A boy’s own world

The pilcrow is a typographical symbol which looks like this: ¶. It was once used in writing (often of the philosophical or religious kind) to indicate a new line of discussion, before the habit of physically separating work into paragraphs changed its status to that of the exotic and learned yet largely useless. It is an apt nickname for John Cromer, the narrator of this novel, who grows up in the 1950s and early 1960s as a bright yet disabled boy: like a human incarnation of the pilcrow, John has intellectual pedigree but society gives him no outlet for it.

As a child John is afflicted with Still’s Disease, a form of arthritis. It is firstly misdiagnosed as rheumatic fever, leading to disastrous treatment; when he should have been exercising, he is confined to bed, where his limbs waste. On being correctly diagnosed (initially by his mother, not a doctor), he is moved to a children’s hospital.