Most authors dream of writing the book that captures a time and culture.
From the strikes and flares of the 70s, the money-fixated 80s, the clubbing 1990s through to the Internet networking craze of the celebrity-obsessed present, this random selection of contemporary British books chronicles just how much the UK has and hasn’t changed in the last 30-odd years.
Nostalgia: Schooled in the 70s and 80s
With film remakes of popular TV series such as The A-Team on the way and the resurgence in 80s-inspired music, nostalgia is still fashionable.
Two British authors in particular have written books which look back at the past with a keen eye for the social and cultural trends of the 70s and 80s.
books on British lifeJonathan Coe’s The Rotter’s Club is a tale about school and work life in the 1970s, a period of “ungodly strangeness” with industrial, racial, national and class conflict, and – Coe gleefully reminds us – titanic tribal differences in musical tastes, from torpid “prog rock” to the heaviness of Black Sabbath and the impact of punk.
The Rotter’s Club is also a book which accurately draws a picture of an unforgettable time in everyone’s life – your days at Secondary School. There are elements of this book that everyone will recognize - sarcastic English teachers, sadistic PE instructors, anarchic school jokers (the “lord of misrule” Sean Harding), epic-at-the-time romantic crushes (Benjamin Trotter’s love for Cicely), and much more. It also features – and this can’t be in everyone’s experience - how to discover God over a struggle for a pair of swimming trunks.
And to find out whether Trotter, Harding and co “sign away their senses of humour with their first mortgage payment” when they grow up, try Coe’s sequel, The Closed Circle.
Continuing with the theme of education and coming of age, David Nicholls’ Starter for Ten follows Brian Jackson’s life as he goes through University in the 1980s. Nicholls’ book takes in the 80s – plastic Socialists, arrogant Tories, ridiculous fashion trends and truly awful hair, male fixations on Kate Bush, demonstrations, and the rest - and gives some memorable pictures of University life that former students will recognize, and prospective UK undergraduates could use as a rough guide. Nicholls’ book has also been made into a film.
The Nineties: Nightclubbing
Many people point to The Stone Roses debut album and the advent of rave as the turning point in UK youth culture in the late 80s and start of the 1990s.
And if one UK author wrote about 90s club culture with more plaudits than any other, it was Irvine Welsh. The often-difficult subject matter and innovative narrative style didn’t stop his novel Trainspotting being touted as “the best book ever written by man or woman”, and his stories in Ecstasy also cover the clubbing generation. Danny Boyle’s movie adaptation of Trainspotting has recently been voted the best British film of the past 25 years.
The Noughties: Celebrity and the Internet
It’s hard to take stock and define a time that you’re still in. This decade, mischievously labeled the “noughties”, has seen a great number of inspired UK novelists produce stories of modern UK life. Here are just a couple which tackle two areas that could be said to have defined the later years of this decade.
Zadie Smith has been rightly praised for her epic debut novel White Teeth. Another of Smith’s books – The Autograph Man – intelligently and wittily tackles (amongst other things) the subject of the power of celebrity, a topic very much relevant in the early 21st Century.
On a lighter note, while we’re waiting for a serious analysis of just what the Web is doing to the way we interact with the instant ‘now’ of the Internet and social networking sites like Facebook, with Ex-Girlfiends United Matt Dunne has a witty look at how the Net could be part of a whole new level of cyber peer pressure.
Running in Social Circles
For the 70s, you could try The Buddha of Suburbia and The Reginald Perrin Omnibus; for the 80s, there are loads, such as Martin Amis’s London Fields; David Nicholls’ One Day spans from the late 80s throughout the 90s and up to the present; great books on recent times include Saturday by Ian McEwan and What Becomes by A.L. Kennedy. There are simply too many good books on the UK to do justice to in this space.
As for the book on the Internet and celebrity, Canadian Douglas Coupland – who nailed the early 1990s with Generation X – is returning just in time with Generation A, a story about the digital world. And bees….
Happy reading.
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