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”