"At once uproariously entertaining and deadly serious—a comedy of manners and mores, but also a conscientious and politically charged reminder of an age quite easily forgotten, yet not far removed from our own.”
—Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
The acclaimed author of The Winshaw Legacy—an epic satire of the eighties—now turns to the previous decade, which is to recent history what adolescence is to life itself: awkward, fervent, confused, sweetly naïve, and oh-so-painfully familiar, yet also far less tiresomely ironic than what we’ve come to.
Our principal guides to this collective coming-of-age story are four boys, classmates and friends, who must cope with their own hopes and traumas as well as their country’s, at a time when industrial and uncool Birmingham is on the cutting edge of Britain’s economic crisis and the air is filled with upheaval and change—from class antagonism and Northern Ireland to new music and morals.
As for parents, it goes without saying that they don’t help one little bit. Witnessing marital dissatisfaction lends no assurance to anyone facing the difficulties of holding a band together; of refining one’s creativity, politics, or (god forbid) faith; of surviving classroom rivalries and racism and romance.
Comic, wistful, revisionist, and even romantic, seamlessly adjoining issues both intimately personal and broadly political, “the novel is filled with characters whose destinies we care about, whose welfare moves us,” wrote William Sutcliffe in The Independent (U.K.). “This is the simplest, but the highest calling of literature. The Rotters’ Club is a book to cherish, a book to reread, a book to buy for all your friends.”
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
