The Rotters' Club

First thought when I finished this? It’s the literary equivalent of The Empire Strikes Back. By which I mean an enormous amount of action that just stops instead of ending.

I definitely enjoyed it. This account of several lives – mainly pupils at a secondary school in Birmingham in the mid-1970s – is funny and touching. (Not to mention wince-inducing in the efforts of one shy, introverted boy to get along with girls. Earnest discussions of the merits of Henry Cow and Hatfield and the North aren’t the way to go.) And its evocation of the time - strikes, punk rock and the IRA bombings, not to mention meals featuring Blue Nun and salad cream and Black Forest gateaux – is so vivid you can almost smell it.

Then it all stops, with a 36-page, 13,955-word sentence that’s a perfect expression of its teenage narrator’s passion and confusion and deluded lovelorn enthusiasm, but which left me thinking: Well, what was all that about?

It turns out that it’s the first part of a trilogy, following the same characters up until the 2016 Brexit referendum. If I’d known that before I started reading, I might never have picked the book up to begin what amounts to a 1,300 page literary evocation of recent British history. But I did start, and the adventures of everyone in it did get under my skin, and now I really want to know – need to know - what happens to them all. 

I could really have done without that 13,955-word sentence though.