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Adam Mars-JonesAdam Mars-Jones
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BiographyWriter and critic Adam Mars-Jones was born in London in 1954. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he studied and then taught Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. He was film critic for The Independent between 1986 and 1997 and for The Times between 1998 and 2000. He is an occasional contributor to The Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement, and a regular reviewer for The Observer. He was selected by Granta as one of its 20 'Best of British Young Novelists' in both 1983 and 1993.
His latest novel is Pilcrow (2008).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Criticism, Essays, Fiction, Non-fiction, Short stories
BibliographyLantern Lecture Faber and Faber, 1981 Mae West is Dead: Recent Lesbian and Gay Fiction (editor) Faber and Faber, 1983 The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (with Edmund White) Faber and Faber, 1987 Venus Envy: On Masculinity and its Discontents (CounterBlasts series) Chatto & Windus, 1990 Monopolies of Loss Faber and Faber, 1992 The Waters of Thirst Faber and Faber, 1993 Blind Bitter Happiness Chatto & Windus, 1997 Pilcrow Faber and Faber, 2008
Prizes and awards1982 Somerset Maugham Award Lantern Lecture 2009 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) (shortlist) Pilcrow
Critical PerspectiveJohn Cromer, narrator of Adam Mars-Jones’ novel Pilcrow (2008), calls himself ‘a specialized piece of punctuation’, adding that ‘I thought of myself as one of nature’s ventriloquists rather than one of her dummies’. This playful delight in the minutiae of language, and the creation of an intimate voice, characterizes Mars-Jones’ fictions. To them we must add their sober subject matters: the chronicling of gay male lifestyles under the shadows of illness or disease. As we listen to the life and opinions of John Cromer, readers not only encounter a remarkably observant mind, attentive to cultural nuances and minute physical sensations, but also revisit the Britain of the 1950s and 60s. It is this combination of critical intelligence, aphoristic humour, and a societal view of what might otherwise be individual tragedies, that makes Mars-Jones such a rewarding writer.
Mars-Jones is perhaps best-known as a literary journalist and particularly a culture critic. He had been chief film reviewer for The Independent newspaper for over a decade before moving to The Times in 1998; not surprisingly, his stories and novels contain numerous witty allusions to movies. He continues to appear on radio and television arts discussion programmes, valued for his ability to turn an acutely dissecting phrase. He is a fine essayist, as is evident in the collection Blind Bitter Happiness (1997). Among their subjects are gay issues, disability as represented in films, his mother’s depression, and ‘Venus Envy’, a controversial diatribe published in 1990 against Martin Amis’s writing. The subtitle, ‘Masculinity and Its Discontents’, is a concern throughout his writing. He comes at it from the gay perspective, having often reviewed books on homosexuality and ‘current gay thinking’ in the UK and USA. Similarly, he shows a subtle appreciation of the social and sexual issues arising in Homophobia (2002).
The relatively carefree tone of Mars-Jones’ early fiction, however, is rather different from his later moral seriousness and observations of gay men under the threat of AIDS. The elegantly written stories in Lantern Lecture (1981) had made him seem like a satirical gadfly to the Establishment, especially the facetious scenario of ‘Hoosh-mi’ in which the Queen catches rabies from a corgi infected by an off-course fruit bat, and starts to behave increasingly erratically. The title story tells two stories in parallel: the christening and the memorial service of an eccentric aristocrat, ingeniously reversing midway through like the old boy’s lantern slides themselves. By contrast, ‘Bathpool Park’ is based upon the 1970s trial of a real-life case, the kidnap and murder of a young girl, the judicial proceedings being inter-cut with recreations of the crime.
Mars-Jones’ writing was changed, one might even say determined, by consciousness of the AIDS epidemic from the early 1980s onwards. His story ‘Trout Day by Pumpkin Light’ was included in Granta magazine’s famous ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ issue in 1983, describing a hedonistic party in Virginia, USA, but never again were gay men’s sex lives to be written about as simply a matter of choice. This change was everywhere apparent in the stories of The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis (1987), co-authored with the American writer Edmund White, about men living with AIDS or adjusting their lives to cope with its fearful restrictions. The weakened narrator of ‘Slim’, for instance, imagines his life as a wartime ration book containing coupons for ‘One hour of Social Life, One Shopping Expedition, One Short Walk’. The sombre outcome of ‘An Executor’ is the AIDS-related death of Charles, but it comes to focus on his volunteer buddy’s efforts to arrange disposal of Charles’ leather fetish gear, cope with family embarrassment and the grieving awkwardness of friends. There is much lingering on the nuances of fetish fashions, concluding that ‘Leather was less a fabric than a set of meanings’.
This oddly comical note re-appears in ‘The Brake’, about an architect forced to change his promiscuous lifestyle; ‘he had seen Some Like It Hot twenty-five times’ and ‘contracted gonorrhea twice for every time he had seen Some Like It Hot’. Hearing rumours of a new illness in the States, ‘he found it easier to give up men than to give up the taste, even the smell, of fried bacon’. William, the voice-over artist suffering from kidney disease in The Waters of Thirst (1993), has had to give up not only his sex life with men but also bacon sandwiches. This short but exquisitely observed novel has satirical interludes but, through William’s monologue, concentrates on the ‘tantalus’ of a life revolving around dialysis sessions and the wait for a transplant kidney. In a rather Proustian manner, there are memories of the forbidden pleasures of salty food and alcoholic drinks. Mars-Jones is a somewhat unemotional writer; he sprinkles witty aphorisms to make palatable what could, in less deft hands, be a bland dish. ‘Stock cubes are the death of love’, we read, and, in transplant surgery as with cooking, ‘everything depends upon the freshness of the ingredients’.
Mars-Jones has sometimes been criticised for the slenderness of his fictional output, but Pilcrow is in every way a magnum opus, more than 500 pages in length. Moreover, it is apparently intended to be just the first volume of a trilogy featuring John Cromer. Born at the start of the 1950s, his self-propelled story takes him and us through that decade into the 1960s, animated by the books he is reading, the radio, television and films he is enjoying. Yet, like most of Mars-Jones’ narrators, this rich cultural and fantasy life is only partly compensation for an ongoing struggle with illness, disease and its humiliations. Increasing immobility and misdiagnoses lead to extended stays in hospital and special schools, where Cromer’s ‘years as a bedbug’ expose him to torturous medical practices and therapies: ‘my walking was a sort of fiction, but it had me fooled’.
Dr Jules Smith, 2009
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