A rare Jonathan Coe book that I didn't enjoy, and yet one that I think serves an educational purpose (at least for non-British writers).
The characters that I loved so much in The Rotters' Club, and that I still enjoyed in The Closed Circle are back for a third time and, at this point, it's just a bit much: with age they've lost a lot of their charm and too many of them have turned into allegoric representations of the sections of society they belong to.
While some of the new characters that are introduced are interesting enough, most of them are rather one-dimensional. The themes discussed are so widely covered in the media these days, and in rather similar ways, that they don't really add anything new. And the ending of the book is not one of the typical chaotic and rocambolesque ones that Coe usually goes for, but rather a flat one that reminds the reader of a cheap romance.
Yet, for someone who doesn't live in the UK and knows little about the current political landscape, this book can be a really good introduction to Brexit and the awfulness of the current political discourse in Britain.
No comments:
Post a Comment