I’ve enjoyed the various authors who have embraced the fictional seaside town of Porthkennack in Cornwall, created as a shared dramatic stage by writer Alex Beecroft. I have a special fondness for JL Merrow’s work, and her use of Porthkennack as a sort of near-magical place where young men go to seek peace and end up finding each other.
“One Under” is in fact a sort-of sequel to a previous book by Merrow set in Porthkennack, and it once again presents two lonely young men separated by class in a very British way. Mallory Thomas is a south London tube train driver who’s suffered a serious trauma at work. He’s fled to Porthkennack to pull himself together because his best friend’s foster-sister works there. That’s the link to the first book. A blue-collar boy and happy to be so, Mal is poking around the local naval history museum and meets the tall, blond, bearded Jory Rosscarrock, youngest scion (if one can have that) of the gentry family who own the manor that looms over the town. Jory is a nerd and a scholar (and a gentleman, needless to say, because this is the UK). But Mal doesn’t know who Jory is, other than adorable, and the feeling is mutual. Jory, for his part, has no idea that Mal’s best mate Dev is the illegitimate by-blow of his much older sister (and this was the plot-driver of the first book).
Merrow works under the prescribed rules and regulations of M/M romance. She does this very well indeed, creating complex, heart-tugging characters who are easy for this gay man to love. She uses the wild, historical, and geologically quirky Cornish coast as a secondary character throughout (much in the way Philippa Braithwaite uses Cornwall’s Port Isaac for her TV series Doc Martin; and Harper Fox uses the equally imaginary town of Dark in her Tyack and Frayne novels). Merrow has a gift for language and dialogue, expressing her characters’ personalities in full dimensions through their use of words. The whole class division theme is still more resonant in the UK than in the USA, where blue-blood Bostonians sound like everybody else and you can never tell a person’s family from their accent).
I liked this book a lot…it represents the best of M/M fiction. It delivers people you love and a story you want to read. I confess I was a little troubled by the casual use of the term “curator,” but that’s only because I’ve been one for 37 years and find that few people actually know how complex a curator’s job is. I guess that’s where my own writing will have to take me. Meanwhile, Porthkennack is a happy vacation spot for me, and I will happily keep visiting as long as young gay men keep dropping by.
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