Jon Ransom is a Cambridge-based, Norfolk-raised writer whose masterly debut The Whale Tattoo last year earned him the Polari first book prize. A raw and gritty novel of gay love, grief and resilience, it focused on Joe Gunner, a working-class young man stalked by visions, revenants and enemies. The narrative flitted between past and present, cut with periodic interludes where a river speaks to Joe, sometimes teasingly, sometimes pugnaciously. The novel swarmed with enigmas but eschewed easy answers: “Way we put meaning on the things that happen to us … We make shit up – to make sense of it.”
Ransom has now written a hypnotic and even more mysterious second novel, The Gallopers. This is a lust-drenched, ache-filled gay love triangle of sorts that gnarls into a sly emotional thriller. The action begins in 1953 Norfolk, shortly after the North Sea flood. The narrator is 19-year-old Eli Stone, whose mother, Eliza, is believed to have been washed away. Eli lives with his aunt Dreama next to a cursed piece of land that exerts an uncanny force on them, and keeps the townspeople at a superstitious distance. When the flood came, “water rushed across the county displacing everything”, save their field. Eli is enthralled with Jimmy Smart, the handsome and obliging fairground worker who rooms up at their barn. One night, not long after they first meet, Eli finds himself masturbating to the sight of the man washing himself off in the open.
One of the central themes in The Gallopers is the occult machinery of desire: its blinding intensity and crippling sway on the mind and the body. “Desire is cunning like that,” Eli repeatedly thinks. Being in the company of Jimmy, Eli tells us, “interferes with everything, like the hairs on my arm during a thunderstorm”. Ransom orchestrates some truly ravishing moments between the two men, tableaux roiling with heat, tenderness and poetry. Jimmy and Eli swim in the nude at night, soap each other’s backs, share cigarettes in wordless pleasure. They dance by a bonfire, Jimmy “communing with the flames”, “his gaze more mysterious beneath the moonlight. As though he might tip his head and howl.”
The other man in Eli’s life is Shane Wright, his co-worker at a print shop. A gruff, boorish figure “filled up with tragedy”, Shane dreams of going to America where he hopes to make a career in fitness modeling. Sex and a whiff of scandal tie him and Eli in an uneasy partnership, and later, when a girl from their neighbourhood goes missing and trouble comes sniffing for Shane, he calls on Eli for help.
The Gallopers is a whispered howl of a novel about men fettered by masculine norms, the ideas and pressures that curtail their freedom, and the bargains they strike with others and themselves in order to live. The novel is excellent on queer love and the shape it takes once it mixes with shame, blood and guilt. Some of its best and most poignant passages capture the ghoulish discord between queerness and the law, the individual and the world, truth and deceit.
As in Ransom’s debut, homophobia and misogyny are the twin evils. Eli is bullied and chastised for his effeminacy; he longs, as a result, to flee, to rid himself of his “sissy mouth”. Throughout the book, a steady volley of stones flies through the windows of Eli’s room, collecting at the foot of his bed: grim tokens, he believes, of the townspeople’s disapproval. Women similarly suffer the casual violence of men. They are “disappeared” and later found traumatised, defiled or rotting deep in the ground.
At the centre of the story lies a one-act play titled The Gallopers. Written by Eli three decades on and presented as a playscript, it reprises the themes of the novel at a slanted angle, recasting Eliza, Dreama and Shane in new roles. Shane appears as a version of Eli, grappling with his queerness, ready to take flight. Dreama, here Shane’s mother, is seen fretting over a misplaced photo album, while Eliza, who is dying of Aids, digs for an unexploded second world war bomb in the field outside their house. Jimmy is a silent character; a showman invoked a few times by name and the fairground music that is part of the stage directions.
Does the play hold the keys to the novel? Does it bring nuance, or add to our reading of the rest of the book? I’m unsure. The novel proper ends in 1954, with Eli leaving for national service. What the play might mean, beyond an older Eli’s attempt to fictionalise his life, while wrestling with ideas of loss, sickness and mortality, is up to the reader to decide. But at its best, The Gallopers offers a surprising and quietly devastating account of three men, and their troubled relationship with themselves and the world they live in.
• The Gallopers by Jon Ransom is published by Muswell Press (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
