Back to the 1970's... (The Rotters' Club - Jonathan Coe)

Member Name: pje

Product:	The Rotters' Club - Jonathan Coe
Date:	31/05/01 (132 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Entertaining, nostalgic, funny and serious.

Disadvantages: You have to wait for the sequel to find out what happened!

We all know that you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover,
but the moment I saw The Rotters' Club with it's off-white
Anaglypta wallpaper covering, I knew it had to be a laugh,
and it is...at first anyway. (Do kids still have to cover their
school books with wallpaper these days I wonder?)

In them days we never had nothing! Not like kids today and all
the things they take for granted! No CD's DVD's VCR's or PC's.
As someone says in the introduction:

"sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!"

Ah yes, imagine all the people sitting in the dark ("I thought
we HAD some candles!") and the whole family playing Scrabble
by the light of granny's old oil lamps... Happy days my foot!
That was the 70's for you - power cuts, Rick Wakeman and flares.
Because, like the ITV sit-com The Grimleys, The Rotters' Club
is set in Birmingham in the 1970's, an irresistable combination
of targets for parody. But it develops beyond Grimleys-style humour and deals with more serious themes - particularly racism.

The story centres around Benjamin Trotter (or BenT rotter as he is nicknamed - hence the rotters' club of the title) his family and chums from King William's School for Boys - a direct-grant school.
Ben is an intelligent but gauche boy... oh no, not another one!
It was difficult not to imagine him in the shape of Gordon Grimley.

His circle of friends include:-

Doug Anderton, who has absorbed the proto-politically correct left-wing morality of his father Bill, a shop steward at British Leyland (and therefore a comrade of Red Robbo). Bill Anderton
is the book's Atticus Finch character, apart from his unfaithfulness that is - his latest affair being with his secretary Miriam Newman,
who later goes missing, upset by his refusal to leave his wife.

Phili
p Chase, Ben's best mate, who suffers the indignity of seeing
his mother seduced by his pretentious art teacher Mr. Plumb
(a complete contrast to his father - an inarticulate coach driver.)

Sean Harding who is the progenitor of some extraordinary pranks
and writer of provocative spoof letters to the school magazine.

Steve Richards, the only black pupil in the school, who suffers antagonism from Ronald Culpepper - captain of every school team going (and a right Slytherin type) when they become fierce rivals
for the schools' Victor Ludorum trophy. (As opposed to the Victor Meldrew trophy which I narrowly failed to win at school - how did
I let that slip out of my grasp? Even now I doon't believe it.)

When they reach the sixth-form the boys get to run the school magazine, and Ben falls for Cicely Boyd - wooing her by panning
her performance as Desdemona in a school production of Othello!
The unattainably beautiful Cicely is attracted by his frankness apparently - oh yes right, and I'm a monkey's uncle!

And I'm not entirely convinced that kids "boogied on down"
at the church disco in Birmingham as early as 1973 either.

Ben's family seem rather peripheral. Father Colin is a junior
manager; mother Sheila reads the Daily Mail; his precocious
younger brother Paul seems to be a proto-Thatcherite creep;
and his older sister Lois, and her boyfriend Malcolm, become
victims of the IRA bombing of the Tavern in the Town pub in 1974.
Well, he couldn't write about Birmingham in the 70's without
dealing with that I suppose, but it seemed a little crass to me.

Sometimes I got the impression that Coe had "things to say"
and the plot of the novel had to be stretched to get them in.
Hence there are some puzzling diversions. Like a family holiday
to Denmark, which provides an excuse to shoe-horn in the sto
ry
of how Danish jews fled to Sweden in 1943 to escape the Nazis.
Jolly interesting, but what's it got to do with the rest of the book?
There's no doubting that Jonathan Coe is a political animal.

He certainly describes the political machinations of the 1970's well; but I feel there is a good deal of projecting what we know now back onto those times. Nobody really knew in the 1970's
that there would even BE a Thatcher government, never mind
the radical changes they would inflict on society in the 1980's
(which was the subject of his first novel What A Carve Up!)

Maybe I sound a little harsh. It is a funny and entertaining book,
and I certainly sympathise with his political outlook,
but I felt somewhat frustrated by the ending...

I know that some strange, and, if I might say so, perverse people,
like to read the last page of a book first. I do not. Which is a pity,
because the last page is an author's note saying that: "there will
be a sequel to The Rotters' Club entitled The Closed Circle."
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH H!!!!!
So that's why all those loose ends weren't tied up.
What a despicable trick!

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