ARTEMIS FOWL

Trotter, Harding, Anderton and Chase: sounds like a legal conglomerate, according to their wearily sarcastic English master. But in fact they are a quartet of young friends at a Birmingham school, and the narrative of The Rotters' Club is about to take them on an unforgettable ride through the surreal landscape of the 1970s. Sean Harding's anarchic humour makes him a mythical figure, both among his fellow pupils and at the girls' school next door. Doug Anderton begins to absorb the political lessons of his father, a leading shop steward at British Leyland's Longbridge plant. Philip Chase struggles to live with his parents' faltering marriage and the collapse of his progressive rock band, whose career is shorter than a Yes concept album. And for Benjamin Trotter, aspiring novelist, part-time composer and closet Christian, life will never have any meaning until he can find some way to make the beautiful Cicely sit up and take notice of him. Together, these friends inherit the editorship of their school magazine, and soon new arguments begin to rage: which is more worthy of the front page, the story of a bitter industrial dispute in far-off London, or the equally bitter sporting rivalry between the loathsome Culpepper and Steve Richards, the only black pupil in the entire school? The Rotters' Club is a zestful comedy of schoolchildren in crisis and adults in trauma; a novel in which the personal and the political intersect suddenly and without warning; a memoir of a long-lost era which shows that racism and class warfare could be just as rife in a school common room as on a car manufacturer's shop floor. Witty, poignant and oddly romantic, it will do for the 1970s what Jonathan Coe's classic novel What a Carve Up! has already done for the 1980s.