Reviewed: Adam Mars-Jones, Box Hill: A Story of Low Self-esteem, Scribe, 2020

Box Hill is one of those tricky books: it disarms you with the candour of its narrator and the apparent simplicity of his story, and then unsettles you the further you reflect on it. It’s mischievous in that way. Its recollection of a kinky coming-of-age that kicks off in 1975 at Box Hill, 30 kilometres south-west of London, is tender and elegiac. Colin, the novel’s narrator, is conversational and self-deprecating. But his story is also unsettling: one critic calls it ‘an exquisitely discomfiting tale’, scattered with moments of ‘deadpan horror’. The author himself describes it in the book’s dedication as a ‘murky brew’. Whether you find its transgressions to be shocking, arousing or poignant—or all of the above—depends on the kind of reader you are. ‘I’m unsure,’ writes another critic, ‘whether to judge the closing line as haunting or innocuous.’ I, for one, am haunted.