A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

Sul Financial Times, la recensione, a cura di Jonathan Derbyshire, dell’ultimo lavoro di Jonathan Coe, Middle England, romanzo con cui si chiude la trilogia cominciata nel 2001 con The Rotters’ Club (edito in Italia col titolo La banda dei brocchi) e proseguita nel 2004 con The Closed Circle (Circolo chiuso).

In 2004, after the publication of his seventh novel, The Closed Circle, Jonathan Coe told the Financial Times: “I have a disquieting sense that I don’t have any more of these panoramic serio-comic political novels left in me.” That book was a sequel to The Rotters’ Club, published three years earlier. Both are, to adopt Coe’s terminology, “serio-comic” novels in which the personal stories of a group of Birmingham school friends are unwound against a vividly drawn political backdrop. Coe had made his reputation — and scored a commercial and critical success — with What a Carve Up!, an angry satire of the depredations of the Thatcher years published in 1994. In The Rotters’ Club, he looked back to the volatile politics of Britain in the 1970s that prepared the ground for Thatcherism — industrial strife, Irish Republican terrorism and a renascent far-right surfing the backwash of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. The Closed Circle skips two decades and is set in the early 2000s, in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and amid the reigniting of racial tensions in England’s post-industrial north.

Immagine di apertura via Wikimedia.