18 Jan 2011 01:48:29
Cedilla is even longer and stranger than its predecessor, Pilcrow, and it is just as unsettling, disarming, and compellingly readable. Adam Mars-Jones has created a narrative about disability that disables conventional critical vocabulary. It is a weird achievement, accomplished with panache, and forged in some region of the literary imagination that defies easy explanation. On one level, this novel is a cross between Proust and Nigel Slater, featuring sickly adolescence, inversion, ambiguous waiters and obsessively detailed retro recipes, but it moves beyond this well-explored domestic terrain to a gripping and perilous scene on a sacred Indian mountain featuring a holy cow. In literary terms, it is impossible for this scene to succeed, particularly for a reader uninterested in Hindu thought and the concept of the Dark Age of the 432,000 years of the Kali Yuga, in which, apparently, we live. It cannot work, but it does. I give up. I am disarmed and disabled.
Cedilla
by Adam Mars-Jones
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In Pilcrow we followed our narrator John Cromer from early infancy and the crippling onset of Still's disease through various formative experiences, some intellectual, some gastronomic and some sexual, and came to admire his courageous tenacity. He was a charmer and a manipulator, because he had to be, and he manipulates the reader as skilfully as he manipulated parents, teachers and school friends. On what grounds can you reproach or disbelieve such a storyteller? You cannot mug a boy in a wheelchair. We left him on the verge of insisting on going to a normal school, and now we follow him there, and on to India in his gap year, and then to Cambridge, where he manages to complete his degree. We already knew he would, against the odds, learn to drive a Mini, and his specially adapted little red car, donated by his monstrously dominating and generous grandmother, features colourfully in many sequences, and is still with him, crucially, on the last page. (The BSM driving lessons are very well done.) We are also taken through pages of painful surgery to adapt John's body for the adapted Mini, to create the functional Adlerian synthesis. Mars-Jones puts us through a great deal of pain, and at times one must wonder if there is a gratuitous or sadistic pleasure in inflicting it upon us. But somehow the question seems presumptuous. John had to put up with it, and so must we.
Cedilla
by Adam Mars-Jones
Buy it from the Guardian bookshop
Search the Guardian bookshop
In Pilcrow we followed our narrator John Cromer from early infancy and the crippling onset of Still's disease through various formative experiences, some intellectual, some gastronomic and some sexual, and came to admire his courageous tenacity. He was a charmer and a manipulator, because he had to be, and he manipulates the reader as skilfully as he manipulated parents, teachers and school friends. On what grounds can you reproach or disbelieve such a storyteller? You cannot mug a boy in a wheelchair. We left him on the verge of insisting on going to a normal school, and now we follow him there, and on to India in his gap year, and then to Cambridge, where he manages to complete his degree. We already knew he would, against the odds, learn to drive a Mini, and his specially adapted little red car, donated by his monstrously dominating and generous grandmother, features colourfully in many sequences, and is still with him, crucially, on the last page. (The BSM driving lessons are very well done.) We are also taken through pages of painful surgery to adapt John's body for the adapted Mini, to create the functional Adlerian synthesis. Mars-Jones puts us through a great deal of pain, and at times one must wonder if there is a gratuitous or sadistic pleasure in inflicting it upon us. But somehow the question seems presumptuous. John had to put up with it, and so must we.
