Beard of the Week LIV: Waters of Thirst
This week's beard belongs to British writer Adam Mars-Jones (b. 1954); I haven't yet identified the terrier (despite the fact that they seem to be always depicted together / photo source).
Mars-Jones has a large literary reputation for an author with — until now — a surprisingly small output of fiction. I know him for two things: a collection of short stories, Monopolies of Loss (1992), and his first novel, The Waters of Thirst (1993). On the strength of those two work he's been on my personal list of favorite fiction authors for over a decade.* I have yet to read an earlier collection of short stories, Lantern Lecture (1981), nor his collection of essays, Blind Bitter Happiness (1997).
After this amount of time, given my spotty memory, I barely remember what either the novel or the short stories were about, but I do remember the intensity with which I enjoyed reading them. It was a sense of amazement at the beauty of the words Mars-Jones chose to use to tell stories that fascinated me. About The Waters of Thirst I wrote in my book of books (see footnote): "A tour-de-force, literary novel that I read as compulsively as a best-selling page-turner. Breathtaking seems an understatement." When it comes to "literary" novels I so often veer towards considering them pretentious or unreadable that I consider this high praise.
At least those two books made enough of an impression that I kept Mars-Jones' name in my mental list for over a decade of no new books coming to my attention. During that time the internet came into its own and I could do things like search for his name to find out whether he was even still alive. He was. He was mostly working as a book reviewer for the London Observer, which I thought was a bit of a let down, actually.
Ah, but this year there's been buzz. Why? Mars-Jones has just published a new novel, called Pilcrow. The reason for the buzz is that this novel, far from the slim, obviously literary The Waters of Thirst, is some 500 pages long. Not only that, but it's planned as the first book of a trilogy. This will explain the title of the review in the Telegraph: "Adam Mars-Jones: When the dam breaks" (5 April 2008).
Here is a paragraph of a review from the Guardian Books Blog ("Waiting for Pilcrow", by Ryan Gilbey, 14 March 2008)
Out of this fertile terrain has sprung – if that's not too urgent a word for a work that's been so long coming – the writer's second novel, Pilcrow, a richly-textured prequel to "Everything is Different in Your House" that runs a generous 544 pages to the original story's 23. Pilcrow (which will be published in April) covers John Cromer's life from birth, in early-1950s Bourne End, to adolescence, and places the reader squarely inside his busy-bee mind and encumbered body. While the latter is inhibited by the onset of Still's Disease, a condition exacerbated by the prescription of bed-rest ("Those years in bed had been a sort of kiln slowly baking my joints into hardness"), John's loop-the-looping imagination renders him and his prose weightless; fantasies, conceits and word-games are woven from the humblest materials. And if you thought you knew the nooks and crannies of the coming-of-age genre, to which Pilcrow tentatively belongs (at least in its latter section), then the novel will prove especially refreshing. "Adolescent fumbling" doesn't cover the extent to which John's body, and the bodies of his various objects of desire, impede the course of true lust ("Because of the inflexibility of my wrists, there was no possibility of me turning my palms towards Julian's crotch. I would have to make do with the backs of my hands").
From another review ("Adam Mars-Jones", Gay Times [UK], 8 April 2008) I particularly enjoyed reading this: "Early readers of the book have been surprised that it has the bad manners to be funny", because it reminded me that beautiful words put beautifully together can still contain a great deal of humor, and I remember that I had laughed before while reading his stories.
Some critics of Mars-Jones that I've read, generally those who find him too toney or hoity-toity, love to mention that he was a Granta "Best of Young British Novelists" in both 1983 and 1993, the first time well before he'd written a novel. (These are generally the same critics who find Granta too hoity-toity, so the association serves their purposes. One presumes that those critics had pieces rejected by Granta. Such is the objective nature of literary criticism.)
Well, one man's hoity-toity is another man's ebulliently allusive writing. As an example that I found online, you might like to read Mars-Jones' essay "Quiet, Please" (Granta 86: Film, Summer 2004), his thoughts on how important it can be to leave out the musical soundtrack occasionally and let the movie tell its story by itself. If it doesn't seem too hoity-toity to you (i.e., too Granta), you'll probably marvel at the rich expression of his writing.
Finally, from the small amount of available online Mars-Jones, this curious pair of essays. The first is "I Was a Teenage Homophone" (New Statesman, 19 June 1996); the second is "We don't want to be special now" (New Statesman, 14 February 2000). The first is a more personal work about Mars-Jones delayed puberty and delayed discovery of his own homosexuality; the second looks at the recent history of "gay liberation", finding some differences between how it happen in America and how it happens in Britain.
I expect I'll report back on Pilcrow once I've had a chance to get a copy and read it.
———-
* I read Monopolies of Loss in January of 1996, and The Waters of Thirst in February of 1997. My "Book of Books" is very convenient sometimes!
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, Faaabulosity
One Response
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Monday, 20 October 2008 at 17.37
Permalink
Well, I shall have to go back and re-read "The Waters of Thirst," which I have on my shelf, with an indication that I read it in August, 1994. Somehow it got omitted from my booklist, so I have had to insert it (and do a LOT of subsequent renumbering).
I also have in my booklist, from August 1997, "Darker proof," a collection of short stories. It doesn't appear in your list of titles here, but maybe that's because (as I have discovered after scouring the shelves and finally finding it) it's stories by Mars-Jones and Edmund White (another very literary author).