Odd characters

Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off.

Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. That book described the early life of John Cromer, a boy whose joints are fused by arthritis. Most of it saw him bed-bound, whether at home in Bucks, at hospital, or boarding at a school for the disabled, where, sizing up the bulges in his classmates’ trousers, he wowed his dormitory with an unrivalled ability to talk filth after dark.

The new book gets out more. Over the course of the 1960s, John has corrective surgery (painfully botched), passes his driving test, flies to India for five weeks to learn about Hinduism (two unlikely milestones teasingly flagged in Pilcrow), sits A-levels at a mainstream grammar school and gets a place at Cambridge. Family life is still vexed: a rift opens with his ever-fretful mum when she finds some mild porn while rooting round in his bag one vacation (young men in ‘socks and not a lot else’).

It seems that dozens of characters waft through these pages: a Falangist Spanish teacher, a hippyish ad exec, Michael Aspel … Sometimes you want them to stick around for longer. I could have done with more from the bolshy vegan Rebecca, one of the few characters in the book who seems a match for John’s psychic grit. (As she points out, he’s a mere vegetarian.) But Mars-Jones gives his narrative a clever alibi that manages to be emotionally persuasive while taking an axe to the trappings of realism:

I don’t shine at this sort of description. The truth is that I resent having to do it. Why should I sift through the various individuating traits — precise shade of eye colour, stature, mannerisms — to convey a vivid impression when all anyone needs to say to pick me out, apparently, is ‘John’ and then ‘You know, John in a wheelchair’.