In November 2020 I wrote a post on the state of the nation novel, a book that doesn’t just tell a story but also deals with the significant social and political questions at the time the book is set. My focus was Jonathan Coe’s 2001 novel The Rotters’ Club, the first of three novels all featuring the same group of characters. This post is about the second novel, The Closed Circle (published in 2004). Coe’s interest in documenting historical and political events in his own fiction is mirrored in the novel that his principal character, Benjamin Trotter, is writing. Titled Unrest, Benjamin describes it to his niece Sophie: ‘it’s about some of the political events from the last thirty years or so, and how they relate to … events in my own life, I suppose’.
Twenty years separate the events of The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle. The Rotters’ Club is set in the 1970s and follows Benjamin and his friends through their years at secondary school in Birmingham. It is December 1999 at the beginning of The Closed Circle, the dawn of the new millennium, and these same characters are now in their forties. They are married, or alternately divorced; parents, or struggling with the grief of not becoming parents; and established in professions that satisfy them to a greater or lesser extent.
Benjamin is a very recognisable older version of the awkward, confused teenager of the first novel, but with an added sense of failure thrown into the mix. His literary ambitions are present, but still unfulfilled, with his novel still a work in progress and a job as an accountant taking up his time. He has been married for fifteen years to Emily, but their inability to have children, and Benjamin’s unceasing devotion to his teenage infatuation, Cicely Boyd, has pushed their marriage to the precipice.
Benjamin may be largely unchanged as a character, but the UK in which he and his friends live has changed significantly. The Rotters’ Club ends in 1978, the year before Margaret Thatcher led the Conservative party to a General Election win, becoming the first female Prime Minister of the UK (ironically, at the end of the novel one of the characters, referring to Thatcher, says to Benjamin, ‘that woman will never be Prime Minister of this country’).
Now, in the closing days of 1999, Labour are back in power following Tony Blair’s 1997 election win. Benjamin’s younger brother Paul – a marginal figure in The Rotters’ Club – is a Labour MP and plays a key role in the novel. Neglectful of his wife and daughter, and embroiled in an adulterous affair, his personal failings are mirrored in his questionable political actions: he votes for the Iraq War (not because he believes in it, but for selfish pragmatic reasons) and is a member of the Closed Circle, a secret sub-group within the Labour party whose aim is to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’; elsewhere the narrator notes that Paul’s ‘political instincts inclined him towards the private sector’.
As with The Rotters’ Club, the food in The Closed Circle is typical of its time. As we saw, the former novel is spot on where 1970s food is concerned: melon, steak and chips and Black Forest gateau are brought out at one dinner party. In 1999 the culinary landscape has changed as much as the political one. As one of the characters notes, ‘”We had this terrible food – God, can you remember what we used to eat back in the seventies…”’ The Berni Inn of the 1970s has given way to All Bar One, Pizza Express and Starbucks – all of which are referred to in the novel. The transformation of the pub scene at this time is also noted: ‘All of the pubs where the elderly locals used to go and drink in familiar surroundings had been tarted up over the last few years, dividing walls smashed down and their interiors turned over into vast open-plan spaces where young stockbrokers and estate agents could drink imported Dutch and Belgian beers at four pounds a pint’.
In The Rotters’ Club there is a humorous comment on foreign influences on food – ‘Roy ordered fillet steak and chips, Colin ordered fillet steak and chips, Bill ordered fillet steak, chips and peas and Jack, who went to the South of France for his holidays, ordered fillet steak with chips, peas and mushrooms on the side, a touch of sophistication that was not lost on the others’. In The Closed Circle the food is almost without exception ‘foreign’ reflecting the massive transformation that has taken place in the British diet over the last thirty years. There is ‘Thai chicken salad with green papaya and rocket’, ‘Panfried seabass fillet with courgettes, fennel and sauce vierge’, ‘Passion fruit brulee’ and ‘Chocolate mi-cuit, smothered in warm crème anglaise’.
Coe also includes an episode in which Benjamin, half-watching the TV whilst ironing a shirt, sees a cookery show:
‘The gardening programme finished and was succeeded by a cookery show in which an implausibly glamorous young woman, living in an implausibly elegant house, prepared delicious morsels of food while tossing her hair, pouting seductively at the camera and licking traces of butter and sauce off her fingers in a manner… explicitly suggestive of oral sex…’
That ‘glamorous young woman’ is undoubtedly Nigella Lawson, whose first cookery book How To Eat was published in 1998, and whose reputation for sexualising food, with her groans of appreciation and pouts at the camera, was cemented by her TV series (the first of which was aired in 1999). This TV cook goes on to make an ‘implausibly effortless concoction of poached pistachio-sprinkled apricots stuffed with crème fraiche… ‘, a recipe which actually appears in How to Eat, and which seems to me to sum up this period with its focus on ‘exotic’ ingredients – pistachio nuts and crème fraiche (a more sophisticated version of sour cream which has been a staple product in middle-class professionals’ shopping baskets – and I include myself in that category – over the last 20 years!).
Whilst I’ve owned How to Eat since it was first published in paperback (1999) and have cooked a number of the recipes, I’d never made this recipe until now. Like all Nigella’s recipes – from my experience, anyway – it’s a guaranteed success. I reduced the quantities to make it for two, but the original version serves six.
NIGELLA’S POACHED PISTACHIO-SPRINKLED APRICOTS STUFFED WITH CRÈME FRAICHE
Ingredients (serves 2):
100g dried no-sulphur apricots
200ml water
20g caster sugar
Seeds from 2 crushed cardamom pods
½ teaspoon lemon juice
70ml crème fraiche
30g shelled pistachios chopped very finely (or ground in a pestle and mortar)
Method:
Soak the apricots overnight in the water.
The next day, preheat the oven to 150C / 130C fan / Gas mark 2 and place a non-metallic ovenproof dish in the oven to heat up.
In the meantime, pour the apricot soaking liquid into a small saucepan and add the sugar, cardamom seeds and lemon juice and bring to the boil. Add the apricots and then pour the contents of the saucepan into the ovenproof dish. Cover with baking parchment and cook for 1 ½ hours. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. Place in the fridge to chill.
When you are ready to serve, remove the apricots from the liquid and allow to drain. Carefully open each one and fill with 1 teaspoon crème fraiche. Place the stuffed apricots on a flat plate or dish, spoon over some syrup and dust with the pistachios. Serve with extra crème fraiche if you like.
