Teenage: the creation of youth 1875-1945, by Jon Savage

In conventional pop-culture narratives, the creation myth of The Teenager goes something like this: the period between the onset of puberty and the attainment of full maturity was always a shabby, uncomfortable refugee camp located on the border separating the Child Hood and the Adult Hood, until the simultaneous arrival of youthful affluence and Elvis Presley. At this point the Teenager was suddenly born, armed with a wallet full of cash and underwear full of raging hormones, demanding cultural control of the Western world.

So far, so familiar. In Teenage, however, Jon Savage tells a story far more fascinating for not having been dulled by repetition. There was indeed teenage life before the rock'n'roll era. By ending his tale at the climax of the Second World War, before the myths of ancient grease kick in, he not only avoids a further muddying of well-trodden ground, but enables us to view the the first half of the last century (and the last quarter of the one before that) through fresh eyes. Well-documented events - the two world wars, the Depression, the rise and fall of Hitlerism and many more - are seen from the perspective of their effect on the youth of Britain, America and continental Europe.

There was a certain amount of serendipity involved in Savage's decision to end his tale in 1945. He realised part-way through his research that to bring the story up to the present would not only result in an unmanageably large volume and extend an already lengthy writing process until the author reached pensionable age. Whichever "present" he ended up with would leave the book inevitably dated in a few years' time. By leaving off just where conventional accounts start, Savage ensures that, far from being overtaken by each unfolding twist in the teenage tale, his book will continue to cast light on future developments. Just as the Sex Pistols' iconic phrase "no future" leaps from the page when it occurs in the extract from a young hobo's story which serves as the epigraph for the chapter on "American Adolescents in the Depression", the present in which we exist and the future which awaits us are never far away.

Savage can be dry, but he is never dull. Primarily renowned for England's Dreaming, his magisterial 1991 account of the life and times of the Sex Pistols, he can bring a beguiling blend of gravitas, wit, scholarship, and a slyly appreciative eye for the subversive, to any topic he approaches. Teenage provides a panoramic scope for his talents. He rises to the occasion with massive aplomb, often finding uncanny parallels in the unfolding of events: such as the synchronicity, in the early 20th century, of JM Barrie's creation of Peter Pan and Baden Powell's founding of the Boy Scouts.

The story begins with a bang, introducing the first documented teenage serial killer and the first teenage diarist: respectively, a 14-year-old American boy in Massachusetts and a 17-year-old Russian emigrée in Paris. What is striking, by contrast, is how few teenagers from the seven decades spanned here serve as actors or narrators, taking centre-stage in the manner of Anne Frank or Arthur Rimbaud, or documenting their early lives and milieux as Jessica Mitford did, albeit in later life.

Instead, in every nation, they were subjected to intense and systematic pressure to ensure their docility and tractibility; to indoctrinate them into prevailing values and, most brutally, to enlist young males as cannon-fodder. Adolescents were considered a potential danger to themselves and to wider society.

A psychologist writing in 1944, tackling the perennial phenomenon of juvenile delinquency, compared teenagers to psychopaths: his book, Rebel Without a Cause, later provided the basis for James Dean's movie. The term "teenager" came into being just two years earlier, coined by the sociologist Talcott Parsons and coinciding in America with the launch of Seventeen magazine - the first publication to address teenage girls as a group - and the coronation of Frank Sinatra as the first real teenage idol. Entertainers before had appealed to adolescents, ranging from Rudolf Valentino to Benny Goodman, but Sinatra was the first to vie specifically for their approval.

To say that this tale carries an epic sweep is an understatement. There is suffering amid the Depression, in the trenches and during the Holocaust, and jaw-dropping heroism in the use of jazz and sartorial outrage to defy Nazism in Occupied France and Hitler's Germany. And there are as many manifestations of angst and frivolity, those time-honoured poles of teenage attraction, as could be found in an age when teenagers were not courted by corporate capitalism, and were effectively denied a voice until they matured sufficiently to have forgotten why they wanted one in the first place.

As the author reminds us in his peroration, "the future would be teenage". Beyond the horizon of Savage's narrative, during his last two decades, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and the Beatles and Rolling Stones are being born. Teenage is exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, but above all a supremely thorough, assured, affecting and involving work which makes no reference to rock'n'roll or anybody connected with it, but still smells like teen spirit.

Charles Shaar Murray's 'Crosstown Traffic' is published by Faber & Faber