The Closed Circle
Page 44
Synopsis of The Rotters’ Club
Birmingham, England, 1973. LOIS TROTTER (aged seventeen) answers a lonely hearts advertisement and starts going out with MALCOLM, a man in his early twenties, also known as The Hairy Guy. Meanwhile her younger brother BENJAMIN TROTTER (aged thirteen) attends King William’s School and converts to Christianity after a bizarre, quasi-religious experience: having forgotten to take his swimming trunks to school one day, terrified that the PE master will make him swim in the nude in front of his classmates, Benjamin prays to be saved from this humiliation and his prayer is answered when he immediately discovers a spare pair of swimming trunks in an empty locker.
Benjamin’s best friends at school are SEAN HARDING (an anarchic prankster), the quiet and conscientious PHILIP CHASE, and DOUG ANDERTON. Doug’s father BILL ANDERTON is a leading shop steward at the British Leyland car factory in Longbridge. He is having an affair with MIRIAM NEWMAN, an attractive young secretary. But the affair is making Miriam miserable, and she threatens to bring it to an end.
On 21st November, 1974, Malcolm takes Lois to a pub in central Birmingham called The Tavern in the Town, intending to propose marriage to her. An IRA bomb explodes in the pub and Malcolm is killed. A wave of anti-Irish feeling spreads through Birmingham in the subsequent days and weeks; and, shortly afterwards, Miriam Newman disappears without trace. Nobody knows whether she has run off with another man, or something more sinister has happened.
Two years later, in the summer of 1976, the Trotter family go on holiday to Skagen in Denmark, with the family of Gunther Baumann, a friend and business associate of Benjamin’s father. Lois remains in England: she has not yet recovered from the shock of seeing Malcolm die, and is still hospitalized. During this holiday, Gunther’s fourteen-year-old son ROLF BAUMANN makes enemies of the two Danish boys in the house next door, and they try to drown him at the treacherous meeting point of the Kattegat and Skaggerak seas. Benjamin’s younger brother PAUL, now aged twelve, dives in and saves Rolf’s life.
Back in England, Benjamin joins the editorial staff of the school magazine, The Bill Board. His colleagues include Doug, Philip, EMILY SANDYS and Miriam’s younger sister, CLAIRE NEWMAN. One of the stories they cover concerns the deadly athletic and personal rivalry between RONALD CULPEPPER and STEVE RICHARDS—the only black boy in the school, popularly known as “Rastus.” Culpepper is disliked by almost everyone at King William’s, with the exception of Paul Trotter, who is beginning to show a precocious interest in politics, and who persuades Culpepper to let him join a secretive school discussion group known as The Closed Circle.
Benjamin writes a review of the school production of Othello, savaging the performance of CICELY BOYD even though he is hopelessly in love with her. However, Cicely is grateful for the review, and becomes his friend. The rivalry between Culpepper and Richards intensifies, Lois slowly begins to recover, and Harding’s humour becomes increasingly provocative and uncomfortable: in a mock by-election held at the school Debating Society, he puts himself forward as a candidate for the National Front, causing Steve Richards to walk out in disgust.
Steve Richards beats Culpepper to the school sporting trophy, and incurs his lasting hatred. Later, when Richards comes to sit his A-levels, someone doses him with a sedative beforehand and he fails a crucial physics exam. He is obliged to take a year out before resitting the paper.
Meanwhile Benjamin abandons a rainswept family summer holiday on the Lln peninsula in North Wales, and makes his way instead to the house where Cicely is recovering from an illness with her uncle and aunt. He and Cicely declare their love for each other, but they do not sleep together for many more months.
Not, in fact, until May 1979. Benjamin is now working for a bank in central Birmingham, prior to attending Oxford university in the autumn. Cicely has been living with her mother in New York. One morning after her return to England, she and Benjamin make love for the first and last time in Paul’s bedroom. Ecstatically happy, Benjamin takes her for a drink that lunchtime in a Birmingham pub called The Grapevine. There, he meets Philip’s father, SAM CHASE, who makes two predictions: that Benjamin and Cicely will have a long and happy life together, and that Margaret Thatcher will never be Prime Minister. Cicely leaves the pub, after being told that a letter has just arrived for her, from her friend Helen in New York. Later that day, Mrs. Thatcher sweeps to her first election victory.
Jonathan Coe
THE CLOSED CIRCLE
Jonathan Coe’s awards include the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Prix Médicis Etranger, and, for The Rotters’ Club, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Writing. He lives in London with his wife and their two daughters.
ALSO BY JONATHAN COE
The Rotters’ Club
The House of Sleep
The Winshaw Legacy
The Dwarves of Death
A Touch of Love
The Accidental Woman
Copyright © 2004 by Jonathan Coe
Illustration copyright © 2001 by Peter Frame
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Coe, Jonathan.
The closed circle / Jonathan Coe.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Birmingham (England)—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction. 3. Legislators—
Fiction. 4. Adultery—Fiction. 5. Brothers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6053.026C57 2005
823’.914—dc22 2004057789
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eISBN: 978-0-307-42826-4
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