Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘I open my mouth to tell him he’s wrong. That he’s talking in tongues. Though no words come out. Nothing hitchhiking on my breath. Truth is troublesome like that’.[1] This is a blog on the second ground-breaking queer novel by Jon Ransom (2024) The Gallopers London, The Muswell Press.

For my blog on Jon Ransom’s debut novel, The Whale Tattoo, use this link.

There is so much going on in The Gallopers that is uncertain and which neither we nor the characters fully understand, or even sometimes believe. Take this moment when after a stone is thrown through their window, ‘slicing the skin beneath my left eye’, the narrator Eli Stone wonders if he is being punished by God ‘for fornicating with the showman’. The showman himself, Jimmy Smart, puts salve on the wound and the two go out into the night to ‘walk the field first’ whilst Dreama, Eli’s aunt (at least in this part of the novel)  ‘makes tea’.

Before long, we find ourselves in the middle of the field. Put our backsides against the dirt here. Ahead of us is an indigo mountain that isn’t really real. Though pretty just the same.[2]      

What is real, or true or believable is often challenged in this novel and nothing really is just what it is named. For instance that field, the two walk. It is a central image: about which the morning after the flood the child Eli is: ‘Unable to believe our arrow-shaped field was an island. … As if the field itself had somehow held back the wet’. Or perhaps it didn’t do so and he should not believe what he is told to see for: ‘The dirt was gone. Hidden beneath the flood. Baffling in the way I couldn’t recall where our field ended and another began. Water is mysterious like that’.[3] Sometimes the field is believed to be cursed or perhaps it is not,  to harbour a Nazi bomb dropped in 1941, or perhaps not, and finally to be the burial place of Eli’s mother, as revealed by Jimmy Smart right near the end of the novel when he tells of how his twin brothers accidentally murdered her and buried the corpse there in his presence. In a field like this, you do not just sit down ; you put your ‘backside against the dirt’. And much gets buried apart from bombs and bodies. Shane Wright, Eli’s only former sexual partner – perhaps even lover – hangs himself in the prison where he is suspected of child rape and mutilation, Jimmy thinks it would be a good idea for Eli to visit the prison one final time  to ‘put an end to everything. Bury the past’.[4] Yet’ despite Jimmy’s prior knowledge of their field before he met Eli (to be revealed at the end of the novel) as they sit there looking at an ‘indigo mountain’ (in some belief systems thought a sign of divinity) that isn’t there, the following is said:

Eli Stone—– You ever gonna tell me the truth about this field? Cuz I know this dirt was cursed before the flood went round it, jimmy Smart says.[5]

It is, as I said earlier, not certain that the flood ‘went round’ the field. In the mind of both Eli and Dreama, the field flooded and the flood carried Eliza, his mother and her sister respectively, away with it. It was both covered, and was not covered, though the ‘dirt’ was taken away, or more mysteriously suffered a process where it was divided ‘into two’,[6] by the ubiquitous ‘wet’. That ‘wet’ is sometimes that vastness of natural water called ‘The Wash’, sometimes rain, urine, semen or something else requiring to be wiped away – often by the use of ‘underdrawers’, or shed, as with Shane Wright, from the body when you hang yourself. Wherever we are in this novel, there is uncertainty or possible dissension over the truth or interpretation of events for, as Eli earlier tells Jimmy (after their first sexual encounter), ‘Some things are not – what they seem’.[7]

Even names (any nouns but proper names too) are not what they seem. Names have meanings in the novel like Dreama’s (the name means ‘REVERIE’ or dream-led). We should remember that Eli tells us that at his seventh birthday, ‘my mother told me she’d called me Eli on account of its similarity to her own name, Eliza. That she wanted me to be just like her. Even though I am a boy’. Yet when Eli writes a play that becomes the second chapter of this book, he writes his role in his own estranged story as not Eli but Shane, who may or may not recall the murderous, repressed and misogynistic queer man, Shane Wright, and names his mother as Dreama, Eliza becoming his aunt (obsessed with the dirt of the field) and who has AIDs. That Eliza (mother or not) gives him ‘her’ name explains his ‘desire to gaze at men’ and a propensity, for that reason to be ‘disappeared’ by men becomes established all the more as a fact of queerness.[8] If the flood had not taken Eliza, Eli may find, as ‘the ache’ in (his) stomach tells him he has, that he’d ‘laid my blame against a lie’.  It’s the kind of lie peddled by the Reverend in the Church, who when ‘The wet won’t quit’, by which Eli means the rain, will perhaps: ‘Tell his congregation of Noah and the Ark’.^[9]

Perhaps all stories and the ways you tell them are only approximations of truths, for just as water ‘is mysterious like that’;^[10] so ‘desire is cunning like that’,[11] a curse ‘is persuasive like that’,[12] the ‘Church is clever like that’,[13] and, in the end, it is all because ‘truth’ is ‘tricky like that’, ‘troublesome like that’, or, as Eli might mean, in Jimmy Smart’s words, when Eli explains why Shane may prefer to lie about being a child rapist (of a girl) than say he is queer: ‘You saying truth might be cunning‘.^[14] In the end, any authority, even a child’s pendulum or tarot cards which claim to predict futures, may tell truths in covered forms. In this novel, people are all unsure that they are being told the truth or that witnesses of events are capable, in any way, of distinguishing lies from truths even when they think they can see, feel or think they know it. Hence, Eli asking to be told ‘the truth’ about the field is barely a surprising thing but is likewise hopeless in its plea. Even when people are told things by a witness to some truth, they doubt it (especially Eli). Hence the quotation in my title: ‘I open my mouth to tell him he’s wrong. That he’s talking in tongues. Though no words come out. Nothing hitchhiking on my breath. Truth is troublesome like that’.^[15] That metaphor about words being merely contingent with the breath is repeated later, when, for the first time, Eli fucks a man rather than being fucked by one which was his norm. The passage shows too the doubling in his mind of the characters and qualities of Shane Wright and Jimmy Smart, how new experience is welvomed whilst past experience is left behind:

Jimmy Smart stood behind, leaving me to say farewell to the ghost of Shane Wright. Because words had no desire to hitchhike on my breath, I’d raised my hand and waved. Feeling foolish until the showman nodded his approval. Seem to me some goodbyes are better left unspoken.[16]

And maybe, because lies are so ubiquitous in supposed truths when articulated, that we can not blame any speaker for lying. Being unable to speak one’s ‘truth’ is at the disturbed centre of this novel and, for me, most disturbing element of that fact is its symbolisation in the story of the never-seen, and never-heard, Adie Lovekin, raped and her tongue cut out to silence her. What a terrible fantasy to have at the centre of the novel and to hang around it its concern with fact and fiction, truth and lies, belief and uncertainty. For we can, or need not, BLAME those who hurt us (as Adie is hurt and the Smart twins unintentionally [perhaps] hurt Eliza), leave us behind (as various people leave each other or plan to do so or are thought be doing so), make us sick (centrally in the story of whom Eliza in Eli’s plays contracted AIDs from – a showman perhaps at a fairground carousel of ‘gallopers’), or ‘disappear’ us in other ways.

For lying and speaking so one can not be understood is focused around the idea of ‘speaking with tongues’. This is how Eli expresses the fear Jimmy is lying in my title quotation. Dreama blames the Reverend for Ada Lovekin’s rape, and perhaps she is correct, at some level, about the responsibility of patriarchal religions that see bodies as ‘dirt’ for the murders done by those who use this as a model for personal relations.

In the church they exchanges words that might as well, be what the priest sees them as, ‘’talking in tongues’. The Priest treats memories of the flood that possibly killed Eliza as God blaming humanity and a punishment of God, citing Revelations Chapter 12 verse 15, which seems to refer directly to the fate of Eliza as Dreama believes it to be. Dreama stands up in church to challenge him with a verse from Matthew’s gospel (Chapter 27, verse 8) of uncertain meaning, except it definitely refers to that troublesome ‘field’ with which we started and is about the price of self-blame, of the acceptance of self-blame by Judas.

The vicar is thrown off: ‘At first it appears the Reverend doesn’t understand. As though she’s speaking in tongues’.[17] And this opens up what I believe to be a complex reference to issues of truth and how names are generated. For I believe Ransom knows the ‘field of blood’ has two explanations for its naming. The first refers to the use of the ‘blood money’ accepted from Judas by the Jewish priesthood and used to buy a cemetery for non-Jews, the second in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 1:18–19) wherein ‘Judas:

acquired a field with the reward of his unjust deed, and falling headfirst he burst open in the middle and all his intestines gushed out. This became known to all who lived in Jerusalem, so that in their own language they called that field Hakeldama, that is, ‘Field of Blood.

Speaking in tongues and conveying truth with fiction has a long history of established authority. And I think the Biblical reference of the novel goes deeper. Eli is a shortened form, in some readings) of Elijah and Elisha, a tradition of prophets and once associated with Christ’s transfiguration, and there is in Eli, a mix of prophet and redeemer as well as misleading believer in whatever fills the current need. His name may recall one of Job’s comforters, Eliphaz the Temanite,  who in Job, Chapter 5: ‘argues that God uses affliction for discipline and purification, hinting that Job’s severe suffering might have been a result of his sin’. This is a ruse often used as blame (as heavy as Judas’s) by Eli about himself or others. And Eliphaz associates also with Eli STONE in the metaphors he uses, including a ‘field of stones’, those stones that have come from Eli and Dream’s fields and are then cast through their windows and collected at the bottom of his bed, for Jimmy to threaten to cast back into the self-same field later. Eliphaz says of the righteous, in terms that apply directly to Eli’s and Eliza’s  bullying by their ‘townie’ community:

²¹ Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue: neither shalt thou be afraid of destruction when it cometh.

²² At destruction and famine thou shalt laugh: neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of the earth.

²³ For thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field: and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.

This, as Job realises, hardly allows him a way out of blaming himself for his misfortune. And those stones, which give Eli’s family their family name STONE, are implements of blame and retribution.

I think it is hard when, in a novel where the rather archaic word ‘cast’ is used, not to think of other echoes such as when the Pharisees address Christ to convict him of law-breaking, and:

⁴ … say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery in the very act.

⁵ Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? ….

⁷ …, he lifted up himself and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone.[18]

If the New Testament reverses the blamer’s anger on themselves as co-sinners, so does The Gallopers, though in terms of its message to those who turn love between men into a kind of ‘wet’ you want to remove from your skin, dirt, dirty ‘holes’, and the shed blood of sexual violence (or its appearance in a swarm of ladybirds). It is not a preachy novel, however, for its method is to undermine the preachy, as Dreama undermines the Reverend. Instead, it shows a family mislaid by misfortune, or perhaps being just emblems of a communally disparaged diversity (madness, queerness and sickness [even AIDs]) at the nercy of hypocrites.

My own love of the novel is justified by its treatment, such as I remember only otherwise dealt with in Rupert Thomson’s debut novel, Dreams of Leaving, of the theme of staying within or leaving communities whose function appears to be the alienation of the marginal and liminal.

Leaving the past behind, particularly the stories collected around albums of photographs – remember Dreama’s lost album – is tantamount to being removed from one’s familiar community by the law, public opinion, God’s flood (or being stoned to death) or one’s windows shattered and head bleeding from stones that come through a window. There are possibilities of staying and confronting the community and not merely staying silent about one’s scapegoating, as if one’s tongue had been torn out. The following passage is beautiful (you either get that or you don’t – or can’t imagine the provincial 1950s) about Jimmy’s uneven relationship with truth:

Him believing me fragile after Shane Wright hung himself out at Mousehold Heath. Worried even, I’d dig up the dirt again to get at what’s buried beneath.  Our bomb. Why we never told a soul. More than once in the past days he’s wanted to know what pulls me out to the middle of the field more often than not. … Truth can be puzzling like that ….Yet I’d wanted to find a truth of my own. Even packed my suitcase, hellbent on leaving. Because my mother disappeared anyway. Then on a sweltering afternoon Jimmy Smart blew in like a whirlwind of sorts. Full of illusions, stirring everything up. A man more alive than any I’d gazed upon. I open my mouth to let out some of what’s on my mind. No matter how foolish it might be. To tell him the thing  a man mustn’t say to another man.[19]

Talking in tongues covers many disallowed languages, including ones specifically disallowed between men with each other. Whilst prohibitions are what they are, many things are lost, as well as languages for requesting them,  that ought to be out in the open. Much in this novel is sensed rather than said – expressed by smell, touch or indirect imagined form of such senses – such as the prompted auto-eroticism of Eli, holding his ‘pale dick’ when he first sees Jimmy semi-naked through his bedroom window.[20] Eli’s concern with his ‘sissy’ ways and ‘sissy-mouth’ for he thinks they make the otherwise hidden about him, as with Shane and Jimmy, both visible and audible.

Yet, as he learns that Jimmy is truly not afraid of identification with him, indeed the reverse, and other queer people, he changes. He is able, by the end of the novel, to think he could  ‘spend the rest of my days familiarising myself with each part of him’, ‘stark naked in lamp light’, as he is: ‘There is no part of him that’s bashful even his gaze. Taunting me’.[21]

I love this novel and, as I think about it, I am reading Andrew McMillan’s recently published Pity and wonder how two queer novelists, both writing brilliantly but differently about working-class queer men can be treated so differently by the establishment. McMillan, well established and networked is reviewed everywhere (only The Literary Review banishing him to a review ‘short’), Ransom is reviewed only, as far as I can see in The Guardian by Yagnishsing Dawoor. It’s an empathetic review but not so searching as the critics allotted to McMillan, where credence is lent by social authority.

For instance, whilst innovations by McMillan are RIGHTLY taken very seriously, that isn’t so with the experiment in historical fiction of Jon Ransom. The second part of the book is a play, written as if by Eli Stone in 1988 and in which identities are shared and named differently, although themes of queer love maintained – AIDs is introduced here in a way it could not have been in the 1953 and 1954 sections. Dawoor says:

Does the play hold the keys to the novel? Does it bring nuance, or add to our reading of the rest of the book? I’m unsure. The novel proper ends in 1954, with Eli leaving for national service. What the play might mean, beyond an older Eli’s attempt to fictionalise his life, while wrestling with ideas of loss, sickness and mortality, is up to the reader to decide. But at its best, The Gallopers offers a surprising and quietly devastating account of three men, and their troubled relationship with themselves and the world they live in.[22]

The bemused uncertainty is fine of course but I think it allows the reviewer to see the novel as yet another novel about ‘troubled relationships’ that are thought to be, as it were, at one with what is the fate of queer men, and to ignore the lure of the happy theme of the circulating carousel of gallopers associated with Jimmy weaving between its horses. There is a lot of ‘loss, sickness, and mortality’ but there is also joy and an ‘indigo mountain’, and some unashamed sex which Dawoor also notices and enjoys. In truth, if Dawoor were to capture it in summary, his account of the novel shows why it goes to places and spaces in explication of queer love that McMillan does not even attempt (my blog to come soon after this). Note this excellent critical paragraph.

The Gallopers is a whispered howl of a novel about men fettered by masculine norms, the ideas and pressures that curtail their freedom, and the bargains they strike with others and themselves in order to live. The novel is excellent on queer love and the shape it takes once it mixes with shame, blood and guilt. Some of its best and most poignant passages capture the ghoulish discord between queerness and the law, the individual and the world, truth and deceit.[23]

Why ‘whispered howl’ though, as if the novel were only a shout of pain, for it is not. It certainly, as The Whale Tattoo, makes the cusp between male and female porous but ‘queer love’ in the novel does not take on ONLY ONE shape but many, and it is not all ‘ghoulish discord’ as if queer men were merely VICTIMS of the law, world, truth and deceit. It also yields some beautiful fictions of its own, not least the ‘gallopers’ motif.

This is a novel that deserves better critical reception than, with Dawoor as an exception, it has got. For it is culturally networked in ways that, as an example, Mcmillan is not and does not want to be I think it is truer in its grasp of the body, for instance, and its appreciation that disgust can be part and parcel of our response to it, and its wondrous palette of colour symbolism – especially those ‘yellow skies’ which may mean something or may not but certainly reflect the hair of the Stone family.

Ransom allows for the shudder  we feel in seeing momently the swinging hanged body of Shane, his legs ‘wet with piss’.[24] It rings through the many various responses of disgust and joy at being ‘wet’, as a result of the body’s relationships between its inside and outside, and it is registered in the fact that queer men, like other people, sometimes self-oppress, though often in reflex with oppression from without.

It occurs to me this might be why Dreama has no desire to be around. These troubles I collect like stones, before we threw them back in the field. He tells me I’m wrong to worry.[25]

Eli misinterprets others all the time (Shane, Jimmy, and Dreama). He over-reacts to the effect produced by what he sees as his ‘sissy-sounding voice’ in seeing it ‘brings me more misfortune than not’.  I find the tenderness of this stronger than any other queer literary fiction that I know; the metaphor of stones having a contextual and parable-like beauty.

Likewise I like the recall of the period smells: Woodbines or John Player’s, the smoke of the 1950s working-class. And I love the association of Eli to the moon as a symbol of lunar variability and its illusive states in reflection; and, of course, perhaps, his distaste at anything feminine within him balanced with a joy therein. Here are two instances of each kind. One opens the book:

Just as the moon shining in a bucket full with water isn’t really the moon, I am sometimes other than I appear to be.[26]

Because of my sissy-sounding voice know what it means 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. … Though same as the moon comes and goes, each time I came back to myself. Was able to find my reflection in a black windowpane some place. Or the oval mirror atop the chest of drawers in my bedroom. Wherte I’s sit and comb my yellow hair neatly, smoothing everything away.[27]

And, of course, that yellow hair – the badge of every Stone, both masculine and feminine, and of Ezzah and Afreen, Jimmy Smart’s beloved lions. For his mother ‘wanted me to be just like her. Even though I am a boy’.

Later, she believed this explained my peculiar manner, same way I inherited her yellow hair. I’d been born with a fondness for pretty things, keeping my fingernails clean, hair combed. And a desire to gaze at men in a way that would bring me more misfortune than not.[28]

But I could quote from this lovely book forever. Do read it. More than once.

With love

Steven xxxxx

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[1] Jon Ransom (2024: 149) The Gallopers London, The Muswell Press.

[2] Ibid: 69

[3] Ibid: 132

[4] Ibid: 157

[5] Ibid: 69

[6] Ibid: 122

[7] Ibid: 9

[8] Ibid: 165

[9] Ibid: 153f.

[10] Ibid: 132

[11] Ibid: 10

[12] Ibid: 151

[13] Ibid:130

[14] Ibid: 59, 149, 70 respectively

[15] Ibid: 149.

[16] Ibid: 161

[17] Ibid: 130

[18] John 8: available at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%208&version=KJV

[19] Jon Ransom 2012 op. cit:: 168f.

[20] Ibid: 2

[21] Ibid; 160

[22] Yagnishsing Dawoor (2024) ‘The Gallopers by Jon Ransom review – gay love in the 1950s’  in The Guardian (Fri 12 Jan 2024 07.30 GMT) available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/12/the-gallopers-by-jon-ransom-review-gay-love-in-the-1950s

[23] Ibid.

[24] Jon Ransom op.cit: 149

[25] Ibid: 156

[26] Ibid: 1

[27] Ibid: 177.

[28] Ibid: 165