Product Description

Jonathan Coe's new novel is set in the 1970s against a distant backdrop of strikes, terrorist attacks and growing racial tension. A group of young friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine and begin to put their own distinctive spin on to events in the wider world. A zestful comedy of personal and social upheaval, The Rotters' Club captures a fateful moment in British politics - the collapse of 'Old Labour' - and imagines its impact on the topsy-turvy world of the bemused teenager: a world in which a lost pair of swimming trunks can be just as devastating as an IRA bomb.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114767 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
At a time when people are looking back on the 1970s with nostalgia, Jonathan What a Carve Up Coe's The Rotters' Club is a timely reminder of quite 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 not only come to terms 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 post-imperial nation.

The book suffers in its programmatic attempts to make the four boys and their families symbolise, or represent, Something Important To Do With British Life. Doug, for instance, symbolises Industrial Decline, via his dad, a shop steward at the doomed British Leyland Longbridge plant. For Sean its Sexual Liberation--at least he's the one that looks 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

From the Publisher
WHAT THE CRITICS THOUGHT: PRAISE FOR THE ROTTERS' CLUB
'Without a shred of nostalgia, sentimentality or preaching, Coe pins down a fascinating turning point in our history. His real achievement however is that this serious political novel doesn't read like one...The novel is filled with characters whose desitnies we care about, whose welfare moves us. This is the simplest but highest calling of literature. The Rotters' Club is a book to cherish, a book to re-read, a book to buy for all your friends.' - William Sutcliffe in the Independent on Sunday

'Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of planting a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box that I carried around in my school days...the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his book makes it a pleasure to read.' - Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

'This novel is a cracking evocation of the 1970s...The novel shares the musical eclecticism of the period...it works wonderfully well.' - Will Cohu in the Daily Telegraph

'You laugh, you cry and you're left wondering what happens in the end. Just like real life. You'll love this book.' - Andrea Henry in the Daily Mirror

'A tremendous romp...the social details are described by Coe with an accuracy and love that could make you doubt his sanity but never his brilliance or his sense of humour...a fluid work, where technical skill, wit and exuberant inventiveness combine in making it a joy to read.' - John de Falbe in The Literary Review

'Like all of Coe's novels, The Rotters' Club is brilliant, funny, apposite, informed and unflaggingly truth-seeking... I for one am keenly awaiting the next instalment.' - Rachel Cusk in The Evening Standard

'Like the best of his previous work, The Rotters' Club is 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 in the TLS

'The almost Dickenisan generosity of his imagination is manifest even in a minor charactes such as Paul...an unflinching picture of a troubled decade.' - Phil Baker in the Sunday Times

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About the Author
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. He is the author of five novels including What a Carve Up! (which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize) and The House of Sleep (which won the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award for 1997). All five novels are available as Penguin paperbacks. He lives in Earl's Court, London.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
I enjoyed this book enormously. I suppose the world it describes - Britain in the mid 1970s - will be about as remote as that of Jane Austen to anyone under the age of thirty - but it captures my memories of the era perfectly.

Some reviewers have queried the handling of the political content, but personally I thought it was integrated well with the rest of the book.

Overall - an excellent attempt to capture the feeling of what it was like to be adolescent.

Most reviewers have either ignored the references to music of the period or just followed the usual cliches - "70s, era of flares, lava lamps and ludicrous music," etc. etc. I thought that Jonathan Coe dealt much more carefully with the music of the time - poking fun at Yes, enjoying The Clash, but quite happy to accept that, like most musical forms, Progressive Rock had plenty of good as well as bad.

Above all, it is clear that he has a great and lasting affection for the music of Hatfield & The North, whose second album gave the book its title. it would be nice if one result of this book's success was to make a few more people discover the Hatfield's music, whose merit was neglected even in the 1970s! Anyone who likes the music will certainly enjoy the book. I can't guarantee that anyone who liked the book will enjoy the music, but why not give it a try.

It all starts so well�.
TRC is like the rhyme of the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead- when it is good it is very, very good but when it is bad it is horrid! TRC suffers from Coe not only trying to tackle head-on most of the dominant issues of the seventies through a quite ordinary group of characters but dabbles in short story territory (the tale of the Danish Jews) and annoying literary styles (Ben's inner turmoil near the end). Added to this is the sickeningly sweet and unfinished end that pretty well tricks the reader.
At the same time, however, it is perhaps premature to criticise TRC unduly until the sequel has been read with it- perhaps it will create a better sense of closure on the plot lines that are left open. To TRC's rescue Coe's humour in this book is spot on and he makes the most of the bizarre nature of teenage years whilst not skimping on the lows as well as the highs.
Nevertheless, the three or four main characters of the book- that of the boys- seem very similar to each other for the first ten or so chapters and it is easy to get them mixed up in your mind. If Coe had concentrated more on developing them earlier on it would have been far more entertaining to catch their antics earlier on than constantly having to flick back to see who's who. It is also badly managed to make Ben the main character near the end of the book- it lends the question- what about the others?
TRC suffers from an annoying future pro and epilogue that adds little to the ambience and story line and takes away the sense of placement that the focus on the seventies throughout the rest of the novel tries to create.
The worst aspect of the book though has got to be the character of Cicely and the whole relationship between her and Ben. We know she is an unpleasant person and is merely good looking from passages of the book so Ben's idolization of her and her sudden emergence as a "good" character is unrealistic and for her to share the "happy ending" just felt wrong. Coe is never very sensitive in his portrayal of female characters (except, perhaps, in The Accidental Woman) but to create such an empty space, as Cicely is very bad form. It feels very much as though Coe is trying to produce his fantasy woman and make her fall in love with the character that represents him.
TRC is a very misjudged novel- instead of the dark realism and surrealism of What A Carve Up! or the human insight of The Accidental Woman we are left with a very good look at the seventies with superfluous plot devices and characters thrown in. A shorter, purely nostalgic and political book with no sequel would have worked much better than attempting an epic like exercise on somewhat flimsy material. I would recommend, to someone who has not read any Coe books before, to start with his early work and work forwards.

Enjoyable in parts unsatisfactory as a whole.
I loved Coe's 2 previous novels and came to this one with high expectations, unfortunately they were not met. There is much to admire about this book Coe really manages to get under the skin of the 1970's and debunk some of the recent myth-making concerning this troubled decade, it wasn't all flares, lava lamps, long hair and Glam Rock, there really were people who thought about forming private armies to destabilise the Labour Governments, the threat from the IRA was real and often deadly and yes there was an awful lot of brown furniture.

Ultimately however I didn't care very much about many of the main characters whom Coe often uses as filters to explore themes and issues. I am not saying that this is always crucial but in a book which links the political with the personal this does matter.

This a long book and tries to fit much into it but that is how it feels, that things are being fitted in rather than developing naturally.

I must conclude by saying that it is still well worth reading it is only because I loved 'What a carve up' & 'House of sleep' so much that I expected more from Coe and I know that I will rush out and buy the sequel.