Caret 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.
From here, Mars-Jones takes us on a picaresque tour of England in the 1970s, as seen through Cromer’s eyes. PD James once said that the best way to understand an era was to read its contemporary crime fiction; unlike “more prestigious literature”, the specificity and granularity of the plots requires that it be “unambiguously set in the present day … right down to how much things cost and attitudes to sex and class”. The same, it turns out, is true of writing from the perspective of a wheelchair-user. Cromer makes for an ideal time-travel guide because he is both native to the world he’s describing and at the same time a detached observer of it; obliged to approach it with an assessing eye, in order to navigate it successfully. As a result, while the slubby, brown-and-orange 70s backdrop is familiar, unexpected elements are amplified. The availability of social housing, the welcoming, well stocked public library – these aspects swell into the foreground: fixed points in a landscape beneath which the social safety net was still firmly suspended.
None of which is to suggest that Caret glosses over the decade’s meagreness; one of the book’s great pleasures is the way in which, thanks to Mars-Jones’s judicious deployment of oddly dismal contemporary references (Chi Chi the panda; Ovaltine; Brut for Men), it transports us back to before the handbrake-turn of Thatcherism wrenched us out of the mid-20th century into the modern consumerist age. But this third volume in the series prioritises connectivity and collectivism over individualism, and emphasises the necessity of the kindness of friends and strangers – particularly as family ties (as seen in the climactic, and literally explosive Christmas dinner scene) begin to fray.
John Cromer, then, is now fully launched into adulthood, and his unfolding life has become, unequivocally, Mars-Jones’s life’s work: a swelling, orchestral project that shows no sign of slowing. With these novels, he’s building a facsimile of existence; a map with a scale that seems, when you’re reading it, to be closing on 1:1. It’s an inordinately bold technique, but in the end it succeeds: it feels, as we follow the seemingly endless meander of Cromer’s thoughts, that we’re not so much reading a story, as living in one. “I couldn’t remember directly, I could only reconstruct,” Cromer says, when groping for an event in his past. “That’s the way memory works.”
• Caret by Adam Mars-Jones is published by Faber (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
