With the Green Carnation having wilted and died a few years ago, the Polari Prize is now the only literary award on these islands dedicated solely to LGBT writers. While one might argue that the last thing the book world needs is a prize that segregates novelists based on their sexuality, credit must be given to Jon Ransom, who won the First Book Award in 2023 for The Whale Tattoo, and the Book of the Year 12 months later for The Gallopers. Reading both novels back to back, I can see what impressed the judges while also struggling with some of the author’s more idiosyncratic choices.
The Whale Tattoo is set in Norfolk and, having lived there myself for three years, the damp landscape of the county is well depicted. Still in his early 20s but lacking ambition or focus, the narrator, Joe, returns home after a two-year absence to confront ongoing grief, care for his ailing but abusive father, and reconnect with Fysh, the boy he hooked up with at 15.
That relationship is quickly re-established but, like the casual lovers he takes throughout the book, it’s more sexual than romantic, which plays into cliches of gay life. Joe and Fysh rarely speak the language of love, not least because the latter has got married since their last encounter and is due to become a father soon.
Menace arrives in the form of Doug, Fysh’s brother, disgusted by his brother’s sexuality, loathing Joe, and yet also despising Dora, Fysh’s wife and the mother of his unborn child. He is filled with inexplicable rage that explodes in moments of violence, and he dominates the standout moment of the novel when, after tragedy strikes, he decides to take brutal vengeance on Joe in a terrifying scene that leaves the reader shaken.
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One should not be too picky about flaws in a debut – every writer, no matter how experienced, has tropes they unconsciously fall back on – but whenever there’s a lull in the action, one of four rather unpalatable things always seems to appear: a description of Joe’s underpants, an update on the state of his testicles, the reappearance of Doug for another fight, or Joe vomiting, usually on someone’s shoes, but once, hilariously, on someone’s penis. Eventually it’s hard not to wish that he would either buy some fresh boxer shorts, consult a doctor, or just get the hell out of Dodge.
Ransom’s second novel, The Gallopers, is set mostly in the early 1950s, with a diversion into the 1980s, and many of the themes running through The Whale Tattoo reappear. Eli, the 19-year-old narrator, lives with his aunt Dreama by a supposedly cursed field and, like Joe, is dealing with grief, having lost his mother during the North Sea Flood. He’s also juggling lovers: Jimmy Smart, a “showman” who works at a local fairground, and Shane, a figure from his past, who, we are repeatedly told, had sex with Eli in a gym when the narrator was only 15, the same age Joe was when he fell for Fysh.
Repetition is not a flaw if it’s deliberate and Ransom clearly wants to make a point regarding this early loss of innocence, but the reiterations become wearing, their emotional impact diminishing each time. More challenging, however, is the central section, written entirely in the form of a play, a conceit that lasts five acts and echoes much of what we’ve already been told. In a short book, it feels like filler, almost as if the author has run out of story.
Despite these criticisms, there is much to admire. Ransom experiments with structure and page layout, and some of the quirkier touches work well. In The Whale Tattoo, for example, Joe regularly finds himself at a river, telling his story to, and taking advice from, the rushing water, while in The Gallopers, lengthy passages of tightly constructed prose are interspersed with brief, sharp dialogues between characters, and these moments elevate the books.
In both novels I was struck by the immediacy of the narrative voices and the author’s skill with language, which he employs with a poet’s sensibility. Both Joe and Eli are troubled, complex young men, given to deep introspection and struggling with past hurt, while moving inexorably towards what feels like tragic endings, but Ransom works hard to keep the reader on their side, hoping they might escape their bleak lives for something, or somewhere, more fulfilling.
Ransom is a talented writer, and these are intriguing, imperfect novels. It will be interesting to see whether he, like his central characters, is willing to move out of his comfort zone and explore other themes in future books.
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