Book of the Week: The Rotters' Club

SAN DIEGO, March 12 (UPI) -- "The Rotters' Club" (by Jonathan Coe $24.95 Knopf, 419 pages) is an immensely enjoyable read by the author of "The Winshaw Legacy," which ferociously explored the 1980s in Margaret Thatcher's England.

Jonathan Coe promises us a sequel at the end of this novel; "The Closed Circle" will pick up the story in the 1990s. Meanwhile, we join a cast of characters, four schoolboys, four chums struggling with their nascent awareness of "real" life, their awakening sexuality and their family problems in 1970s England -- Birmingham, to be precise.

This novel explores their dreams and ambitions intertwined with the bigger picture of life in industrial Birmingham: labor disputes, growing unemployment, racism and politics, as well as the daily struggles of their parents' lives.

Music plays a big part in the novel as well as in the boys' life. They compose and play it as well as listen to it. They discover new trends like punk rock or, as one person in the book puts it, "dole-queue rock" -- bands like the Sex Pistols and The Clash, music that mirrored the growing chaos of English society. They try to make sense of it, but after awhile decide that it doesn't matter after all. "What's it all about, though, the Cold War? I mean, why's it called the Cold War in the first place?"

"Well," said Benjamin, struggling to raise some interest in this topic, "I expect it is very cold in Berlin, isn't it?"

"But it's all to do with America and Russia, I thought."

"Well, it's definitely cold in Russia. Everybody knows that." "And why's it called Watergate? What's President Nixon supposed to have done?"

"I don't know."

"Why's petrol got so expensive?"

Benjamin shrugged.

"Why do the IRA go round killing everybody?"

"Because they're Catholics?"

"Why are we having power cuts?"

"Because of the unions?" He turned up the volume, sensing the approach of what was already a favorite passage. "Listen to this bit -- it's brilliant."

Philip sighed, and began to pace the room, seemingly not at all satisfied with their collective grasp of current affairs. "We don't know much about the world, do we?" he said. "Really, when you think about it?"

"So what? What does it matter?"

Philip decides that indeed it may not matter, maybe it was more important to do well at school, pass the exams, get published in the school paper, and most of all catch the attention of girls. Girls, of course, as every young man knows, occupy their every waking thought. "How often do you think about girls with no clothes on?"

Benjamin gave this question the serious thought it deserved.

"Quite often," he said. "All the time, in fact."

"Do you undress girls with your eyes? Try to, I mean?" "Sometimes. You know, you try not to stare at them that way, but then again, you can't help it. It's only natural."

Racism is also a part of their life, with the token black student, Steve Richards, bearing the brunt of it, from being nicknamed "Rastus" to his ongoing feud with another of the students, Culpepper, that ends up having such a dramatic impact on his life. It was the time of Idi Amin and the influx of Asian refugees from Uganda, of intense labor union activity, and people thinking that maybe Enoch Powell had been right.

Powell, by the way, was a Conservative politician who made a speech later known as "The Rivers of Blood" speech in which he warned about the dangers of immigration, especially from the Commonwealth nations. It was also the time of IRA activity, and bombs, and racism and hatred towards the Irish too. There was talk of "droves of dark-skinned sub-racials," (those were the days before political correctness), "race-degeneration," "the lie of racial equality," and "the threat to our Nordic birthright of freedom."

All of this would supposedly lead the nation into "the maws of doom," an ominous sound which becomes the name of the pop group formed by the boys' friends.

Another interesting aspect of the novel is the premise that J. R. R. Tolkien, a native of Birmingham much in the entertainment news these days, was as much a racist as his fellow Brummie, Enoch Powell. The boys are all fans of "The Lord of the Rings," and recognize in their own surrounding countryside the author's descriptions of Bag End and Hobbiton-across-the-Water, home of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. It is both ironic and touching that Benjamin, like his grandparents, feels intense affection for his corner of the world.

"It wasn't just the slow inclines and occasional muted, autumnal glades of this semi-pastoral backwater that made him think of the Shire; the inhabitants themselves were hobbit-like, in their breezy indifference towards the wider world, their unchallenged certainty that they were living the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible locations."

The story is told from several different points of view, which allows us different perspectives, sometimes on the same events.

The last chapter is a tribute (?) to James Joyce. It is written like the last chapter in "Ulysses," (which one of the characters in "The Rotter's' Club" is reading), without periods, a run-on stream of consciousness passage with the famous "yes, and yes" cropping up now and again. It is all very tongue-in-cheek, and the novel ends with a prediction that Margaret Thatcher will never become Prime Minister of England, which, of course, she did.

Benjamin thinks that God not only exists, "but he must be a genius, a comic genius, to have made everything in the world so funny, everything from Sam and his crazy predictions right down to the dark beery circle my glass has just left on this green coaster."

I don't know about God, but I do know that Jonathan Coe is a comic genius and has given us a rollicking good tale in "The Rotters' Club," with promises of more to come.