The Rotters' Club [Audio Download]

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.

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.

In this novel of enormous reach, Coe attempts to give epic significance to the 1970's in Birmingham, England. Abandoning the extremely tight, limited focus he employed in The House of Sleep, Coe here employs a huge cast of characters, eight or ten of them teenagers (somewhat difficult to keep track of because they are not yet fully formed or unique), along with their parents and their parents' lovers, their brothers and sisters and the brothers' and sisters' lovers, and their teachers and some of their lovers.

Starting with a meeting in 2003 between the adult children of some of the characters from the 1970's, the novel switches back and forth in time through several different points of view, offering insights about what has happened in the interim. The teenagers' lives are depicted in minute detail as they work on school magazines, collect new rock albums, create their own bands, score with girlfriends, and do all the superficial things teenagers do the world over, told from the well-developed, if not particularly compelling, perspective of the '70's.

Coe can be very funny, and his view of teenage life is often amusing, but the teenagers also reveal their intolerance of differences, their casual cruelty, doubts about religion, ignorance of the political system, and general insulation from the forces which are shaping their world. Their parents' lives are completely separate from their children's, dealing with union vs. management issues, Labour vs. Tory political goals, a stagnant economy, resentment over immigration, IRA activity, some anti-semitism, and a belief that their dreams probably will not come true. These huge and important themes seem a bit jarring when juxtaposed against the superficial, day-to-day activities of the teenagers who are the main characters.

Coe has enormous, very obvious talents, but this book feels fragmented, with too many characters pursuing too many different ends, the ultimate goal seeming to be the recreation of the entire sociopolitical history of 1970's Birmingham. At the end of 400+ pages of this book, Coe himself states that a second volume will continue this story, perhaps the author's acknowledgment that his reach has exceeded his grasp with this one. Mary Whipple