarket Cava." We have been here before. Coe's previous novel, ''The Rotters' Club," opened with the Trotters watching television in the same Birmingham house in 1973 and closed with the election of Margaret Thatcher. This absorbing sequel ends with British troops fighting in Iraq.
At the dawn of the millennium, Sheila Trotter puts the kettle on for tea and mutters ''I don't know. It doesn't really feel any different to me," voicing the quintessentially English response to most situations -- honest, deflating, disappointed -- which Coe depicts so brilliantly. ''Twenty years on," Claire Newman muses when she meets two old school friends, one still enamored of her, one still oblivious to her love, ''and deep down, nothing has changed. Nothing ever changes."
Everything does, of course, all around them. Nevertheless Claire is right. She and the other adolescent characters from ''The Rotters' Club" are now middle-aged, living in London or abroad, but if their circumstances have changed, their condition -- the human condition -- has hardly altered. Benjamin Trotter, frustrated artist and unhappily married accountant, still worships his lost love while his brother Paul, the ambitious politician, ascends in Tony Blair's New Labor Party. Claire is haunted by the disappearance almost 30 years before of her sister Miriam, a mystery that connects the lives of the Newmans, the Andertons, even the innocuous Trotters, and that is brought to life again by a stray memory and a chance remark. (Coe includes a helpful synopsis of ''The Rotters' Club" at the end of this sequel, but even readers new to his world will not be lost).
As in all of Coe's novels, there are layers of memory and meaning. ''The Closed Circle," for example, describes the small world in which these characters grew up and to which they periodically return. But in ''The Rotters' Club" it was also the name chosen by Paul for his secret school discussion group, one that has matured into a shadowy think tank of ruthless politicians and industrialists, cultivated by Paul, who are determined to shape Britain's future.
From Lambeth Bridge, Paul sees that future eclipsing the past: ''the Palace of Westminster, floodlit and buttery, its shimmering reflection throwing a golden light on to the black metal surface of the sleeping Thames; and to his right, the new upstart, the London Eye, bolder, sleeker, bigger than any of the buildings around it. . . . One of them represented tradition and continuity -- the things Paul was most suspicious of. The other represented -- what? . . . It was a machine, a flawless machine for making money and for showing people new vistas of something that they already knew to be there."
Past and present, personal and political, seep into each other, blurring the lines of meaning and perception in a narrative that nonetheless remains miraculously airy. When Paul's new media adviser, the lovely young Malvina, argues that ''it's not what you guys say that matters any more, it's how it's interpreted," she prompts even her cynical boss to protest briefly that ''words have meanings." One of Coe's sly jokes is that Paul will be skewered by his assertion and that the difference between what he says and what he means will finally matter more to callow Malvina than it does to anyone else.
Not every character in ''The Closed Circle" gets his/her comeuppance. Coe is, after all, a satirist. Vile characters flourish in his Cool Britannia. From the ranks of New Labor to the corporate boardroom, from the newsroom to the dinner party, all is spin and solipsism. Even everyday manners and conventions are tainted.
Coe describes the London playgrounds where self-absorbed weekend fathers drink lattes, read newspapers, talk on cellphones, and ignore their children. Jargon is similarly punctured. When Paul describes the Labor Party's ''third way" as ''an alternative to the sterile, worn-out dichotomy between left and right," he adds, ''That's a good thing, isn't it?" ''It sounds like a very good thing," his journalist friend responds. ''And you guys managed to come up with it in a weekend, as far as I can see. . . . What else has Tony got hidden down the back of a sofa at Chequers?"
In previous novels, Coe has had fun not only with consequences but also with sequences, manipulating time in ''The House of Sleep" and reality itself in ''The Winshaw Legacy." Here he is less playful but no less graceful, constructing a plot that meanders enticingly yet has the pleasing symmetry of a Shakespearean comedy. All is revealed if not restored: Malvina's true identity and Paul's true nature; lost Miriam's fate and absent Cicely's revenge; Claire's reward and Benjamin's punishment. Discarded spouses and mislaid children settle for less. Underlying it all is the comic discrepancy between the ideal and the actual: Benjamin -- Cicely's courtly knight -- ironing his shirt in front of the television and getting an erection when the celebrity chef Nigella Lawson licks butter off her fingers. The millennium's here, Mum, better put the kettle on.
Anna Mundow, a freelance journalist living in Central Massachusetts, is a correspondent for the Irish Times. 
