Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones — hell for leather

Box Hill in Surrey lies about 30km south-west of London, and offers spectacular views across the North Downs. Known for being the setting of the picnic in Jane Austen’s Emma, the viewpoint was, according to Colin Smith — whose curious sexual awakening forms the heart of Adam Mars-Jones’s fourth novel — a popular Sunday afternoon hang-out for 1970s leather-clad bikers.

It’s on Box Hill, on his 18th birthday, that Colin meets Ray Jones. “He was tasty,” says Colin, referring to Ray’s handsomeness — but “tasty” is also a slang term for somebody who’s good at fighting, which is apt for Ray, who exudes an air of menace. Colin moves in with the older man the next day and they begin a sadomasochistic love affair that lasts six years.

The teenager’s parents might have been expected to object, but Colin — who is narrating these experiences from the vantage point of middle age — says they considered Ray “a good influence”. Colin’s “little mum” and “little dad” represent a bygone world, a kind of eternal 1950s, sheltered from the liberations of subsequent decades.

Colin and Ray’s relationship is defined by rules and sexual tension. Ray cuts Colin’s hair, makes him sleep on the floor and forces him to stay out of the house during the day. “He didn’t need to give a reason,” says Colin, who submits to Ray without complaint. “That was just the way it was.”

Ray is at once mysterious — Colin never finds out what he does for a living or his age — and ordinary (“a stickler for speed limits”). Their world is a combination of fantasy and the humdrum and, in contrast with their surreal sex life, their ordinariness (encapsulated in their surnames, Smith and Jones) feels radical.

I found Colin’s voice affected, particularly in its repetitions: “Not just experience but experience in the form that intoxicates. Not just experience but practice.” Colin talks about “the naffness” of his leather jacket and says “naff was a word then in its prime”. Yet it’s a good word to describe Colin when he says things such as: “Ray’s bike was as classic as he was — they were versions of the same superlative, he in confidence and leather, the Norton in power and chrome.”

The period observations would be better suited to a memoir: “In 1975 there were still a few people called Marjorie.” There could be a broader social commentary here as 1975, the year Colin met Ray, was when Britons voted overwhelmingly to stay in the European Economic Community. Later, Colin mentions Aids — a subject Mars-Jones explored in his short-story collection Monopolies of Loss (1992) — and the melancholic tone of these passages indicates that Colin’s story might be a metaphor for the losses gay men would endure.

Making such claims, however, I can hear myself trying to find meanings in Box Hill that aren’t necessarily there. It’s a clever and subtle novel but one that left me cold. Last year, Mars-Jones published Second Sight, a collection of his film criticism, which, like this novel, spanned around three decades, and there is a stark cinematic quality to Box Hill. If the book were transferred to the screen, its strange atmosphere might be arresting, but on the page the material falls flat.

Box Hill , by Adam Mars-Jones, Fitzcarraldo Editions, RRP£9.99, 128 pages

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