The Rotter's Club

The Rotters Club by Jonathan Coe. Undoubtedly it was the music of Hatfield and the North that led me to the novels of Jonathan Coe but I love the fact that these things become circular and self-referential. Check out Jonathan's Unnessesary Music on Bandcamp which is a pleasant and necessary reminder that people are not defined by the one area of work. Back to the novel - this is just a funny rites of passage for Midlands teenagers who grew up on the cusp of progressive music moving to punk. Jonathan excels in this kind of poignant satire hence the most recent Brexit travails of Middle England.

A man with two heads is very unique

Everybody is unique but some people are more unique than others. At the danger of being labelled an oxymoron I wish to pay brief homage to the totally unknown pop act that is John Greaves and Peter Blegvad. John is a bassist and pianist who has played with Henry Cow and National Health and has an unhealthy obsession with the French poet Paul Verlaine. Peter is a wordsmith and cartoonist (the Independent's Leviathan) who also doubles as a musician and has performed as part of Slapp Happy. Their two headed collaborative album Kew.Rhone is a classic and thankfully impossible to categorise. You could write a book about it - with contributions from Jonathan Coe, Carla Bley and Robert Wyatt - and you would know a great deal more about palindromes, numinosity, proverbs and even perverbs so Peter Blegvad has done just that. Like this painting 'Exhuming the First American Mastodon' by CW Peale you would get to dig (ie understand and appreciate) a little more about the author and his chum but it would still leave you with a poetically playful sense of awe and wonder at how such a beast could have lived and now go unrecognised.

Number 11 marks out of Number 10

Jonathan Coe was worried that the timing was not great for the release of his latest novel Number 11 because one of his heroes, Umberto Eco, was unleashing a satire on finance and politics at the same time called Numero Zero.

Coe's surname may be an anagramatic echo of Umberto's but I don't think the two clash in any way. On its own merits Number 11 is Coe's best and, of course, eleventh novel to date. It's also a sort of follow up to What a Carve Up! which is one of his most enjoyable novels. I prefer The Rotters' Club personally - for musical and nostalgic reasons but they're all pretty good.

This one also has a musical reference: Louise Le May's Sink or Swim from her recent and delicately beautiful album A Tale Untold which is appropriated to play a role for a talented singer who perhaps hasn't had the exposure and fame she deserves. Fiction imitating reality there. A tale untold told.

Coe has a sure touch with caricature but also with well rounded characters, particularly the young women in this story, who are completely engaging as we follow their lives, careers and experiences. The backdrop is a wry and amusing swipe at modern life and politics - not just British as the malaise and absurdities here translate widely, you just need to change the names. As an added bonus you also get a twist. I won't spoil it here but I'm not talking about a plot twist, I'm talking about a genre twist. Highly unexpected and enjoyable.