Coming-of-age novels are often entertaining and strike a sentimental
chord among readers, but they rarely leave a profound and durable
print. Exceptions are some of the greatest novels of all time, like Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Magic Mountain.
When you close Pilcrow
(Adam Mars-Jones, London, Faber & Faber, 2008, 525 pp.) after
reading its last paragraph you feel excited, happy, full, and at the
same time puzzled. And you want to start reading it again, right then.
Which is the sign of a great book. It happens for example at the end of
Remembrance of Things Past, which is not a lesser reference than the novels previously mentioned...
There
is a discrepancy between the beginning of the novel and its end, as if
a second volume would follow... And maybe it will. Hopefully (In an
interview with Jasper Rees in the Telegraph, April 4th 2008, Mars-Jones reveals that Pilcrow
is the first in a projected trilogy). When the book opens, John Cromer,
the narrator, 'years and years later,' remembers the spring when he
learned to drive. It was 1968 and he was 18 years old:
The
spring I learned to drive, the cherry tree in front of our house on
Bourne End flowered as never before. It was 1968. Driving meant a lot
to me as an idea. I felt that mastery of a car was a big step on the
way to mastery of a life.
From there John Cromer takes us back from his birth to his adolescence in this captivating bildungsroman.
When the volume ends, he is 15 years old, and we have not closed the
gap with the first pages, which, by then, have become a puzzle.
The
novel is beautifully written as a memoir by an adult often adopting a
child's perspective with a fine sense of humor, underlined by great
intelligence, and psychological acumen. And no sentimentalism.
After
his birth John 'was a text-book healthy baby, a magazine-cover specimen
of infant.' But his life only really begins when he is about 3 years
old:
My life began with a fever.
The pain came only at night, to start with. Starting in the knee. Hot
and dizzy. At two in the morning I'd be screaming, then by
breakfast-time I would almost have forgotten. All childhood illnesses
are dramatic, but this was more dramatic than most. I would scream for
quite a while without stopping, and I couldn't bear for my knee to be
touched. Mum gave me aspirin, so many that once I saw two Mums coming
into the room.
After spending some time in the hospital he
is sent home with a diagnosis, rheumatic fever, and a treatment, strict
bed rest. I cannot resist but read aloud some more, showing the
author's precise prose, humor and intelligence:
I had my diagnosis, or rather Mum and
Dad did. But diagnosis without cure or even treatment is cold comfort.
There was nothing to be done for me. To be more accurate: nothing was
to be done by me. I was to do nothing. In rheumatic fever it is the
heart that gives concern. Permanent damage can be done to it.
Additional strain must be avoided.
If you're a patient who isn't
positively going to die, so that sooner or later your condition is
likely to improve, then the chances are you'll be on the receiving end
of whatever treatment is currently the fashion. In the seventeenth
century I would have been bled. In the 1950s the prevailing wisdom
required no special equipment. I was simply put to bed. Bed with no
supper was a punishment. Until you say you're sorry. Bed res till
you're better was doctors' orders, however long it took.
John is confined to his yellow roses wallpapered bedroom. His
interaction with the world is limited to his impoverished middle-class
parents, a younger brother, Peter, his grandmother, the doctor, the
cleaning girl and a teacher coming several times a week to their house
when he reaches the age of five, all extraordinarily sketched. Of
course the diagnosis was wrong. What the young boy has in fact is a
rare condition called Still's Disease, a severe form of juvenile
idiopathic arthritis. While both Still's Disease and rheumatic fever
are untreatable conditions, as the narrator explains, staying as
motionless as possible, as he had, was the worst imaginable thing for
the former: 'A boy with Still's Disease had different obligations. His
job would have been to keep his limbs in constant gentle movement, so
as to minimize the sizing up of the joints.' It leaves poor young
narrator in a crippled state difficult to imagine. He has become the
pilcrow of the title: ¶, immobilized by the stiffening of most of his
joints in an elongated position which not only physically resembles the
strange typographic character: 'I'm not sure I can claim to have taken
my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh
letter. I'm more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla,
umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or
typewriter.'
John spends the following years in specialized
institutions, first the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in
Buckinghamshire County, west of London, then the fictional Vulcan
School. Through light strokes we are provided with a description of his
terrifying condition, en passant, without any sentimentalism.
The portraits of the hospital staff, nurses, doctor, matrons, teachers,
fellow boys and girls are sometimes cruel, always psychologically
sound, and often funny. John's character and cleverness make him a very
likable and attaching character.
The other ongoing theme in the
novel is that John is gay. Hints are provided, initially subtle,
starting in the first pages. It is never felt as an issue by him, at
least in this volume, despite the era in which the novel is set... When
he grows up his sexual urges increase. But what can the sexuality of a
crippled boy, unable to care for himself in the most simple situations
of life, be? How can a disable gay young man get 'to mastery of his
life?'
Adam Mars-Jones is an English writer born in London in 1954. Lantern lecture, his first collection of stories appeared in 1981. It was followed in 1992 by Monopolies of Loss,
a collection of short stories about Aids, some of which were previously
published, together with two short stories by Edmund White, in The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis. In 1993 he published a short novel, The Waters of Thirst, recounting the life of a gay man with a congenital kidney disease. Mars-Jones has also published a collection of essays, Blind Bitter happiness (1997).
Pilcrow is his most ambitious novel to date. A masterpiece in the making? How strange that no American edition is available...
2009.02.01
