The first book of the year
Jan. 12th, 2020 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustAmong all the ways in which I am urged to improve myself for the new year, I have been seeing exhortations to read books from outside my comfort zone. I don't suppose that what they have in mind is very successful comic novels, but that is what circumstances dropped into my lap. It happened like this: during our pre-Christmas visit, durham_rambler's brother recommended Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, which was surprising mostly because this is not a conversation we usually have; he'd come across it, I think, because a grandson was reading it at school. Back home, a copy of it waved to me from the used book stall at the market, only a pound, explained the stallholder, because of its condition (it wasn't in terrible condition, but someone had clearly been reading it). While we were chatting, I mentioned that I'd been looking out for a copy of Michael Palin's Erebus, and would probably now buy the new paperback: surprised, he reached behind his seat and pulled out a nice shiny hardback copy, just in. So that was a two-coincidence purchase.
Coincidences never come singly: as I was nearing the end of The Rotters' Club, it was announced that Jonathan Coe had won the Costa Novel Award, for Middle England, which is a sequel to The Rotters Club, if only in the sense that it has the same central character. The judges have been praising Middle England as a Brexit novel, and the perfect fiction for these times - which makes it an odd sort of sequel for The Rotters' Club, which is, among ither things, a historical novel.
The Rotters' Club, first published in 2001, takes its central characters through the mid-1970s, by way of a framing device set in Berlin in 2003. I don't know why the author chose to open the novel in a future that only its first readers would see as the future: this is only the first of a number of things I don't know about the book. I don't think this is a result of my long-standing problem with comedy. It's in the nature of that problem that I could be wrong, but there are numderous scenes and situations that I recognise as funny, even if they are not the kind of funny that makes me laugh. Does being a comedy justify leaving a number of loose ends? It might, I suppose, if lines followed in pursuit of a joke were not always tidied away - but not every unfinished story is obviously funny, and at least one is quite the opposite. Does this make me want to read a sequel? Not in itself, no, though I might read it for other reasons: The Rotters' Club is enjoyable and very clever.
The title is taken from a record by Harfield and the North, a real-life band about whom I know only where they got their name from (road signage in north London). This is important to the central character, Benjamin Trotter, partly because he likes the music and partly because his school nickname deforms his name, Ben Trotter, to Bent Rotter. His sister Lois is likewise Lowest Rotter, and it is stated explicitly that the adoption of the title, the Rotters' Club, expresses a bond between them - despite which, it is Ben who is central to the book. But it's also an assertion of the importance of music to the characters, and I liked how this was handled. Most of the references are to bands I know only by name (though there is also a scene which focusses on Vaughan Williams): this isn't a disadvantage.
Music provides much of the detail which anchors the narrative in the 1970s; but while the adolescents are going to gigs and forming - or failing to form - bands, their parents are involved in industrial relations, or drinking Blue Nun. or waiting for their holiday photographs to return from the processors (though since the company concerned is Grunwick, it's a long wait).
There is, in other words, a lot of period detail: yet one thing which is never mentioned is the women's movement. The timespan is precisely that of the introduction of the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts, but they don't impinge. I've already noted that if Lois constitutes half the title, she doesn't have half the author's interest: despite her major part in the events of the novel, the narrative is more concerned with the impact on Ben than in Lois herself. This is fair enough; the author gets to choose what book they write. But it is noticeable (or at least, I found myself noticing) that a book with multipke characters and multiple narrators (and some real stunt writing going on here) still manages to fail the Bechdel test.
tl;dr version: I enjoyed it, I'm glad to have read it. And now I'm glad to be back in my comfort zone, reading Simon Morden's Bright Morning Star.
durham_rambler's brother recommended Jonathan Coe's The Rotters' Club, which was surprising mostly because this is not a conversation we usually have; he'd come across it, I think, because a grandson was reading it at school. Back home, a copy of it waved to me from the used book stall at the market, only a pound, explained the stallholder, because of its condition (it wasn't in terrible condition, but someone had clearly been reading it). While we were chatting, I mentioned that I'd been looking out for a copy of Michael Palin's Erebus, and would probably now buy the new paperback: surprised, he reached behind his seat and pulled out a nice shiny hardback copy, just in. So that was a two-coincidence purchase.Coincidences never come singly: as I was nearing the end of The Rotters' Club, it was announced that Jonathan Coe had won the Costa Novel Award, for Middle England, which is a sequel to The Rotters Club, if only in the sense that it has the same central character. The judges have been praising Middle England as a Brexit novel, and the perfect fiction for these times - which makes it an odd sort of sequel for The Rotters' Club, which is, among ither things, a historical novel.
The Rotters' Club, first published in 2001, takes its central characters through the mid-1970s, by way of a framing device set in Berlin in 2003. I don't know why the author chose to open the novel in a future that only its first readers would see as the future: this is only the first of a number of things I don't know about the book. I don't think this is a result of my long-standing problem with comedy. It's in the nature of that problem that I could be wrong, but there are numderous scenes and situations that I recognise as funny, even if they are not the kind of funny that makes me laugh. Does being a comedy justify leaving a number of loose ends? It might, I suppose, if lines followed in pursuit of a joke were not always tidied away - but not every unfinished story is obviously funny, and at least one is quite the opposite. Does this make me want to read a sequel? Not in itself, no, though I might read it for other reasons: The Rotters' Club is enjoyable and very clever.
The title is taken from a record by Harfield and the North, a real-life band about whom I know only where they got their name from (road signage in north London). This is important to the central character, Benjamin Trotter, partly because he likes the music and partly because his school nickname deforms his name, Ben Trotter, to Bent Rotter. His sister Lois is likewise Lowest Rotter, and it is stated explicitly that the adoption of the title, the Rotters' Club, expresses a bond between them - despite which, it is Ben who is central to the book. But it's also an assertion of the importance of music to the characters, and I liked how this was handled. Most of the references are to bands I know only by name (though there is also a scene which focusses on Vaughan Williams): this isn't a disadvantage.
Music provides much of the detail which anchors the narrative in the 1970s; but while the adolescents are going to gigs and forming - or failing to form - bands, their parents are involved in industrial relations, or drinking Blue Nun. or waiting for their holiday photographs to return from the processors (though since the company concerned is Grunwick, it's a long wait).
There is, in other words, a lot of period detail: yet one thing which is never mentioned is the women's movement. The timespan is precisely that of the introduction of the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts, but they don't impinge. I've already noted that if Lois constitutes half the title, she doesn't have half the author's interest: despite her major part in the events of the novel, the narrative is more concerned with the impact on Ben than in Lois herself. This is fair enough; the author gets to choose what book they write. But it is noticeable (or at least, I found myself noticing) that a book with multipke characters and multiple narrators (and some real stunt writing going on here) still manages to fail the Bechdel test.
tl;dr version: I enjoyed it, I'm glad to have read it. And now I'm glad to be back in my comfort zone, reading Simon Morden's Bright Morning Star.
