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Pilcrow (Hardcover)

by Adam Mars-Jones (Author)
4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
RRP: £18.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 544 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (3 April 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571217036
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571217038
  • Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 15.8 x 5.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 343,012 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #4 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > M > Mars-Jones, Adam

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Product Description

Product Description

Meet John Cromer, one of the most unusual heroes in modern fiction. If the minority is always right then John is practically infallible. Growing up disabled and gay in the 1950s, circumstances force John from an early age to develop an intense and vivid internal world. As his character develops, this ability to transcend external circumstance through his own strength of character proves invaluable. Extremely funny and incredibly poignant, this is a major new novel from a writer at the height of his powers.'I'm not sure I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet...I'm more like an optional accent or specialised piece of punctuation, hard to track down on the typewriter or computer keyboard...'


About the Author

Adam Mars-Jones's first book of stories, Lantern Lecture, was published in 1981 and won a Somerset Maugham Award. In 1983 and again in 1993 he was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, despite not having produced a novel at the time.
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Customer Reviews

6 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.8 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic writing on a odd adolescent.....what next? ***1/2 stars , 2 Nov 2008
By J. Minogue (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)      
'The spring I learned to drive, the cherry tree in front of our house in Bourne End flowered as never before'. It was 1968'.

From these opening lines I was expecting a David Mitchell ( in Black Swan Green mode) exploration of adolescence. Instead there is a slow moving, incredibly detailed account of firstly bed rest for rheumatic fever - absolutely the wrong treatment for the Still's disease that it turns out that John Cromer really has - and then life in the special hospital for children with Still's.

It's a strange rites of passage novel as John Cromer is a strange boy. The detail of the descriptions can be excruciating - his pain at the hands of the nurses rather than his mother's care, his first sexual encounters and the logistical and physical difficulty of them considering his handicaps and those of his partners.

The detail and the length give us some insight into a life which is so severely curtailed physically if not in thought and spirit...but I'm still left wondering what Adam Mars-Jones was telling us.

The writing is good and funny - but the book just ends - I've since read that this is the first book in a trilogy - in which case I don't think it works fully as a stand alone volume.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Overlooked masterpiece, 2 April 2009
By Phil (Bristol, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pilcrow (Paperback)
I started reading this tremendously inventive book just after giving up on this year's Man Booker prizewinner "The White Tiger", which, after a brilliant start, descended into tedious dialogue and uninspiring writing. Why THIS novel by Adam Mars-Jones wasn't even long-listed, I can't imagine. (I jest! What is truly hard to imagine is that the panel of agenda-burdened judges might for once favour something that I find readable.) In a literary sense, this is one of the best books I've ever read: a word-lover's paradise, full of brilliant turns of phrase and playful games with language, and so elegantly written that reading it was pure joy.

John Cromer is a boy with severe constraints on his mobility, who spends almost the entirety of this, the first part of a planned trilogy, either in bed or in a wheelchair. But these limitations open up to him the infinite possibilities of thought, and fertilise his imagination. John's small world is thus made a lot more interesting than many wider ones, and his delightful narration is full of insights into human behaviour, and thought-provoking accounts of obstacles most of us never have to deal with. There's plenty to make you angry or sad on John's behalf - especially the way that some of his carers treat him - but it's also extremely funny. And John is (usually) so cheerful, and determined to have a life, that you admire him as much as you ache for him.

Mars-Jones really gets inside the mind of his child narrator; it's so convincing, it reads like a genuine autobiography. It won't be to everyone's taste: it's a slow, wordy novel of detailed reminiscence, rather than a story with a plot, and readers who would get their knickers in a twist over frequent and detailed reference to a disabled schoolboy's homosexual yearnings should avoid it. But if you find it strikes a chord with you, you'll be glad you read it.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Pilcrow, 17 Nov 2008
By Margaret Swift (Porlock, UK) - See all my reviews
This is a truly remarkable novel, a masterpiece. It is a Proustian evocation of a fifties childhood, recaptured in extraordinary detail, and with great wit and good humour. Mars Jones is well known as a critic and for his shorter fiction, and here for the first time he writes at leisurely length. A second volume is promised, and is eagerly awaited by his admirers.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling
A totally compelling piece of work. It is indeed 'a brick' of a novel, but its watchword is readability. Read more
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I had to give myself a little break from Pilcrow before I could review it so that I could take it all in and let it digest. Read more
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