the rotters' club by jonathan coe
before i even get into the literary merits of the rotters' club, can i just rhapsodize a bit about the book cover? so, so perfect. and great even if you don't read the book. but, if you do - just spot on. good book cover design makes me really happy, in the geekiest of ways, and this is the best bit of synchronisity that i've come across in a while, so i just had to throw that out there.
moving on to the actually book - i quite enjoyed it and found it very enlightening. meaning i have to plead my ignorance of the world that coe recreates here. despite occassional bouts of anglophelia, i know precious little about working-class england in the 1970s. except of course that it gave birth to punk rock and the conditions had to be such to allow that to happen. but the details? a little hazy there. so i was keen on the portrayal of the declining industrial class, the stuff about the labour unions, the stuff about the i.r.a., the stuff about nme or whatever music rag it was that appeared in the book. see, coe fits a lot of that stuff in as he tells the story of four friends and classmates at a decent public school in, er, manchester (i think it was manchester). and really, school story + sprawling book with lots of characters and their intertwining lives (some of the most interesting bits of the rotters club have to do not with the boys directly, but rather with their assorted family members) + coming of age + working class + british + obviously smart writer is pretty much a winning equation for me.
because the book sprawls so much, it's almost impossible for me to do the plot encapsulation thing, which as i've already said is not really my strong point. so - a lot of stuff happens to these boys and their family. there's schoolboy pranks. sexual fumbling and conquest. affairs. death. madness. adultery. othello. bus rides. fab female characters whom i'd like to have seen more of. riots. miracles. lots of talk. bit of action. it's all pretty decent.
that being said, i thought i was going to hate hate hate the book, because there's this sort of introductory few pages that take place in the present time and feature the descendents of the characters meeting unexpectedly in germany and sitting down for a chat. and this introductory bit concludes with a terrible line, something to the extent of "cast your mind back to those crazy days in the not-so-distant past, if only you can imagine" and when the book ends there's a return to these two, mulling over this almost four hundred page book which one has seemingly just shared with the other over a languid dinner. oh many. terrible literary device and completely unnecessary and it almost made me give up on the book before it began and it still makes me angry to think about it a week or two later and really i wish i could stricken it from future editions of the book.
so yeah. also, to be pithy, the rotters club reminded me a bit of black swan green, so if you dug that one, maybe you'd like this one.
moving on to the actually book - i quite enjoyed it and found it very enlightening. meaning i have to plead my ignorance of the world that coe recreates here. despite occassional bouts of anglophelia, i know precious little about working-class england in the 1970s. except of course that it gave birth to punk rock and the conditions had to be such to allow that to happen. but the details? a little hazy there. so i was keen on the portrayal of the declining industrial class, the stuff about the labour unions, the stuff about the i.r.a., the stuff about nme or whatever music rag it was that appeared in the book. see, coe fits a lot of that stuff in as he tells the story of four friends and classmates at a decent public school in, er, manchester (i think it was manchester). and really, school story + sprawling book with lots of characters and their intertwining lives (some of the most interesting bits of the rotters club have to do not with the boys directly, but rather with their assorted family members) + coming of age + working class + british + obviously smart writer is pretty much a winning equation for me.
because the book sprawls so much, it's almost impossible for me to do the plot encapsulation thing, which as i've already said is not really my strong point. so - a lot of stuff happens to these boys and their family. there's schoolboy pranks. sexual fumbling and conquest. affairs. death. madness. adultery. othello. bus rides. fab female characters whom i'd like to have seen more of. riots. miracles. lots of talk. bit of action. it's all pretty decent.
that being said, i thought i was going to hate hate hate the book, because there's this sort of introductory few pages that take place in the present time and feature the descendents of the characters meeting unexpectedly in germany and sitting down for a chat. and this introductory bit concludes with a terrible line, something to the extent of "cast your mind back to those crazy days in the not-so-distant past, if only you can imagine" and when the book ends there's a return to these two, mulling over this almost four hundred page book which one has seemingly just shared with the other over a languid dinner. oh many. terrible literary device and completely unnecessary and it almost made me give up on the book before it began and it still makes me angry to think about it a week or two later and really i wish i could stricken it from future editions of the book.
so yeah. also, to be pithy, the rotters club reminded me a bit of black swan green, so if you dug that one, maybe you'd like this one.