The Rotters' Club: A comic coming of age tale from the bestselling author of Middle England

Coe, Jonathan

ISBN 10: 0241967767 / ISBN 13: 9780241967768

Published by Penguin, 2014

About this Item

Ausreichend/Acceptable: Exemplar mit vollständigem Text und sämtlichen Abbildungen oder Karten. Schmutztitel oder Vorsatz können fehlen. Einband bzw. Schutzumschlag weisen unter Umständen starke Gebrauchsspuren auf. / Describes a book or dust jacket that has the complete text pages (including those with maps or plates) but may lack endpapers, half-title, etc. (which must be noted). Binding, dust jacket (if any), etc may also be worn.

Seller Inventory # M00241967767-B

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Rotters' Club: A comic coming of age tale from the bestselling author of Middle England
• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241967767
• ISBN 13: 9780241967768
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: acceptable

About this title

Synopsis

Rotters Club

Review

At a time when people are looking back on the 1970s with nostalgia, Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club is a timely reminder of how ghastly that benighted decade was in Britain. Set in the "industrial" heartland of the West Midlands, it chronicles the growing pains of four Brummie schoolboys--Philip, Sean, Doug, and Benjamin--who must come to terms not only with the normal pangs of adolescence but with terrible knitwear, ludicrous pop music, nightmarish food, and insidious racism, all set against the awful, surreal, and tragicomic reality of a postimperial nation.

The book suffers in its programmatic attempts to make the four boys and their families symbolize, or represent, something important to do with British life. Doug, for instance, symbolizes Industrial Decline--his dad is a shop steward at the doomed British Leyland Longbridge plant. Sean symbolizes Sexual Liberation--at least he's the one who seems most likely to get his rocks off. And young Ben Trotter would appear to represent A Young Jonathan Coe. But if this aspect of the novel seems contrived, then the author's capricious, deft, wryly comedic, and touchingly empathetic style keeps things chugging along, as he knits together the troubles and tragedies of some fairly ordinary people living through fairly extraordinary years. --Sean Thomas, Amazon.co.uk