The Rotters' Club
I've just finished The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe, bought last week to celebrate the opening of The Woodstock Bookshop. I greatly appreciated the development of character as the story is told episodically, stepping through the Birmingham of the 1970s from pub bombing to picket-line crushing to impending recession, as the teenage characters grow up and start interacting with the adult world. Everyone is a witness to the unravelling, perhaps the murder, of the national myth; whether in the form of the vicious beating of the British Leyland trade unionists who travel to join the picket line at the Grunwick photo-processing plant, or the rebellion of three-fifths of embryonic prog rockers Gandalf's Pikestaff in throwing off their leading light (the book's hinge character, Benjamin Trotter) to become punk outfit The Maws of Doom; or just in the persistent undermining of the ideals of the post-war settlement by entrenched attitudes based on class antagonism and the ill-considered assumptions and prejudices of empire. I'm only a decade younger than the teenagers of the novel, and so was affected by many of the same cultural developments. The Closed Circle is the sequel, and while I intend to read it the blurb suggests that it doesn't enjoy the same perspective on the late 1990s that The Rotters' Club expresses on the earlier decade.