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!