This was a solid read for me, it did take me a little bit to get into it.but once you make it past chapter 5 then it starts to get good. The ending does and did need a little bit of work.

Jon Ransom has yet again captured the subdued menace of water, a swirling and magical presence that soaks through pages, bursting the banks of both syntax and dialogue. Much like the titular gallopers, twisting around and around on their carousel, drenched thoughts are pulled into a cyclone of desire, convulsion, and resolve that transcends bodies by constantly collapsing in on itself.

While the addition of a play midway through the novel may come as an abrupt respite from passion, its disjointed presence in the eye of the storm isn’t without its meaning. Like Eli, helplessly absorbing both the agony and ecstasy inflicted by men—and one man in particular— we learn that the only way forward is to let the mind off its leash. Feel it unravel as it absorbs Ransom’s unique blend of storytelling. This is the only way to experience his worlds, and not to do so is to miss out on a thrilling cerebral descent.

It took me a minute to realize that the “Polari” in “Polari Prize” (which this book won, and which is not to be confused with Canada’s Polaris Prize, which exists to funnel money to the indie rock band Broken Social Scene) is the same as the “Palare” in the 1990 Morrissey song “Piccadilly Palare,” but it makes sense. Being gay in England seems like its own highly specific thing which I wouldn’t get, being from California, and being gay in Norfolk a further niche. You get a good impression of it from Jon Ransom’s The Gallopers.

It’s a bit like looking at a painting by Monet, where all the little dots that don’t make sense up close resolve into a vivid sense of being-there-ness at a distance, except it’s big chunks of dense prose interspersed with sections of dialogue (it’s also much bleaker than Monet, trading idyllic seasides and lily-strewn ponds for ugly, dirt-banked rivers and lethal floodwaters). It’s definitely doing *something* stylistically.

There’s a barn on the protagonist’s property which is notable for its lack of article: everyone is always “going into black barn” or “looking at black barn” and every skipped an or the piles up in this big heap of unease. Lots of little tricks like that make the book atmospheric in a way you can’t quite pin down until the narrative really gets going in the last quarter or so: the whole thing is this slow build of poverty and dirt and alienation and bottoming with no lube, and it takes a long time before it feels like *story* happens.

The book is grim and unromantic. It’s not a light read–it fills out its Important Gay Lit bingo card with both 1950s homophobia *and* AIDS–and I had too few serotonin molecules banging around in my brain to enjoy it much. That said, a more well-adjusted person with better taste than me would probably love it. It would make a fantastic movie, where the narrative’s bleakness could be visually offset with beautiful young actors and long shots of the Norfolk countryside at sunset.

Four stars, I guess?

I loved Jon Ransom's previous work. I loved the same lyrical writing in this book. The formatting sadly, drove me mad. I really struggled to read more than a few pages at a time because there's very little formatting when it comes to dialogue. It's even difficult to read which characters are saying what.

I did persist although I got a bit more confused in the middle section which suddenly switched to being a screenplay rather than a novel.

There is a lot of rare and well captured emotion in this novel. Three very different men finding their ways in and out of one another's lives as time marches on. Unfortunately I think the formatting won't work for a lot of folks!

A teenage, self-described “sissy” is awash in a world of prejudice and small-town economic despair in Jon Ransom’s second novel, which takes inspiration from the North Sea Flood of 1953. With weathered, working-class characters and an uncomplicated yet evocative style, the book is reminiscent of the work of John Steinbeck and Annie Proulx.

Eli is the story’s central character. He lives with his aunt Dreama on a farm on the East Coast of England, whose low lands suffered a devastating flood that took Eli’s mother. Dreama’s farm was the only parcel of land that wasn’t ruined by sea water, which has earned her, and Eli by association, resentment and accusations of wrongdoing (even witchcraft) from their neighbors. Late at night, people throw rocks at the windows of their house, and Eli collects them neatly at the foot of his bed.

Dreama is an eccentric woman who inspires both idolization and mystification for Eli. She seems to have a psychic’s gift for sussing out people and situations, and she also wanders out to the fields late at night, sometimes laying naked in the brush, detached from everything around her. Due to the harassment they’re experiencing, she hires a hearty local fellow, Jimmy Smart, to help out with the farm and live on the property. Jimmy is a carnival worker who runs a merry-go-round that the locals call the gallopers.

Despite the heavy atmosphere of homophobia in 1950s rural England, Eli has managed to find himself in a hidden relationship with another young man, Shane Wright, who works at a boxing gym. But when Jimmy comes along, Eli is drawn to follow the handsome workhand around, admiring his casual masculinity and fearlessness. Both Dreama and Jimmy advise Eli to make his way in a place with better prospects, and Eli is old enough to understand that he’ll likely need to leave town to live happily. But he hasn’t known any other home and is increasingly enchanted by Jimmy. Questions about his mother’s death and the truth behind a heinous crime that might involve Shane also have him paralyzed.

There’s beauty in Ransom’s prose: his rendering of Eli’s deeply felt emotions, Dreama’s wild and neglected farm, and the bitter bargains of the townspeople who inhabit his world.

The novel structure is odd and unpolished, however. Inexplicably, a section takes the form of a screenplay set three decades later, with little connection or elucidation of characters or plot. Those elements are resolved later in the book anyway, thus what was the point?

Lately, I’ve been confounded by the way publishers are marketing gay fiction these days, and The Gallopers is unfortunately another example of that. An epic story of three men, spread out over thirty years is promised, but truly, the novel is Eli’s story, and excepting the aforementioned bizarre screenplay interlude, it doesn’t venture beyond one year in Eli’s nineteen-year-old year old life, nor take a narrative point-of-view of Jimmy or Shane.

Though roughly hewn in places, The Gallopers has lovely writing that transports the reader to another time and place, and the story is full of well-realized and appealing characters. It may interest readers of gay literary fiction.

Reviewed for Out in Print