The Whale Tattoo

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Joe Gunner and the river that keeps mocking him, the death that follows him around and the fragility of everything he holds dear in this book broke my heart as much as it had me glued to each page. Jon Ransom won the Polari First Novel Prize for his debut “ The Whale Tattoo” (2022) which I really enjoyed giving it four stars and describing it as “ dark, raw and relentlessly gritty. Whether 'Earthly Powers' should be considered a 'gay' novel is considered in my review of the book - it isn't in case you don't want or can't be bothered to read it! The settings are so vividly depicted that the reader can smell and taste them every bit as much as Joe can. Neither the novel nor the author needs my five stars or words of praise but I am proud to be an echo of my betters all the same.

Kit de Waal: Scenes from an Unpredictable Childhood Kit de Waal’s influence across contemporary British literature is so broad as to be almost immeasurable. The books first big surprise could have been handled more adeptly (I can’t say more, no spoilers here). I should add that this may be in part due to the formatting issues in my review copy, which often made the writing more fractured than intended). I really struggled to read this and in the end I had to admit defeat and give up reading at around the halfway mark.Ransom's short stories have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Queer Life, Queer Love amongst others. There is a sense of detachment from the characters which does feel very English, however, and which steers clear of the melodrama we might associate from the American authors. Despite this, it is worth persisting, and I suspect, it's a book that needs to be read more than once. Joe learns that love and hate are very much interwoven and his adoration of Fysh is so beautifully presented that I could feel his emotions almost viscerally.

As time goes on and we learn more about them, the characters gain more complexity giving the story a rich texture. It was just too confusing for me, and if there's someone who has more patience and tolerance who can make an educated guess to explain it to me, I'll be more than happy to read it again with a fresher perspective. Coming across a dead sperm whale on a Norfolk beach, the working-class youth believes the dead whale speaks to him, telling him death is following him.

Support our vendors this winter and beyond If you can't visit your local vendor on a regular basis, then the next best way to support them is with a subscription to the Big Issue. As the novel’s first-person narrator, Joe’s story is also told in a non-linear fashion perfectly consistent with the young man’s befuddled nature. The body of water it holds penetrates the protagonist’s psyche, floods reality in a way that is both hungry and foreboding. Notably, the mimetic, lyrical quality of its prose which echoes the bodies of water so central to the The Whale Tattoo’s plot; writing of occasional “ball-aching” beauty (as will become clear if you give this a go), which for all its fluidity, can’t much help the novel feel more than a bit one-note and flat.

Haunted by the nagging water of the river and an ominous beached whale, Joe finds love in the form of a local fisherman named Tim Fysh. With no smartphones or internet, and a set of characters who are sometimes deeply homophobic, it has a timeless quality and could be set at any time from the 1960’s to the present day. And so, THE WHALE TATTOO is both a dream and a nightmare, both a pursuit of objectivity and an escape from the claws of morality. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The whole story read with no emotion, I imagined it being read in a monotone voice with no inflection at all.The subject matter means it's never a particularly easy read, but it is a fairly quick one which gratifyingly ends (spoiler alert! When a giant sperm whale washes up on the local beach and tells Joe Gunner that death will follow him wherever he goes. And when his eyes forget their colour and he is more still than any stone you’ve ever held in the palm of your hand, suddenly you’ll see what it means to be a father. Recounting this novel's story line and adding words of praise is inadequate for what I feel about this novel so instead I am going to try and show via an anecdote why this book is so remarkable to me. Nothing startling there but forty odd years later I am astounded that in the course of my lifetime a whole new literature has come into being and I can not imagine anyone asking about the need for another 'gay' novel.