Caret

Adam Mars-Jones

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN: 9780571280070
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'Joyous.' Observer
'Tremendously entertaining.' Irish Times
'Truly original.' The Times

** A Times and Guardian Book of the Year **

'We make lazy assumptions about the centre of things and its location. Who's to say that the centre of things isn't in a corner, way over there?'

'Nobody can be a person twenty-fours hours a day - it just can't be done. At night the sets dissolve and the performance falls away. We're off the books.'

That's John Cromer talking, in this fresh instalment of his lifelong saga. For John, embarking on a new stage of life in 1970s Cambridge, charm and wit aren't just assets, they are survival skills. It may be a case of John against the world. If so, don't be in too much of a hurry to bet on the world.

Conjuring a remarkable voice and mind, Caret is a feast of a novel, served on a succession of small plates, each portion providing an adult's daily intake of literary nourishment. Reading it - like any encounter with John Cromer -- is guaranteed to help you work, rest and play.

'Thank god for John Cromer and his creator Adam Mars-Jones, one of the funniest, most self-aware characters in English fiction, whose minute observations on everything from constipation to lust are a source of unexpected delight.' Linda Grant

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Open the doors of orthography a crack
• Sledges pulled by scandalised huskies
• In the land of asymmetrical spoons
• Ripe for the snaffling
• The flavour of a gypsy encampment
• Micturition syncope is real
• The rigours of perching
• A whiff from the pit
• Any number of nutritious skirmishes
• I’ve not had the rhino virus
• Thixotropic isn’t a word
• Keep those insoluble polysaccharides coming
• Closer to you than your jugular vein
• Delivered of an obese torpedo
• I could write FRESH in letters a yard high
• Elven financial instrument
• I storm the vestibule
• Safe passage of baked goods
• A boom preceded by its echo
• As worn by Father Brown
• An organism that differs from itself
• Flexing its nonseptate filaments
• Dragging their C-value down
• The rapidly spreading bloodstain
• Retrospective annihilation of the moment
• The presence of metaphysical toxins
• I could strangle a Mandie
• The Mini let out a low shuddering cry
• Little bundle of thwarted instructions
• A shrug on a grand scale
• The student and the incontinent tramp
• Wheelchair manhandle with cup-of-tea-and-biscuit finish
• Held safe in the tiger jaws
• To chew an Energen roll for God
• A holy sandal-mender with sciatica
• The lips of this pestering ferret
• The greedy pulsing berry
• Focussed ignorance is a precious yeast
• Don’t let the Pythiums bite
• Common sense is an infinite litter
• I may have missed out an ancillary Pedley
• Blissful dismounting from the treadmill
• Just ask for BURLIES
• Encashment must always have the edge
• To fluster an opal
• Foreknowledge of the brouhaha
• Pessimism, garrulity, sarcasm
• Seedy Maigret overtones
• One of us will have ginger twins
• The geode and the cauliflower
• Lavatory, Laboratory, Lavoratory
• My scouts in the next room
• My toes were curling frantically upwards
• Better marquetry than closetry
• The forest is full of ears
• She was all over mousetraps
• The smallest fart
• Cats are clearly scopæsthetic
• Tins of intellectual caviar
• The Scarlet Pimpernel of flagellant ambushers
• Was Goethe a Shoe Fetishist?
• Gold dust seeping through my blood
• Cromer’s Law
• Maya has a ladder in her stocking
• Campaign for Real Apologies
• The vast human unity offstage
• Tweeters with delusions of grandeur
• I call it wankerage
• It’s an ill wind that blow job any good
• The Return of the Culotte
• Krishna would have managed
• Easier to explain with dogs
• A bulb of scrotum
• A Chameleon on the rampage
• The nail file of Damocles
• There are two men in my life
• Admire the extra-strength parenthesis
• Libertines of the underclass
• The workings of Sod’s Law
• He hunted down the regicides
• Riding the tide of synovial fluid
• Golden age of civic delinquency
• A low-cut gown beneath the plumber’s overalls
• A Parisian garsong of the most lubricious stripe
• The way it is with elderly Velcro
• A carnival of torques and stresses
• Voicing the implied solidus
• I can smell the sauerkraut
• You’d have burned a hole in my forehead
• Adding Braille italics to the font of talk
• The official cigarette of Gay Liberation
• As intimate as a suffragette
• The longed-for dilatancy
• A replacement bubble for the spirit level
• Zephyrs in the pay of Alberto VO5
• Technically he was a strange man
• Please will you be my crack
• Exactly the sort of fuss he hates
• Young people’s dental health in pre-Wilhelmine Germany
• The curtain of molecules
• The end of my rough-diamond phase
• A surprisingly bitter argument about geraniums
• I’m not the only vandal in the building
• You’d be the second to know
• My version of 1970s milkman vernacular
• Wear and tear on the frenulum
• A magical uncosy entity such as a psammead
• The way it strokes the eye
• The very antipodes of tickety-boo
• His C-value was plummeting
• A Marc Bolan perm
• Tureens have had their day
• Take on the Grim Reaper in a tug of war
• To connect directly with the flywheel of history
• Big Ben Was Wrong
• The password is ‘tureen’
• Piss-whatever-it-was-called
• Better than no kiss at all
• The northern white cedar springs to mind
• Tiffs with divinity
• Suburban adultery hound slinking around Olympus
• Death has his lines off pat
• Surviving on crumbs
• We behead Scheherazade
• An easy person to avoid
• A small glass of the Bristol Cream
• Niminy-piminy junior penalty
• Lack of parallelism in the ocular axes
• Glue extra tailage on a lyrebird
• The habit of screaming is partially repressed
• A degree enriched with marrow-bone jelly
• The selfish drama of reflexive opposition
• As comforting as the smell of wet dog
• As we know ladies are demons
• The darkling pie
• A thick woven worm
• A customer had helped himself to a saveloy
• May the Best Yob Win
• The nougat of wisdom enrobed
• These toffs need to be taught a lesson
• My idiolect had gone to the dogs
• The Sidney part of the Taken Sidney
• Hunched over the lurid mushroom
• Larceny bred in the bone
• Reservoirs of trodden foulness
• Towards a European gold standard
• Pain turned inside out and pushed away
• Pedro the bloodhound, welcome
• Autoglossotomy is a wonderful word
• The hygroscopic properties of honeycomb confectionery
• Replaced as easily as a light bulb
• A dozen assorted dolts
• Every chance of a rosette
• She knocks George Herbert into a cocked hat!
• His head became the temple bell
• Swirled spiritual ketchup
• Margaret Rutherford does the Twist
• Malabar for the Derby
• Past form as taker of the piss and wind-up merchant
• The small change of mage and huckster down the ages
• Constricting preputial hood
• The humming of his realigned chakras
• I’ll be the First to Roast
• All England seemed to be bending
• I long to stet those hyphens
• Sandy liked hay as well as ice cream
• Writing letters to pandas about Boy Scouts
• The labels have been switched on the voting machine
• Dolphins always seem to be smiling, don’t they?
• Topping up the dog’s bowl with vodka
• All I Want for Christmas Is a Pygmy Sphygmomanometer
• The stone money of Yap springs to mind
• The gentlemen of the law warm their hands impartially
• Imagine your little Granny serving granules!
• Relied upon to deliver more death than love
• Little Bo-Peep trying to calm her panicked sheep
• Its plutocratic absorbency perhaps giving it the edge
• A Rosetta Stone with nothing whatever written on it
• Professor emeritus of bird education
• Pathos can be cranked up to quite Dickensian levels
• Their catapults don’t miss
• Fellow sufferers from an idiopathic lockjaw
• An undertone outshouts a megaphone
• A balancing dose of masculine terror
• Greater than the average mousewife’s
• In the privacy of its own mug
• Pulling apart the spring-loaded claws
• Makeshift portholes punched through the parietal bones
• Long evenings running his tongue over glued surfaces
• With Every Good Wish for a Freeze-Dried Christmas
• Hardened to the sufferings of potatoes
• Never been anywhere near the rooftops before
• Not how you impale customers on the knife of adverting
• Phyllis was failing to pull her weight socially
• A poultice of his own devising
• Not remotely worth the double amputation
• The teeth of punctuation protocol
• If there is a Mrs Wogan
• Anapæstic sigh of wonder
• She couldn’t half make your ears pop
• My original pianissimo ending was the right choice
• The one that lived in Ivy’s mouth
• The grass blades became daggers and cudgels
• Stuffed festive tubes designed for no other purpose
• Because you are morbidly obese
• Something rubbery and bright yellow
• From tiara to deerstalker
• The very cream of her toes
• Herons and pelicans can come a cropper
• Just as likely to have been Brut for Men
• The Russian roulette of ethanol detection
• Growing mangel-wurzels and smoking a pipe
• His goodnight kiss scented with blood
• The details, technical or gory or both
• Ode to a red cabbage
• The dolorific calculus of Christmas
• Weedkiller in a man’s curry
• A turbine cranking out increments of joy
• Headlong into the confusion of the womb
• More along the lines of a quiche lorraine
• To squeeze the fig with a finger
• Are These the Eyes of a Fork-Bender?
• Spoons under scrutiny at Cambridge
• And the greatest of these
• About the Author
• By the Same Author
• Copyright