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Adam Mars-Jones
Good humour … Adam Mars-Jones. Photograph: Rob Smart
Good humour … Adam Mars-Jones. Photograph: Rob Smart

Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones review – a sparky yet sad vision of gay subculture

This article is more than 4 years old

This slim portrayal of an abusive gay relationship in the 1970s is the biggest small book of the year

Adam Mars-Jones’s fiction is nothing if not intermittent. His early stories in Lantern Lecture (1981), including one where the Queen contracts rabies, won him a place on the first, influential Granta Best of Young British Novelists list in 1983. His stories focusing on Aids, collected in Monopolies of Loss (1992), put him on the second list in 1993. Clearly embarrassed at having been twice named one of Britain’s best young novelists without a novel, he wrote his brilliant debut The Waters of Thirst in a couple of months and released it the same year.

It was 15 years before his next work of fiction arrived. Pilcrow (2008) was the fat first part of a projected four-volume mega-novel about the life of a disabled gay man; the second volume, Cedilla, came in 2011. These are the great achievements of his fiction to date, though of the third volume there is no sign. (Being an Adam Mars-Jones completist is not a full-time occupation, though it is a rewarding one.) Now we have Box Hill, the slenderest of creatures, and the biggest small book of the year.

The novel tells the story of Colin, a 42-year-old Tube train driver who is looking back in 1999 at his youthful relationship with “tasty” Ray in the 1970s. They meet at Box Hill near Leatherhead – “Box Hill where the bikers go, on a Sunday” – when Colin, on his 18th birthday, literally falls over a pair of size 12 biker boots as their owner, Ray, reclines against a tree. Things move quickly on as Ray gets up and unpeels his biker leathers in a page-long unzipping (“Ray’s zips always purred when he pulled them open or closed”). Then Ray “clicked his fingers and nodded, once”.

Opening with a blowjob scene recalls Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, but Mars-Jones seasons it with his trademark good humour. Later in the book, another blowjob is described as “dutiful, somehow … like Prince Philip opening a hospital annexe”. The format of the narrative – one unbroken text, with no chapters or scene breaks – enhances Colin’s conversational voice, and often Box Hill reads like an Alan Bennett Talking Heads monologue: wry, dry, plump with words like “fumble” and “stiffies”, and with a pleasure or peculiarity on every page. (Like Ray, Mars-Jones doesn’t believe in delayed gratification.)

But despite its sparkiness, this is the saddest novel he has written. It’s subtitled “A Story of Low Self-esteem”. Colin, who is “short and fat and tired of being bullied” and grateful for the attention of good-looking Ray (whose “smile was beautiful, but it made me uneasy. I couldn’t see what I had done to deserve it”), immediately moves in with him. And however chirpily Colin tells his tale, the facts he flatly states are unsettling, and the heart sinks a little further with each blithe revelation.

Ray cuts off Colin’s hair, “which was an improvement in some ways, I expect, or he wouldn’t have done it”. He makes him sleep on the floor, “where I wanted to be but would never have dared to suggest”. And in a scene which made me yearn to pull Colin out of the pages back to safety, Ray rapes him. “I’d thought he was going to kill me with his cock, but when I found he hadn’t, after a while I started to cheer up, and to think it hadn’t been too bad, all in all.”

There are lower-key images too that are equally hard to take, such as Colin at the bedroom window, silently watching Ray clean his motorbike outside, knowing Ray will never look up at him.

Colin is in an abusive relationship masquerading as a consensual dominant/submissive one (“Why did I take you on?” asks Ray. “Nobody else would have you”), yet it provides him with a perverse sense of security that “someone else was taking responsibility”. It fits around his low self-esteem and supplies a holding place for his affection after his mutually devoted parents have locked him out of theirs.

The setting for most of the book – a certain gay milieu of the late 70s and early 80s – makes it read like a portrait of a world already gone, pre-Aids, like Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library which was set in “the last summer of its kind”. The vision Box Hill delivers of that subculture – Ray’s biker buddies come round to his house and make use of Colin too – is ugly. And there are bitterer twists to come, but by the end of the book the comfort we desperately need is provided simply by the knowledge that because Colin is telling us his story, he is still here.

Box Hill is published by Fitzcarraldo (RRP £9.99). To buy a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.

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