An exquisitely discomfiting tale of a submissive same-sex relationship, Box Hill owes its life to Fitzcarraldo Editions’ novel prize, worth £3,000 in the form of a book deal for the winning manuscript. I’d pay nearly as much to know what went through the minds of the four unpublished novelists on last autumn’s shortlist when they saw the fifth nominee was no less than Adam Mars-Jones, twice named one of Granta’s best young British novelists, and hardly in need, you would think, of a leg up from an avant garde indie publisher in south London.
Fingers crossed, Mars-Jones only wanted to flex his limbs while knee-deep in the long-rumoured third volume of his John Cromer saga, about a gay, disabled Hindu convert in the stockbroker belt. The idea that he had to win a competition to get a hearing for a book as perfectly realised as Box Hill seems as far-fetched as Nijinsky doing Strictly; yet given reports last year that James Kelman, a Booker winner, can’t find a publisher for his latest novel, who knows?
It’s 1975, before the advent of what our narrator, Colin, a trainee gardener from Middlesex, calls with Partridgesque majesty “the Aids” (“you wouldn’t say Freddie Mercury died of syndrome, would you?”). On his 18th birthday, daring to sample the gay scene on Surrey’s Box Hill, he encounters an enigmatic biker, Ray, a taut 6ft 5in to his tubby 5ft 6in.
Whisked pillion “past Chessington and Surbiton, on the A243” to the spotlit chrome and leather of Ray’s flat, Colin finds himself adapting to some alarmingly prohibitive ground rules, which include – just for starters – no sitting on the sofa and no leaving Ray’s bed unmade, even though he’s not allowed to sleep in it.
Colin’s chatty recollection in middle age (“Another funny thing…” one paragraph begins) masks the story’s teeth, glinting between the lines of his undimmed worship of Ray, whose very sweat was “an elixir” (“My sweat was no more than a waste product”). The mood of definitive retrospect indicates right away that the relationship didn’t last; we don’t know why, but there’s a distinct chill in its apparent wordlessness. Whether requesting a beer or a blowjob, Ray communicates with clicked fingers and raised eyebrows; when he asks, “What am I going to do with you?” and Colin answers, “whatever you want”, it’s one of only two moments of direct speech between them.
Still, the atmosphere is light enough early on to distract us from the deadpan horror when Colin mentions that “if the weather was unusually cold… Ray didn’t mind if I wore a few clothes”. His degradation is clearer by the time a poker player at one of Ray’s blinds-drawn Saturday night sessions presents himself to be serviced: “I wasn’t even sure he hadn’t the right to fuck me,” Colin says. “I thought I knew he didn’t, but it had never been said, and I didn’t dare to cry out…”
Adjust the contrast and Box Hill could be Fifty Shades of Ray, or a subplot in Hanya Yanagihara’s abuse chronicle, A Little Life. Yet this is a very funny book, partly because of its eye for physical comedy, recognisable from the Cromer novels (“If you’re a glasses-wearer, putting on a crash helmet presents quite a problem”). But mainly it’s because of the remarkable high-wire act by which Mars-Jones grants the narrator dignity even as he’s being sent up. Witness the moment when Colin tells us about his mother helping out a housebound neighbour: “It offended me that Mum let herself be used like that, but that was how she wanted it.”
If the first part of that makes us laugh, it’s the second part that’s key. Shock value, though it certainly exists, isn’t the game here; ultimately, our interest in the book’s twisted romance lies, instead, in how it raises intractable questions about the essential mystery of attachment between consenting adults. While the flyleaf subtitle, “a story of low self-esteem”, invites us to read Colin’s word against the grain as a study of false consciousness, the novel’s almost wicked subtlety lies in our dawning sense that to read it this way only strips him of exactly the agency we’d be seeking to defend. “Ray was good to me – he was,” Colin tells us. Rarely was so much said in a dash.
Anthony Cummins in The Guardian
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