Cruel Britannia

Tony Blair on May 3, 1997 — his first full day as British Prime Minister (AP Photo/ Michael Crabtree).

The Left has long made the personal political; Jonathan Coe’s great imperative as a novelist, however, has been to do the inverse, to cut through the bafflegab of government policy and show how it affects real people. In books like The Winshaw Legacy, The Rotters’ Club and, now, The Closed Circle (published in North America this week), Coe has tied his characters’ private dilemmas to the greater socio-political mood of his homeland, Britain.

Although it can be read — and presumably enjoyed — as a stand-alone novel, The Closed Circle is actually the second half of a generational saga established in The Rotters’ Club (2001). Set amid the labour strife in mid-’70s Birmingham, The Rotters’ Club centred on the Trotter siblings: diffident, quixotic Benjamin, an aspiring writer/musician; his scheming younger brother, Paul; their ill-fated sister, Lois; and a host of wonderfully vivid cronies. Despite a few unsettling plotlines — one character vanishes; Lois’s fiancé dies in an IRA bombing — The Rotters’ Club was a largely wistful look at youth in pre-Thatcherite Britain. (In one glorious night, Ben’s friend Doug Anderton manages to see an early Clash concert and get stupendously laid by a really hot punk girl.)

If The Rotters’ Club was a shimmering reverie, The Closed Circle is a harsh blast of reality — personally and politically. Twenty years later, Benjamin is an accountant mired in a loveless marriage; his only hope of salvation is an experimental novel-slash-album that he’s been working on for the better part of two decades. Paul, meanwhile, is an MP in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s new Labour cabinet, while Lois is only now emerging from her teen despair.

The title of the new book refers to a covert discussion group formed by Paul Trotter and some of his right-leaning schoolmates in the ’70s. It’s also a comment on the loopy nature of the political spectrum in present-day Britain. At one point, Doug — now a political columnist — upbraids Paul (and his party) by saying, “The entire system nowadays is only geared to accommodating a tiny minority of political opinion. The left’s moved way over to the right, the right’s moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle’s been closed and everyone else can go f--- themselves.” It’s one of many outbursts of disillusionment in the book, and reflects the author’s own disappointment with how things have turned out.

The heyday of "Cool Britannia" (AP Photo/pa/ho).

“There was a very strange period in 1997,” says Coe, on the phone from his home in London. “Kind of unusually for Britain, we were feeling more than we were thinking. We were reacting more with our hearts than with our heads. In rapid succession, you had the arrival of Tony Blair — this young, handsome, dynamic, supposedly radical, very presidential political figure who was very different from the moribund political culture that we’d had under John Major. And just a few months after that, we had the death of Princess Diana, and this extraordinary display of public mourning and grieving, which Tony Blair very expertly tapped into and rode the wave of.

“It took us all a couple of years to calm down a little bit and realize that the guy we’d chosen as prime minister was not the old Labour figure a lot of us had been expecting. I was caught up in that myself. But we entered a trough of disillusion after that, in the early 2000s, and that’s the mood that The Closed Circle picks up on.”

North Americans assume that the Iraq invasion has been Blair’s biggest blunder; he’s certainly been contrite since committing Britain to a military campaign with little public approval and even less of a solid motive. Many Britons, however, had begun to distrust Blair long before that; by 2000, it was clear that the Labour party — the assumed champion of the working class — had become unnervingly cozy with big business and appeared willing to put cherished public services like education and health care in private hands.

The Closed Circle was published in Britain last September; the fact that Blair was elected to a third term earlier this month doesn’t diminish the book’s point, says Coe.

Courtesy Random House Canada.

“I’m under no illusions that my art, or really anyone else’s, is going to change the world, or even significantly change the political direction things are going in,” claims the 43-year-old writer. “The nature of what I do, which is to make up stories, doesn’t, to my mind, automatically confer any kind of political authority on me. I see my books as a kind of commentary on what’s happening, rather than an agent for change.”

Although he’d already had three books under his belt, it was the 1994 novel The Winshaw Legacy (published in Britain under the more captivating title What a Carve Up!) that announced Coe as a master of social satire. In it, a young man named Michael Owen receives a mysterious commission to pen the biography of the wealthy Winshaw family, a loathsome clan that embodies the moral rot of the Me decade: one is a business “columnist” whose opinions are provided by corporate interests; another is a farming magnate who finds increasingly unsavoury ways of boosting production; another peddles weapons to Saddam Hussein. A thrashing indictment of ’80s greed and upper-class impunity, Coe’s stunning novel ends with a satiric flourish that is shockingly grotesque (though gratifying all the same). Nothing he has written since can match the blackness of that finale.

“I think the outrage is still there, but there was a sort of young man’s cruelty about that book that I don’t have access to anymore,” says Coe. “With the aging process and having your own children, it’s not that you mellow — you’re less quick to hurt people, including your characters. And you maybe start to take human suffering a little more seriously. I’m thinking of the glee with which those characters [in The Winshaw Legacy] are killed off in the end. It was entirely right for the sort of comic, Gothic mode that the book was written in, but I can’t write that way any more.”

The personal revelations in The Closed Circle are often painful, but they’re handled with Coe’s keen compassion. The book is as panoramic as anything Coe has written, though this time around, ambition gets the better of him. With its sizeable cast, the book often feels like an overcrowded elevator. It also suffers, at times, from an accumulation of soap-opera-like coincidences, particularly towards the end; plot-wise, it’s a little too tidy.

That said, The Closed Circle is a wonderful distillation of Britain’s millennial moment, which is defined by Iraq, 9/11 and, more than anything, the failed promise of Tony Blair.

“It’s always difficult when you’re writing a book that’s set in very contemporary times,” Coe admits. “Really, you’re having to bring an end to a story that never ends, which is endlessly unfolding.”

The Closed Circle is published by Random House, and is in stores this week.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.