And so, following The Rotters’ Club and The Closed Circle, we come to the final novel in Jonathan Coe’s trilogy, Middle England. Awarded the Costa Novel prize in 2019, Middle England opens in 2010, with our protagonist Benjamin Trotter and his friends from his secondary school days now in their fifties. Marriages that were still vibrant in The Closed Circle have grown stale, parents are growing infirm and dying (the novel opens with the funeral of Benjamin’s mother, and midway through the novel his father dies too) and the next generation are now adults and forging their way in life (a substantial part of the novel is devoted to Sophie, Benjamin’s niece, her career as a fledgling academic, and her on-off marriage to a driving instructor, Ian, she meets on a speed awareness course). On the plus side, though, Benjamin has at last finished his novel, which becomes an overnight success when it is longlisted for the Man Booker prize. Continue reading “The State of the Nation novel: part three”
Category: 21st century fiction
The State of the Nation novel: part two
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’. Continue reading “The State of the Nation novel: part two”
The State of the Nation novel: part one
As well as telling great stories about complex characters, many novels are interested in the social questions and political changes of their time. As in the title of Anthony Trollope’s highly-acclaimed 1875 novel, such writers explore The Way We Live Now. Continue reading “The State of the Nation novel: part one”
Feeding children
Back in 2015 I wrote a post – The Hungry Child – about Jane Eyre. In that novel, published in 1847, Charlotte Bronte describes in heartfelt terms the hunger that Jane and her fellow pupils experience at the harsh boarding school Lowood.
More than 170 years later and, depressingly, children are still going hungry. Continue reading “Feeding children”