Tag: Middle England

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”