Books & Poetry

John Cromer, the narrator of Adam Mars-Jones’ new novel (his first for 15 years), calls himself Pilcrow, after a ‘specialised piece of punctuation’ that marks the end of a paragraph (¶). Because of a rare form of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis contracted in early childhood, John is ‘not sure that [he] can claim to have taken [his] place in the human alphabet’ –  rather like the pilcrow, in fact, which is ‘hard to track down’ on a keyboard.

‘Pilcrow’ (the novel) is an exploration of John’s condition. Or rather, it is the adult John’s recollection of a 1950s childhood lived inside the prison of his horribly ankylosed joints. Mars-Jones has fashioned a kind of magnificently stunted Bildungsroman out of John’s predicament. It runs from the moment the disease takes hold, when John is three, to the first stirrings of his homosexual desire at a boarding school for the education of ‘Disabled but Intelligent Boys’.

There’s not much of a plot to speak of – the principal events are John’s transfer from his bedroom in his parents’ RAF house to a hospital bankrolled by the Astors, and eventually to the  Vulcan School , where he has a number of painfully choreographed sexual encounters.

It is the novel’s linguistic textures that are most striking. For example, the Cromer family’s memorably idiosyncratic  anatomical-domestic patois (‘tuppence’ for faeces, ‘scallywag’ for scrotum, ‘taily’ for penis), an argot that later betrays John to the other inmates of the children’s hospital as irredeemably ‘posh’. Mars-Jones is a virtuoso of voice, and to have sustained John’s internal monologue over more than 500 pages is some achievement.