Adam Mars-Jones's Blog

Colm Tóibín, Alan Hollinghurst, Adam Mars-Jones and more recall the high style and libidinous freedom of a writer who ‘was not a gateway to gay literature but a main destination’

• Edmund White, novelist and great chronicler of gay life, dies aged 85

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Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on the novel Box Hill so, misgivings riding alongside, it felt right for the author to motorbike to the film festival for its premiere

I set out on my motorbike for Cannes on the morning of 16 May, a distance of about 450 miles, having booked a room in Montpellier so as to break the journey and take my own sweet time. It’s not often that anyone’s books are the basis of a “queer biker movie” premiering at the only film festival everyone has heard of, let alone one of mine – I felt I owed it to myself to make an entrance in style.

Harry Lighton’s film Pillion is based on my novel Box Hill, published in 2020. When the option was acquired I didn’t see how a consciously disorienting first-person narrative could work on the screen, but I was happy for him to try. At one point I was told, through my agent, that everyone was happy with the first two acts of Harry’s draft, but the third needed work. After three years it was up to me to decide whether the project should go ahead. Conscientiously Yasmin McDonald, then at United Agents, itemised some drastic divergences. My 18-year-old narrator Colin was now 35 when he met the glamorous biker Ray, though still living with his parents, and Ray didn’t die as he does in the book but simply disappeared from Colin’s life. I flinched when I heard about these changes. Would the next phone call let me know that Olivia Colman had agreed to take on the demanding role of Ray? Nevertheless I said yes. I couldn’t imagine pulling the plug on a project that someone had spent far more time adapting than I had spent writing it.

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As the 2018 shortlist is announced, the chair of this year’s judges explains how they hope to reward more than simple innovation

There’s a passage in Proust that offered useful guidance during meetings to judge this year’s Goldsmiths prize, about “artificial novelty” in a work of art being less effective than a repetition designed to reveal a new truth. (I imagine he’s implicitly defending his own method as a novelist.) What we were looking for – in a prize designed to reward the “genuinely novel” – wasn’t innovation as such, but writers able to take fresh possession of the form’s resources. Books that had strong advocates among the judges but couldn’t quite displace the six on our list have earned thanks for the pleasure they gave us – Jonathan Buckley’s The Great Concert of the Night, Jeremy Gavron’s Felix Culpa, Danny Denton’s The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow, Nick Harkaway’s mighty fantasy Gnomon.

There have been novels in verse before, but the one we selected, Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, does a remarkable job of harnessing the dynamics of prose fiction and has a superb sense of time and place. The main character, a traumatised veteran of the second world war, sees the world collapsing around him a second time in the corporate destruction of Los Angeles as a liveable city. Cinephiles will particularly respond to the element of film noir, not a matter of vague atmosphere but specified shots, angles and film shoots.

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It was the case that had everything: aristocrats, airmen, entrapment and immunity. But one gay man in the dock refused to go quietly. Adam Mars-Jones on how the courage of Peter Wildeblood paved the way to a more tolerant Britain

The Wildeblood case was less sensational than the Wilde case, but it has had as much of an afterlife. Peter Wildeblood’s ordeal – he was tried and convicted in 1954, along with Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and Michael Pitt-Rivers – is as far in the past now as Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 was then. It is the contrast in their actions after prison that marks the difference between Wilde’s and Wildeblood’s experiences of disgrace.

While he was serving his sentence Wildeblood resented the well-meaning assumption, made by warders and others, that he would disappear when he was released, most likely living abroad as Wilde had done. Instead, he intended to take up his interrupted life – and he did, though with a new reformist agenda. He had been a journalist, but hardly a campaigning one (he was the diplomatic correspondent of the Daily Mail at the time of his arrest). He had found a subject, and his memoir, Against the Law, was published in 1955, the year of his release. The title of the book has a subtle double meaning, perhaps muffled on first publication by the prominence of the word “victim” on the cover – those were the days when the marketing of a hardback could be more lurid than the paperback that followed it. The title plays with the overtones of the word “against”: before Wildeblood was sent to prison his activities merely contravened the law; afterwards they opposed it.

Related: Kid Gloves by Adam Mars-Jones review – growing up gay with a homophobic father

Wildeblood wanted his book to be widely available – so that it would reach people who needed to know they weren't alone

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Shootouts and fist-fights are no longer a young man’s game. Hollywood is rebranding ageing actors as action heroes – but it still discards older women

Male careers in the movies have always been longer than female ones, but until recently there was only one real route to on-screen immortality – to the certified, gold-standard agelessness of, say, Cary Grant. (In North By Northwest, Grant, then 55, not only appeared opposite a woman 20 years younger than him, Eva Marie Saint, his screen mother was played by someone only seven years his senior.) The key principle is suavity: the refusal to break a sweat; sophistication with the faintest hint of self‑mockery; the actor letting us know that he is old enough to know how silly this all is.

There are still disciples following that path up the mountain to the sunny uplands of longevity – perhaps we should think of this as Mount Rushmore being reconfigured to include a huge stone likeness of Grant himself, like the ones he scrambled over so urbanely in North By Northwest. Over there, do you see? There are George Clooney and Hugh Grant (both 54) in their hiking shorts, clambering for dear life as the career shadows fall, and a little further down is Colin Firth (also 54), trying to make sense of the map. Richard Gere (65) is sitting cross-legged on a boulder and seems to be meditating, though he may just be taking a nap. Suddenly they all freeze (though with Gere it is hard to tell). What’s that sound? Gunfire. But it seems to be coming from further up the mountain, where the old-timers are plainly not putting their feet up.

Related: Liam Neeson: five best moments

Related: Liam Neeson's special skills forces other ageing actors into training

Related: Is Hollywood afraid of older women?

Related: Russell Crowe: female actors should act their age

Related: All hail Tom Cruise and the era of the equal opportunity action movie

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Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained is morally comfortable; everyone is a victim or monster. But what I'd really like to see is Spike Lee's Lincoln

Quentin Tarantino may take the low road (trashy vitality, pastiche of already disreputable genres) and Steven Spielberg the high road moral seriousness, historical scruple but they have both arrived in the same territory this year, the subject of slavery in American history. Is the national shame better staged in good taste or bad, as solemn struggle or sanguinary panto? Perhaps taste is a misleading consideration, unimportant compared with a shared tendency to make things easy for an audience.

At the beginning of Django Unchained, the recaptured runaway slave Django (Jamie Foxx) is freed by the German Dr King Schultz, for selfish reasons. Schultz () is a bounty hunter in need of help identifying three lucrative targets, and Django knows them. Two hours of screen time later, they're still together.

Though rich in language and symbolism, Nadeem Aslam's novel shies away from its own contradictions

In Nadeem Aslam's memorable 2008 novel The Wasted Vigil, set in Afghanistan, beauty and pain were intimately entwined, impossible to keep apart. The various incompatibles in his new book The Blind Man's Garden don't surrender their separateness so magically. There are awkward gaps and residues despite the author's great gifts of imagination.

The novel starts in late 2001 and takes place largely in Pakistan, though some sections are again set in Afghanistan, newly invaded. Elderly Rohan, eventually the blind man of the title, his vision gradually dimming, founded an Islamic school called Ardent Spirit with his wife Sofia. After her death he was forced out as the school became intolerant, a virtual nursery of jihad, but continues to live in the house that he built on the same site.

Tash Aw's tale of five migrant workers carving out lives in a modernising Shanghai is the stuff of a hit TV miniseries

At one point in Tash Aw's fine new novel about what people call "the new China" a young woman is trying to photograph herself on her mobile phone in a park in Guangzhou, hoping to enliven her internet dating profile with an image that doesn't make her look like an immigrant factory worker (which she is). An old man who sells tickets for the rowing boats on the lake offers to take the picture for her. He looks uncertainly at her phone. She wonders if he understands how to work it. Then he says: "This phone is so old. My grandson had one just like this three years ago when he was still in middle school." This is the world of the book, where traditional societies seem to have leapfrogged their way into a modernity without signposts, where the past isn't solid enough to build on but too substantial to be ignored.

The five main characters, three men and two women, all come to Shanghai (by some definitions the world's largest city) from Malaysia, though their backgrounds range from old money to rural deprivation. As a title, Five Star Billionaire is close to brash, and the book's storyline could persuasively be pitched to a producer in search of a blockbuster miniseries, but the reading experience it offers is coolly engrossing with elements of frustrating evasion rather than propulsive. Tash Aw doesn't exactly kill plot momentum or the emotional impact of the situations he creates, but he certainly keeps them in check. Narrative hints are often indirect, like clues in a detective story, as when a passing reference to a character having written an article deploring the architecture of Gaudí suggests that a conversation almost a hundred pages earlier wasn't in fact spontaneous.

Adam Mars-Jones on two lively books about how music has shaped us

One theory about the development of our brains is that reliance on hearing played a large part in it, at a time when we were tree-dwellers vulnerable and fearful at night since sound, needing to be measured over time, requires more processing power than visual information. Neither of these ambitious and complementary books goes back quite so far, though they start from the same recent discovery about the distant past: that prehistoric wall paintings coincide with the spots of maximum resonance within caves. Artistic expression in its earliest visual form was a response to richness experienced through the ears.

Each book is the published accompaniment to a series in another medium, Noise being a commission from Radio 4, while The Story of Music has just finished its run on BBC2. Howard Goodall has form not just as a presenter (with the excellent Big Bangs) but as a composer. If anyone could bring off a survey of music that, while it obviously can't hope to include everything, doesn't exclude any musical style or event in advance, then it has to be him. Even the most rushed whistlestop tour of the subject would have to make time for a halt outside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 for the première of The Rite of Spring, but Goodall manages to find space to discuss another Stravinsky score, Les Noces from 1923, whose soundworld he regards as even more influential.

A love triangle, a religio-racial apocalypse and an action thriller jostle for attention in Manil Suri's ambitious new novel

Manil Suri's ambitious new novel brings together an unusual love triangle, a religio-racial Mumbai apocalypse and an action thriller. "Brings together" seems more accurate than "blends", since the elements fight each other more than they get along. The opening is narrated by Sarita, separated from her husband Karun at a time of political crisis and social meltdown. The first thing she does is to buy a pomegranate, at an exorbitant price, and defends her possession of it with a devotion that seems excessive even when it is revealed that she used it in the past (following a tip from The Kama Sutra) to amplify Karun's rather muted sexual interest.

India has been invaded by China, its troops pouring through the northeastern frontier, and then by Pakistan. The UN forced the withdrawal of China (acting in concert with Pakistan all along), but Pakistan stayed put. Then cyber-attacks disabled many institutions, including computer networks, so that mobile phones and the internet packed up. In these circumstances, with nuclear warfare looming, no reaction can be described as normal, but fixation on the powers of fruit is a hard one to share.