Not Another Teen Novel

There are many--Yanks and Brits alike--who think of England in the 1970s as a nation stuck in an eternal teatime of irrelevance, desperately struggling for a smidgen of historical attention through the Dada antics of Monty Python and David Bowie. They forget that the island nation was still paying for its once-mighty empire. They forget (if they can even remember) the 1972 flight of Ugandan Indians from the brutal regime of Idi Amin. They forget the abominable reception of the refugees in a country in which the racist, ultra-nationalist National Front proved a far stronger force than many had imagined (and they certainly forget that demigod Eric Clapton’s drunken attack upon immigration on the stage of the Birmingham Odeon in 1976). They forget the IRA.

Here comes Jonathan Coe, however, to remind us of all the above, and particularly to tell us that, in that far-off decade, there was a city called Birmingham. This Birmingham--long before Simon Rattle civilized it with a baton--was a city with a British Leyland automobile factory that had management and a union. It was a city with many pubs, some of which were destroyed by IRA bombs. Most importantly, it was a city that housed a middling public school, King William’s, “the toffs’ school,” as one automobile worker called it, that, fortunately for this novel, also admitted children of other classes and colors on scholarship.

“The Rotters’ Club” is the story of four of those children--Sean Harding, an anarchic comedian; Philip Chase, a confused artist; Doug Anderton, radical son of a British Leyland shop steward; and Ben Trotter, the son of Doug’s father’s boss--as they muddle through the “forgotten” part of the ‘70s, from factory strikes and pub bombings to the acquisition of A-levels and the loss of their virginities.

The novel takes its title from a song by the band Hatfield and the North, also the name given to young Ben Trotter and his sister Lois, whose names are wickedly mispronounced (as only adolescents can) as Bent Rotter and Lowest Rotter. Hatfield and the North, along with other forgotten bands of the ‘70s like Henry Cow and Curved Air, provide a confectionery nostalgia that Coe sprinkles occasionally upon the narrative for the reader to snort up when the tempo begins to lag.

Sad to say, the tempo not only lags but has all the canned appeal of a mid-1970s rhythm machine. Coe fails quite completely to create real characters to drive his historical novel. His gang of four and their supporting cast are less 1970s British equivalents of the American teenagers who populate “American Pie,” “Bring It On” and “Ten Things I Hate About You,” than the cartoons of “Not Another Teen Movie” with its pastiche of broad-band teenage stereotypes.

There is the token black who is good at sports, the token racist who gets his comeuppance, the token beautiful, self-involved girl who turns out (amazingly!) to have a soul, the token self-doubting writer who nevertheless gets into Oxford, the nerd, the politico, the town drunk, the innocent girl suffering from shock and depression, even the token unpronounceable Welsh town. Worst of all, there is even (thanks to a random Trotter family trip to Denmark) a token, tragic tale of the Holocaust.

Coe earnestly dredges the archives of the ‘70s from Lonely Hearts’ ads to T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” and Jonathan Wood’s definitive “Wheels of Misfortune: The Rise and Fall of the British Motor Industry” (his acknowledgments run to 21/2 pages.) And much of “The Rotters’ Club” is redolent with the byproducts of that dredging. Time and again, Coe chooses history over drama, fact over fascination. On the basis of “The Rotters’ Club,” a teenager looking backward in the year 2003 might well believe that the third dimension passed Birmingham by in the 1970s.

“The Rotters’ Club” finishes not with a bang but with a threat: “There will be a sequel to ‘The Rotters’ Club,’ entitled ‘The Closed Circle,’” says an author’s note at the end, “resuming the story in the late 1990s”--by which time, it is devoutly to be wished, the characters may have acquired some substance.

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Jonathan Levi is a contributing writer to Book Review.