The Rotters' Club Jonathan Coe Viking, 416pp, £14.99 ISBN 0670892521

The dust jacket is textured to resemble woodchip wallpaper. As you would expect, the novel it enfolds is set in the 1970s. The storyline follows a group of Birmingham schoolkids from the time of the oil crisis to the eve of Margaret Thatcher's arrival in Downing Street, five and a bit years later.

Benjamin Trotter, more or less the central character, is the artistic one, though he can't decide whether to be a writer or a composer. His evil little brother, Paul, is a precociously fanatical Tory, plotting the destruction of socialism from age nine, while his big sister, Lois, is interested only in her nice hippie boyfriend, Malcolm. Benjamin and Lois are known at school as Bent Rotter and Lowest Rotter, so they call themselves "the Rotters' Club", which happens to be the title of an album track by Malcolm's favourite progressive rock band, Hatfield and the North.

Benjamin's friend Doug Anderton is the leftish one who wants to be a journalist. Phil Chase - well, he seems all right, but there isn't a convenient peg to hang him on, so you sometimes confuse him with Doug, or else forget him altogether. Sean Harding, much discussed but seldom seen, is the anarchic one, the slightly out-of-control practical joker.

Jonathan Coe starts with a little light lifestyle nostalgia and swiftly darkens the tone. Benjamin's father, Colin, is a manager at the troubled Longbridge car plant where Doug's father, Bill, is a shop steward. (Don't look at me - this barrage of names is just as confusing in the book itself, although only for the first 200 pages or so.) They meet over a Berni Inn steak dinner to discuss how British Leyland's appalling industrial record can be improved. They suspect they may fail, and the reader knows they will. Trying to get into his executive Austin 1800 in the car park afterwards, Colin has problems with the door lock he himself designed. Symbolic, if you like.

Racism is another of Coe's themes. Bill struggles to restrain his Paki-baiting colleagues while, at school, Doug is the only boy cool enough to call his classmate "Steve" instead of "Rastus".

As is the norm in historical novels, the characters tend to be caught up in historic events. Lois and Malcolm go for a drink at the Tavern in the Town on the very night that the IRA leaves a bomb there. Colin's 1976 summer holiday snaps are sent to the Grunwick processing lab in London and don't come back for two years because of the famous strike over union recognition. Bill joins the mass picket at Grunwick and is on the receiving end of a police baton charge. The same thing later happens to Doug at the big anti-National Front march in Southall.

One of Doug's school magazine articles impresses the editor of the New Musical Express. However, when Doug pays a painfully casual visit to the NME offices, Coe does things the classy way: Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill aren't there, nor is Nick Logan or Charles Shaar Murray; in fact, the place is near deserted. Even so, Doug gets picked up by a posh punk girl - no contradiction, punk was quite a posh fad at first - and attends an early gig by The Clash.

The boys seem remarkably lucky with girls. The girls are always interested and never fail to do the asking. It's life, Jim, but not as we know it. Even Benjamin's hopeless infatuation with Cicely, the school beauty, turns out not to be quite so hopeless after all, though Cicely makes clear, with masterly irony, that this is not necessarily good news for Benjamin.

There are many other elements to the story, and a nice mix of techniques: standard third-person narration, stream of consciousness, letters, magazine pieces, a speech made by Doug in later life, a short memoir written by Benjamin. Only the clumsy framing device, a sequence set in 2003, fails to work. The teenage son of one character and the teenage daughter of another meet by chance in Berlin and fall into conversation about their parents' adolescence, a subject most teenagers cannot bear to contemplate. "Let's go backwards . . . Back to a country that neither of us would recognise . . . Just think of it! A world without mobiles or videos or PlayStations . . ." Someone should have persuaded Coe out of this.

The Rotters' Club, for all its occasional overegging and its self-conscious deployment of issues, is a superior entertainment. The pages seem to turn themselves, and Coe's oblique humour allows the romantic and satirical to combine without undercutting each other. The effect is vastly enjoyable - so much so that 400 pages isn't really enough, and the promised sequel will be more than welcome.

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