The Writing on the Wall

I harbour – perversely, you might think – the fondest memories of two much maligned phenomena: the 1970s and Birmingham. As far as the former goes, yes, there were strikes, rising unemployment, power cuts, rampant racism, social unrest, the advent of Thatcherism. Perhaps most memorably, there was the IRA. In a pivotal scene in Jonathan Coe’s novel The Rotters’ Club (2001), the sister of the central character, Ben Trotter (school nickname Bent Rotter – hence the title), loses her fiancé in the Birmingham pub bombing.

The national scene has improved in many ways since then – of course it has. A lot of things – like the gearshift of shop steward Bill Anderton’s British Leyland car which features in the novel – didn’t work very well back then, and work much better now; and the IRA seem to have disappeared – touch wood – from these shores. But there was great contemporary music, which plays a significant part in The Rotters’ Club; there was a good deal of top-flight television that cost next to nothing to make; and in the summers the sun actually shone, consistently, or that’s how I recall it. I still have etched on my memory the sight of the Oval, during the West Indies’ tour of 1976, looking like somewhere in the Sudan. And Birmingham? Well, it’s true that as cities go, it’s no oil painting. But it is not without its attractions. There’s the Symphony Orchestra, where Simon Rattle began his career; the Birmingham Rep (ditto, Peter Brook); Aston Manor, one of our finest Jacobean houses; fabulous surrounding countryside, with Stratford-upon-Avon and the Royal Shakespeare Company just a short drive away. I knew it well during the very period in which The Rotters’ Club is set, as I had cousins who lived in its suburbs, and I loved my stays there. I was lucky, of course. I had a relatively pleasant, carefree adolescence, and I see all this through a Proustian haze of nostalgia . . . And so, for the most part at least, does Jonathan Coe. His unabashed affection for his teens, and for the city where they took place, forms the core of The Rotters’ Club – a rite-of-passage novel which should take its place as an enduring classic of the genre, in the same league as The Catcher in the Rye or Tom Sawyer. Coe himself was born in Bromsgrove, just outside Birmingham, in 1962. He attended the city’s most distinguished school, King Edward’s, where he acquired a love of literature, and of music, playing keyboards in a band and composing, as well as starting out on a fledgling literary career. The novel’s main character, Benjamin Trotter, shares these preoccupations and is, one has to assume, substantively the author himself, albeit disguised beneath a crafty cloak of ironic detachment. Likewise, the fictional school Ben attends – King William’s – is surely based on King Edward’s. The central story is that of Ben and his friends, a group of startlingly clever teenagers, the boys at King William’s, the girls at its sister school. As with all bright kids, aspirations are already forming, or even (in the case of Ben’s friend Doug, who is contributing to New Musical Express while still in the sixth form) starting to be fulfilled. And sex has reared its head, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful (as when Ben finally beds the miraculous Cecily Boyd) and always perplexing. Coe’s trick is to create, with his well-chosen, unerringly drawn clutch of characters, a scenario to which we can all relate – the trials and tribulations, the hopes and fears, of adolescence. Anyone – or at least anyone who, at that age, was educated and either middle-class or upwardly mobile – can board a time machine and go back to that sometimes enchanted, sometimes baleful time in their life. Coe’s teenagers are an intelligent, articulate, engaging bunch, but not so much so as to be unconvincing. As we watch them progress from middle school (1974) to A levels and Oxbridge Entrance (1978), Coe never sentimentalizes them. We are given strictly warts-and-all portrayals of each. Here we have a narrative that performs the magic trick of making us care about what happens to its subjects. And these young characters, like all adolescents, are already not merely participating in, but actually creating, history. They are prophetic as well as lifelike creations. Doug, the precocious, go-getting NME contributor, is in many ways an ’80s animal, for all his left-wing background. Harding, the enigmatic, seemingly fascist outsider, heralds the advent of the new right, with his outrageously reactionary, yet at the same time satirical, japes and outbursts. And Ben, with his self-absorption and essential apathy, in some ways prefigures the Blair era. But this is not merely a rite-of-passage novel. The canvas is broader than that. Alongside the teenage dramas, other events of wider significance are unfolding in the city, through which Coe conjures up a vivid picture of a country in turmoil. Interwoven with the lives of the adolescent protagonists are those of their parents. Two of the fathers work at British Leyland’s troubled Longbridge plant which is, unbeknownst to its workers, on the brink of mass redundancies. Through the life of the factory we get a vivid picture, drawn from a distinct, but never didactic, left-wing standpoint, of a famously, fascinatingly troubled decade. The sense is clear of a once-great nation now in the doldrums, having reached a turning-point in its history. The resulting upheavals may have been necessary, but they were nonetheless scary, and not just because people were required to spend quite a lot of time, of an evening, in pitch darkness or candlelight. Whole areas of this country, Coe is reminding us, were devastated by the new economics that came in with Callaghan and Thatcher, and it took them a long time to recover. We forget now that Birmingham, and cities like her, used once actually to make things. When Bill Anderton, the philandering Longbridge shop steward, whose bright boy Doug attends King William’s, goes to hear the new British Leyland chairman Michael Edwardes address a mass meeting to explain forthcoming ‘rationalization’, he realizes that the writing is on the wall for socialism, and collective bargaining, and for compassion too. His career as a radical bruiser is over. So, as it happens, are his days as a serial adulterer, and perhaps this second emasculation is a metaphor for the first. Have I mentioned that this is a comic novel? It may, so far, have sounded rather serious, but it is liberally peppered with hilarious episodes. Perhaps the funniest of these is the attempted seduction of one of the King William’s parents by her son’s art teacher. The latter is a dandy, too educated for his own good, whose foppishness expresses itself principally in a ludicrously flowery vocabulary. In order to fend off his rival, the aggrieved husband (a Brummie coach-driver of little brain) decides to fight fire with fire and broaden his vocabulary. He gets hold of a couple of self-help books and drafts a letter, which he never sends – he ends up simply blowing an enormous raspberry down the phone. But the unsent letter is worthy of Amis or Waugh at their best: ‘You are the very personification of narcissistic obliquity. Your effrontery and culpability are beyond the terminus of legitimate forbearance . . .’ and so it goes on. Not only is this brilliantly funny, it’s as much about the class warfare Coe is recollecting elsewhere in the novel as it is about conjugal jealousy. In the end, Coe suggests, the workers at Longbridge lose their battle with the bosses as much because of poor education as economic realities. They lack the weapons of language – weapons that some of their offspring, brighter, better educated, are busily acquiring.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 52 © Ranjit Bolt 2016