Book Description

This novel captures a fateful moment in British politics during the 1970s - 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.

Sean Harding's anarchic humour makes him a mythical figure, both among his fellow pupils and at the girls' school next door. Doug Anderton begins to absorb the political lessons of his father, a leading shop steward at British Leyland's Longbridge plant. Philip Chase struggles to live with his parents' faltering marriage and the collapse of his progressive rock band, whose career is shorter than a Yes concept album. And for Benjamin Trotter, aspiring novelist, part-time composer and closet Christian, life will never have any meaning until he can find some way to make the beautiful Cicely sit up and take notice of him.

Together, these friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine, and soon new arguments begin to rage: which is more worthy of the front page, the story of a bitter industrial dispute in far-off London, or the equally bitter sporting rivalry between the loathsome Culpepper and Steve Richards, the only black pupil in the entire school?

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

Book Dimension:

length: (cm)24.1 　　　 　　　　　 　width:(cm) 15.6