For details, call 02380 592261 or email: j.reilly soton.ac.uk. The title of Jonathan Coe’s sixth novel suggests a raffishly decadent coterie, but it turns out that the Club takes its name from the 1975 record by Hatfield and the North, and has only two members. They are Ben and Lois Trotter, known to their schoolfriends as Bent and Lowest Rotter Neither nickname is particularly apt. Ben, although guilty on occasion of callow cruelty, tries to be good in gratitude for a divine intercession; Lois spends much of the action in a mental hospital, traumatised by the IRA pub bombing which decapitated her boyfriend. Thereafter, it’s The Rotters’ Club contra mundum in a society Coe exposes, layer by layer, as rotten to the core.

The title of Jonathan Coe’s sixth novel suggests a raffishly decadent coterie, but it turns out that the Club takes its name from the 1975 record by Hatfield and the North, and has only two members. They are Ben and Lois Trotter, known to their schoolfriends as Bent and Lowest Rotter Neither nickname is particularly apt. Ben, although guilty on occasion of callow cruelty, tries to be good in gratitude for a divine intercession; Lois spends much of the action in a mental hospital, traumatised by the IRA pub bombing which decapitated her boyfriend. Thereafter, it’s The Rotters’ Club contra mundum in a society Coe exposes, layer by layer, as rotten to the core.
The book is set in the 1970s, mostly in Birmingham, where its author grew up, a time and place he paints grey and brown: grey people in brown clothes, brown steaks in brown Berni Inns, brown cars manufactured at British Leyland’s Longbridge plant. Yet there are lyrical passages, notably when Ben associates the flight of a yellow balloon he lost as a child, his Rosebud, with Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, and the closing soliloquy where he rhapsodises Molly Brum, yes, in a sentence that extends to 33 pages.The central characters are four pupils of King William’s direct grant school, who run its magazine. Ben emerges as perhaps most autobiographical figure in a narrative which patently draws on memory. Coe distances himself by a sort of double bluff: the story is told by Ben’s niece from the perspective of 2003, in an ironically clunky device which paves the way for a sequel This is the book’s thesis: “People forget about the 1970s.

They think it was all about wide collars and glam rock, and they get nostalgic about Fawlty Towers and kids’ TV programmes, and they forget the ungodly strangeness of it, the weird things that were happening all the time. They remember that the unions had real power in those days but they forget how people reacted: all those cranks and military types who talked about forming private armies”.Coe brings the decade, with its class war, racism and the dying throes of Old Labour, to life, making the political personal as lives are changed or touched by popular culture and seminal events: the Southall riots, the Grunwick strike, the collapse of union resistance to lay-offs at Longbridge, and the Tavern in the Town bombing. He even sends one youth to the offices of the NME, where he is disappointed not to encounter Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons Coe’s text, as always, is rich with allusions. When a girl goes missing, in what might prove tragic circumstances, her departure has echoes of the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home”, and an author so au fait with TV comedy must have enjoyed giving the Trotters the same surname as Del Boy.Reaction to some episodes might well divide along gender lines, with men of a certain age identifying with the lads’ abortive efforts to form a band (OK, their choice of name, Gandalf’s Pikestaff, is spot on) and chortling at the ritual which makes a sex object of one pupil’s schoolbag, while women conclude that adolescent males, among themselves, are as ghastly as they suspected.However, anybody would sympathise with Ben’s plight in the swimming lesson.

A bizarre rule decrees that any boy who forgets his trunks must swim naked, and Ben has left his at home. But God moves in a mysterious way and miraculously provides a pair, albeit the wrong size. This is the deity every child prays to; but alas, he so rarely turns up trumps, or trunks, in that way.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.. Work at its best is a kind of serious play. A vision of fully engaged, freely committed people applying their talents to the full haunts us.

We know the organisations who use our days would have trouble recognising such a person, and would not know what to do with them if they did. So we settle for weekend consolations: sports training, water colours, DIY, home-brewing

Work at its best is a kind of serious play. A vision of fully engaged, freely committed people applying their talents to the full haunts us. We know the organisations who use our days would have trouble recognising such a person, and would not know what to do with them if they did. So we settle for weekend consolations: sports training, water colours, DIY, home-brewing.
Or computer-hacking. Not the nasty virus-spreading, Pentagon-baiting kind but the cuddly, free software, code-sharing kind.