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the complete review - fiction

The Rotters' Club

by
Jonathan Coe

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : well-written, clever, entertaining look at Britain in the 1970s -- though the novel doesn't unfold in the most straightforward manner

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus.

  From the Reviews:

• "Coe fills in this broad canvas with a series of comic set pieces that poke gentle fun at his characters while also deepening their appeal. (...) Coe's attempts to tackle more serious themes prove less uniformly assured." - Stephen Amidon, The Atlantic Monthly
  
  
• "Like all of Coe's novels, The Rotters' Club is brilliant, funny, apposite, informed and unflaggingly truth-seeking. Does it achieve the authority, the political status, for which it so clearly strives ? This is somewhat harder to discern" - Rachel Cusk, Evening Standard
  
  
• "(B)eneath all this entertainment, there's a deep and moving study of the intensity of youth, remembered rawly, but described with sophistication." - David Sexton, Evening Standard
  
  
• "Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album (.....) Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days. (...) (A)s always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
  
  
• "(I)t's The Rotters' Club contra mundum in a society Coe exposes, layer by layer, as rotten to the core. (...) The Rotters' Club is a widely ambitious and entertaining undertaking which leaves so many stones unturned and stories tantalisingly untold that its sequel, The Closed Circle, is not only desirable but necessary." - The Independent
  
  
• " Sad to say, the tempo not only lags but has all the canned appeal of a mid-1970s rhythm machine. Coe fails quite completely to create real characters to drive his historical novel. His gang of four and their supporting cast are less 1970s British equivalents of the American teenagers who populate American Pie, Bring It On and Ten Things I Hate About You, than the cartoons of Not Another Teen Movie with its pastiche of broad-band teenage stereotypes. (...) The Rotters' Club finishes not with a bang but with a threat: "There will be a sequel"" - Jonathan Levi, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "There are many other elements to the story, and a nice mix of techniques: standard third-person narration, stream of consciousness, letters, magazine pieces, a speech made by Doug in later life, a short memoir written by Benjamin. Only the clumsy framing device, a sequence set in 2003, fails to work. (...) The Rotters' Club, for all its occasional overegging and its self-conscious deployment of issues, is a superior entertainment. The pages seem to turn themselves, and Coe's oblique humour allows the romantic and satirical to combine without undercutting each other." - Hugo Barnacle, New Statesman
  
  
• "Its form owes something to Galsworthy and, in the dance of its characters through time, to Anthony Powell. In purpose and style it is entirely different. Its tinder-dry combustion of comic, indignant and elegiac suggests an Evelyn Waugh of the left, though not so well chiseled and a lot more discursive." - Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "The school-as-microcosm idea, though, works best if the larger world doesn't feature, while, in fact, Coe is constantly bringing in wider issues. It's as if his research into the period has made him burningly aware in retrospect of everything he didn't register at the time (.....) The tone is uneasily comic or, at least, non-serious. (...) Works of literature aren't necessarily undone by mixed emotions and incoherent ideas, but The Rotters' Club is altogether too unsure what to mock and what to mourn." - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "To be sure, Coe's '70s are rough going, certainly not the whitewashed, bell-bottom-ogling, smiley-face version the sitcoms would have us recall. The road to parity is littered with losses, blood, violence, injustice and needless death. (...) Though Coe resolves many of the elements of his story -- in some cases, perhaps, a bit too patly -- he lets some of the larger issues dangle." - Amy Reiter, Salon
  
  
• "The Rotters' Club is a thrillingly traitorous work. It hums along for a hundred pages of wise comedy about teenage love's mortifications, then cold cocks us with an honest surprise as cruel as it is earned. (...) Coe gets steadily funnier, piling on some of the most engaging comic writing since Davies hung it up." - David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "(A) tremendous romp through the bizarre, often very funny culture of that troubled decade: the clothes, the music, the hair ... 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. (...) The book is such fun that it is easy not to notice how subtle it is. (...) If I have quibbles with this book, they are that the 'bookend' structure is clumsy, and that the language -- unlike Salinger's -- is sometimes lax." - John de Falbe, The Spectator
  
  
• "What you have here is about 20 characters in search of, if not a plot, narrative drive or linking theme or some connection more meaningful than happenstances (...) What is needed here is a sense of consequence, of why things matter and to whom." - Anna Shapiro, The Times
  
  
• "(T)he constant shifting between narrators can be confusing initially. However, Coe handles his complex approach to a complex era effortlessly, and the end product is a compulsive and gripping read. (...) It is, however, the narrative's seamless interplay between the seismic political events of the decade and the personal story it relates that really impresses." - Paul Connolly, The Times
  
  
• "Coe writes perceptively about the unexpected and accidental intersection of individuals' priorities and commitments, and about the realizations these overlaps induce. He has a thoroughly eighteenth-century conception not only of narrative as a kind of coitus interruptus, but of the world as a giant physics experiment, in which the particular identities of different characters are perpetually colliding, fissuring and fusing. (...) (I)ts sophistication is veiled behind skein upon skein of endearingly unpretentious humour. The observational comedy is especially sharp." - Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(T)here aren't many satisfying payoffs, comic or otherwise, in The Rotters' Club, Coe's gloomy sixth novel, about teens enduring a confusing time (the mid '70s) and place (suburban Birmingham, in England's sagging rust belt). (...) Coe's logic gives us a realistically wistful story, but an unfinished one, abandoning numerous characters and tensions when it ends. That puts a heavy burden on the future Act II of The Rotters' Club -- and only Coe's hardiest readers will resist the temptation to sneak out during intermission." - Todd Pruzan, The Village Voice
  
  
• "Coe delivers a remarkably fine-grained portrait of how the signal upheavals of the time -- in everything from labor relations to musical tastes to racial politics -- convulsed the most basic ways that people made sense of their world. (...) (T)he novel stands as a welcome, complicating rebuke to the hoary genre categories that lurk behind reviewing clichés: It's both reflective and compelling, satirical and tender, wildly imaginative and painstakingly realistic." - Chris Lehmann, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Rotters' Club is a novel of Britain in the 1970s, a surprisingly rich and varied work about that odd and already so distant decade. Much of The Rotters' Club is clearly autobiographical. Coe, born in 1961, is about the same age as the four boys around whom most of the narrative revolves. He comes from near Birmingham -- the locale of most of the novel -- and attended King Edward's School there; in the novel, much of the action takes place at a King William's. (The name of the central (and most Coe-like) character, Ben Trotter (affectionately known as Bent Rotter) is certainly also a sort of homage to his King Edward's School English teacher, Tony Trott.)
       The novel is framed by brief introductory and concluding sections, set in Berlin, in 2003. It is the next generation -- the children of the youths that are at the centre of the novel -- that look back on their parents' formative years. A planned (and now available) sequel (The Closed Circle) continues the tale, jumping to the late 1990s.
       The novel proper -- with the main stories -- begins in November, 1973, with the "dark promise of an English winter". Dark and wintery, indeed, as the oil crisis was beginning to hit home, and years of economic turmoil (eventually culminating in the election of Margaret Thatcher) began. It is that brief era Coe writes about, and he captures it marvelously. The events of those years are neatly integrated into the novel, those 70s a constant, often very prominent, background.
       Dashed labour (and Labour) hopes figure large, the spectre of the coming Iron Lady looming over the pages. British Leyland is a major employer in the area, and several of the characters work there (in all capacities). British readers know what became of British Leyland, but at the time of the novel decline is merely in the air -- along with hope. Readers know all hope was dashed (though one wonders if American readers even recall British Leyland). Coe is very conscious of what happened after the period that dominates his novel -- just as he knows his readers are well-aware of it too, and come to the novel with that knowledge and experience --, and he uses this very well
       Coe captures the then still-prevalent clash of class well too. There are boys from all classes at King William's (and a prominent black student), and it remains an issue in many facets of their lives (and, more obviously, their parents' lives). Some of the confusion of the times also arises from the shifts that have begun to occur: the changing face of labour, the rise of Thatcherite ideas of meritocracy.
       The terrorist bombings of the time -- the Birmingham pub bombings, in particular -- are effectively used. The National Front, racism, anti-immigration sentiment -- and Eric Clapton's (in)famous statements at a Birmingham concert -- all also play a role. So is the shifting cultural scene, and specifically pop-music, with the rise of punk rock. One of the characters, Douglas Anderton notes years later, in a speech from 1999: "People forget about the 1970s." Coe sets out to recreate the era, to remember "how people reacted".
       "What days those had been, for unfinished stories", Claire (one of the two girls that dominate the lives of the four boys) thinks, and it is specifically unfinished stories that Coe tells -- as, indeed, The Rotters' Club, with its promised but still unavailable sequel, is as a whole.
       The Rotters' Club is much like many of Coe's previous works, in that it interweaves a large number of stories and that the narrative is presented in a variety of forms. There is a great deal of straightforward narrative, but Coe also offers letters, leaflets, articles from the school newspaper, The Bill Board, and diary entries. One of the last sections of the book is a sort of interior-monologue, a single sentence that stretches on for thirty-three pages.
       The different approaches allow Coe to strut some of his best comedic stuff: some of the school-newspaper articles (or, for example, the letters to the editor supposedly written by a parent, Arthur Pusey-Hamilton) are hilarious. Coe is a clever writer, and these different approaches -- as he also jumps between characters, storylines, and times -- make for a broad canvas. He specifically avoids filling in all the blanks for readers -- and he manages to do this in a way that is not too irritating.
       Benjamin Trotter wonders about writing (in what is parenthetically revealed to be an unpublished story, found among his papers in 2002):

But slowly, irresistibly, I can feel it beginning to dissolve into the hazy falsehood of memory. That is why I have written it down, although in doing so I know that all I have achieved is to falsify it differently, more artfully. Does narrative serve any purpose ? I wonder about that.

Bent Rotter, and Lowest Rotter. We're The Rotters' Club. You and me. Not Paul. Just you and me.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Penguin publicity page
• Conversation at Salon

• City Paper
• CritiquesLibres.com (French)
• Entertainment Weekly
• The Existence Machine
• Falter (German)
• The Guardian
• Leselust (German)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• The Modern Novel
• New Statesman
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• Publishers Weekly
• Salon
• San Francisco Chronicle
• The Spectator
• taz (German)
• The Vibe
• The Village Voice

• BBC page
• IMDb page

• The complete review's Jonathan Coe page
• Official site

• The Accidental Woman
• Bournville
• The Closed Circle
• The Dwarves of Death
• Expo 58
• The House of Sleep
• Like a Fiery Elephant
• Middle England
• Mr. Wilder and Me
• Number 11
• The Rain before it Falls
• The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim
• A Touch of Love
• What a Carve Up ! (also: The Winshaw Legacy)

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review

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About the Author:

       Born in 1961, Jonathan Coe attended Cambridge and Warwick universities. He is the author of several novels.

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© 2002-2022 the complete review

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