Rotters' Club [Hardcover]

Jonathan Coe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition (Unsta edition (March 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670892521
• ISBN-13: 978-0670892525
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,498,080 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You won't fool the children of the Revolution -- oh, no, November 28, 2005

By 

Alysson Oliveira "Alysson Oliveira" (Sao Paulo-- Brazil) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rotters' Club (Paperback)

Nearly the end of Jonathan Coe's extremely funny masterpiece "The Rotters' Club", one of T. S. Eliot's poem is quoted. "Time present and time past / are both perhaps time future", and it is interesting that throughout the whole novel this is exactly what the writer is trying to state -- and he does so admirably.

Past and present walks hand in hand in "The Rotters' Club" -- such as in life. Our present is the result of the mistakes we made in the past. And the novels' characters -- as anyone -- have committed a lot of mistakes -- even though most of them are in their teens. As soon as we are born we start to make wrong choices.

Placed in the `70s, Coe uses Britain politics are the background for the story of Ben Trotter (a.k.a. Bent Rotter) and his friends. This is the period when the kids discover love, sex and above all that life is hard. In this fashion, the writer paints a paint a multicultural and multilayered portray of living in England in a troubled time, when IRA was bombing places and strikes were taking place all over the country.

Coe also exploits the kids' parents' lives exposing that not only youngsters are liable to commit idiotic mistakes. As a result he writes some of the funniest and saddest moments in the novel. Betrayal, failure and frustration seem to be the main cause of domestic problems.

Avoiding the common narrative, Coe brings to his text pages of characters' diaries, letters, school newspaper and even short stories written by them. In this sense the novel never falls the boredom because there always is something new and exciting in those pages.

The characters are amazingly real. And in the end one has the feeling that has met them in flesh and blood -- which is almost true since we have learned so much about them, that it is like we are all friends and part of the Rotter's club. And the fact that Coe wrote a sequel to the novel, called "The Full Circle", is even reason of joy, since we'll be able to meet our friends again and see what have happen to them in time present, time past and time future.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Does narrative serve any purpose? I wonder about that.", November 27, 2005

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Rotters' Club (Paperback)

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