Through Plate-Glass

Ian Sansom

  • The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe
    Viking, 405 pp, £14.99, April 2001, ISBN 0 670 89252 1

There are those who like to mortise a plot, carefully and neatly, and there are those who are content simply to bang it together with panel pins and a tube or two of Gripfill. Jonathan Coe is undoubtedly the craftsman – a counter-sinking, dove-tailing, professional-finishing kind of writer. But he does get away with the occasional bodge. The framing device for his new novel, The Rotters’ Club, for example, seems to be held together with two blobs of mastic, intended to provide a solid fixing onto a sequel.

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