Review Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – a semi-infinite novel

Review

Caret by Adam Mars-Jones review – a semi-infinite novel

This article is more than 3 years old

The third instalment in the brilliantly immersive autobiography of tragicomic creation John Cromer takes a picaresque tour of 1970s England

Sarah Crown

Wednesday 16 Augusto 2023

C

aret is the third volume of what Adam Mars-Jones’s publisher has dubbed a “semi-infinite novel”: the moment-by-moment autobiography of his tragicomic creation, John Cromer. Like the first two, it takes a proofreading mark for its title. Pilcrow, volume one, was named after the paragraph break symbol; the second, Cedilla, after the Ç accent. Caret, meanwhile, is a mark used by subeditors to indicate a missing word – so it’s clear from the off that Mars-Jones can take, or better yet make, a joke. The plain fact is that there are no missing words here: Caret runs to a whopping 752 pages of text that is dense both literally and figuratively; our hero is not a man to say in a sentence what he could plausibly spin out over the course of a page. No experience is too small to be described; no reflection (“And what is Fybogel? Pulverised isphagula husk, that’s what, and just about as chaffy as it’s possible to get”) too fleeting to set down. As with the first two volumes of Cromer’s story, this is fictional autobiography as big as life; Bildungsroman as immersive experience.

And what an autobiography it is: at once compelling and tedious; terrible and deeply, comically banal. John Cromer was born in the middle of the last century, a cover star for Nursery World magazine: “the sort of bonny baby who provokes knitting frenzies in susceptible persons”. All is conventionally well until illness strikes: aged just three, he contracts a rare form of arthritis that leaves him permanently disabled, confined at first to bed, then using a wheelchair. With the outside world no longer in reach, he’s forced to turn to an interior province that is, luckily for him and for us, both rich and wry.

In Pilcrow, Cromer navigates childhood, education, the love of his mother (at once buoying and smothering) and the dawning recognition of his homosexuality. In Cedilla, he shrugs his way free of stultifying suburban family life, learns to drive in a specially adapted Mini, gains a place at Cambridge and undertakes a pilgrimage to India. This offers both a great comic set piece (his wheelchair becomes entangled in the horns of a sacred cow) and, more quietly, an example of the tenacity and chutzpah with which he faces down a world that, by and large, declines to accommodate him. As Caret opens, these qualities are called on once more. Cromer has graduated, and his Cambridge college requires him to vacate his room, but the flat “reluctantly made available to me by Social Services” won’t be free for another three nights. He must fall back on his own resources – his charm, his intelligence, his loyal Mini – again.

THE GUARDIAN