LGBT Book & Video Blog

Pilcrow
by Adam Mars-Jones
Faber £18.99, pp525

This is a pilcrow: ¶.

It is a piece of typographical arcana, a paragraph mark, a second cousin of the cedilla and the umlaut, and it is, as Adam Mars-Jones rightly observes, 'hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer'.

Pilcrow is chosen by John Cromer, the narrator of this singular coming-of-age-novel, as a kind of nom de plume because he is 'not sure he can claim to take his place in the human alphabet even as its honorary 27th letter'. Cromer is an oddity, an outcast, existing almost invisibly in the space between other, more delineated lives. He is made so by his development in early childhood of a rare condition called Still's disease, which leaves him brittle-boned and bedbound, dependent on carers for everything but thought. … The result of his repression is that Pilcrow is forced to confront his growing awareness of the fact that he is gay, alone. The most insistent spark of life in his world comes in his experiments with 'taily', his twitchy penis, which occupy a good deal of his consuming curiosity. The other boys in his ward, struggling with their disabilities, become savoured objects of lust - 'The contrast between strong upper bodies and wasted legs made these boys seem like mythical beasts, minotaur colts' - and Pilcrow increasingly understands desire as the escape tunnel from his frustration. See  Review: Pilcrow by Adam Mars-Jones
Guardian, UK