calimac

I see where Jonathan Coe has published The Closed Circle, his promised sequel to his 2001 novel The Rotters' Club. I'll have to look for that at some point, because I really enjoyed The Rotters' Club, of which I have a remaindered copy of the '02 US (Knopf) edition I picked up at Elliott Bay on my last trip to Seattle, though I'd read the book before. It takes place in the early 1970s in Birmingham, England, among students at an academically prestigious but not posh secondary school, and their families. The school is closely modeled on the real King Edward's School, which was Tolkien's alma mater, and some of the novel's characters are passingly referred to as Tolkien fans.

The Rotter's Club is mostly comic, partly tragic (some of you will know offhand what happened in Birmingham in 1974), and has a plotting style that's somewhat over-the-top but not entirely slapstick. My favorite scene features a somewhat dim man trying to do the crossword:

"Large feline." Five letters, beginning with T, ending with R.
Now come on, Philip's father said to himself, you must know the answer to this one. A feline was a cat, he knew that for sure. A kind of cat, five letters, beginning with T? What about tabby?
He would just double-check on the meaning of "feline." ...
feline--adj. 1 of the cat family. 2 catlike. -- n. animal of the cat family. felinity n. [Latin feles cat]
He knew all along that this was what it meant. So it had to be tabby, didn't it? Were tabbies large? Well, Mrs. Freeman's tabby next door was bloody enormous. Two weeks ago it had seen off a fox. So the "R" must be wrong.

And he's off, running intently down the wrong track.