Adam Mars-Jones managed to find himself twice listed as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, in 1983 and 1993, despite the small matter of never having actually published a novel. Yet the judges were obviously on to something: Caret, his long-awaited new book, is the latest hefty chunk in a comic sequence – described by the author as “semi-infinite” – that, after Pilcrow (2008) and Cedilla (2011), now totals 2,000 pages, as if in overabundant repayment of a debt.
Set in 1973, it gives us another year in the life of the disabled gay Hindu convert John Cromer, whose joints are fused by arthritis. Last seen aged 23, estranged from his parents and homeless in Cambridge having obtained a third-class degree, he’s still sleeping in his customised Mini when Caret begins, navigating state bureaucracy en route to a council flat and home help. To come is jury duty in a GBH trial, a sexual adventure with a pub supplier who repays him in booze, and a reluctant family Christmas back in Buckinghamshire: a vexed reunion that goes awry thanks to a combination of his pet parrot, his difficulties pulling a cracker, and a botched attempt to explain his religious beliefs to his 13-year-old sister, so mangled it leads her to think they’re adopted.
Mars-Jones, recently the author of a pair of novellas, Box Hill and Batlava Lake, is perhaps best known as a demanding critic whose reviews – like stock from a carcass, often richer than the work he’s writing about – are characterised by microscopic attention to detail. If it sometimes leads him down dead ends as a critic (does it really matter if someone in Zadie Smith’s NW thinks Poundland sells things for more than a pound?), that hypervigilance as a fiction writer makes the Cromer novels sing. Passing observations routinely lead into improbably absorbing disquisitions expressed with purring elegance and comic timing, as Mars-Jones conscientiously evokes the texture of life for a narrator who can’t rotate his wrists and ankles, bend his knees or turn his neck. The bittersweet tone mixes slapstick with thoroughgoing consideration for the quiddity of John’s existence, as in the opening pages describing the cutlery he stole from his Cambridge college (the design happens to be what most helps him eat).
If Pilcrow was largely bedbound and Cedilla worldly – involving university and a five-week trip to India, the source of John’s Hinduism – Caret is somewhere in between, sustained largely by the quality of Mars-Jones’s attention. When we’re told of a shocking family epiphany that resulted from household viewing of a BBC television play starring Judi Dench in the 1960s, Mars-Jones’s almost uncanny command of detail (in which tickled nostalgia clearly has its fair share) dovetails perfectly with the emotional and psychological thrust of the book.
Often it’s simply very enjoyable. John remains a stickler for the finer points of language, though ready to make concessions: “when correct usage seems to demand ‘Sainsbury’s chairman’s Achilles’s heel’ you have to ask yourself a serious question. Where is it all going to end? If Achilles long ago gave up his apostrophe (along with the s that came along for the ride) without feeling the need to sulk about it, then shouldn’t less temperamental nouns follow his lead?”
More often, though, John is against that kind of rationalisation, ready to defend, say, “the use of the ligature æ in sundæ spoon” despite it being “somewhere on the continuum between optional, wayward and plain wrong… so much typographical variety is being lost from year to year that it becomes an act of solidarity with the alphabet in its fullest form”. John is a dogged spirit, and it’s hard not to suspect that in these joyous novels his author is, against the odds, constructing his own bulwark against narrowness, efficiency and cutting to the chase. Long may it continue.
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
