Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
This is a novel of such confidence and control that it’s hard to believe it’s only the author’s second book. But Jon Ransom already has an impressive track record, winning the Polari First Book Prize — awarded to the best debut on LGBTQ+ themes — for his 2022 novel The Whale Tattoo.
The Gallopers is a short, contained novel, a chamber piece that holds us tightly within the narrator’s head for most of its length. That narrator is Eli Stone, a 19-year-old man living next to a reputedly cursed field in Norfolk in 1953 with his aunt, the curiously named Dreama, following the disappearance of his mother in the great North Sea flood earlier in the year.
“I am something other than I appear to be,” Eli tells us in his opening sentence. What he is, is a gay man, but without the language to identify himself he prefers terms such as “that way” or “sissy-sounding”. He knows what he wants, however: “to be held down by a man. To have him everywhere at once, his smell and sweat and power, until I have all but disappeared.”
And he knows who he wants it with: Jimmy Smart, the itinerant showman who’s living in a barn beside the cursed field and runs the gallopers, the “painted horses, three abreast, [that] hurtle around and around” the local funfair carousel. “I am that horse,” says Eli, “hellbent on chasing these things I desire.”
Eli’s thoughts are full of with loving descriptions of his lust for Jimmy, which is not slaked by the fact that he’s already having regular sex with another man, Shane Wright. It hardly feels like a balanced relationship: Shane is older, and effectively groomed Eli (another phrase not at his disposal) from the age of 15 in the local boxing gym. And Eli’s feelings are further complicated by his guilt at being with Shane on the night his mother went missing.
The novel, heavy with emotion, has multiple lines of narrative pull. What happened to Eli’s mother? Where did Jimmy come from? And why has Shane suddenly been arrested for the disappearance of a young girl? But what sets it apart is the way Ransom tells the story, accentuating the claustrophobia of Eli’s world, a place where women are enigmatic, men say as little as possible, and everyone smokes Woodbines. (Even this detail, it turns out, is important.)
Ransom portions the story out into short alternating sections, each no more than a page or two long. First we get Eli’s thoughts, in solid blocks of text made from blunt sentences: “I haven’t seen the sea since before the flood. After my mother was carried away.” Then, tension ably built, we’re released into a stretch of dialogue made of short exchanges between the characters, their clipped lines dropping down the page like poetry. Internal, then external; and again, and again.
This idiosyncratic style, added to the under-addressed subject matter of working-class gay life, gives The Gallopers tremendous character and flavour, reminding us that one way to make a book stand out from the crowd is to have a distinctive vision and stick to it. The short scenes make reading the book a compulsive act; there’s always time for just one more section.
But is this tale of a hidden life in a dark time too good to be true? The middle third of the book jumps forward 30 years to 1983, in the form of a play written by Eli in middle age, apparently based on his own life. Characters from the main narrative appear, some with names or identities blurred, in a plot about a buried bomb. This section feels off-key, with clunky dialogue so ill-matched to the rest of the book that it can only be intentional. And yet, there are hints that may reveal what happened after the main story took place, including Eli’s own fate.
Intriguing as it is, is the play a bizarre mis-step, or a clever new dimension to a story that bristles with originality? I’m undecided, but the best writing thrives on risk, after all.
The Gallopers by Jon Ransom Muswell Press, £14.99, 208 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
