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Pilcrow

A boy’s own world

Adam Mars-Jones
Faber, 525pp, £18.99,

Simon Baker

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Simon Baker reviews the new novel from Adam Mars-Jones

The pilcrow is a typographical symbol which looks like this: ¶. It was once used in writing (often of the philosophical or religious kind) to indicate a new line of discussion, before the habit of physically separating work into paragraphs changed its status to that of the exotic and learned yet largely useless. It is an apt nickname for John Cromer, the narrator of this novel, who grows up in the 1950s and early 1960s as a bright yet disabled boy: like a human incarnation of the pilcrow, John has intellectual pedigree but society gives him no outlet for it.

As a child John is afflicted with Still’s Disease, a form of arthritis. It is firstly misdiagnosed as rheumatic fever, leading to disastrous treatment; when he should have been exercising, he is confined to bed, where his limbs waste. On being correctly diagnosed (initially by his mother, not a doctor), he is moved to a children’s hospital. This place encapsulates the dual character of the era: pointless rules, sadistic functionaries and a prevailing view that children should not be ‘sissies’ still exist, but there is a newer, more humane approach among some members of staff. Afterwards John attends a school for disabled children, where once again attitudes collide: there is the unpleasant matron who enjoys letting the boys freeze on winter mornings, but the gentler, more enlightened Mr Raeburn, a teacher whom John falls for. (John is aware of his homosexuality from an early age: his first fantasy involves being alone in a cave with Julian from the Famous Five series.) Throughout, John dreams of getting a place at a ‘real school’.

And that is it as far as the plot goes. Pilcrow is a fictional documentary rather than a yarn: nothing much happens to John, and in fact the novel’s whole point is to describe what it is like to be clever and yet unable to do anything. John’s doting mother, a collation of social insecurities whose goal in life is to maintain respectability, and his father, a kindly yet distant RAF man, both feature, but this novel is about the internal world of a boy who is deprived of an external world.