(courtesy Hachette Australia)
Living up to hype, any hype, can be a crippling burden for any novel.
It might well be every bit as good as the buzz feverishly declares it to be, full of characters you will love, themes you will embrace and a story that will draw you in and never quite let you go, even as the last page is reached, but if the pitch of the fervour gets too shrill, you may find yourself judging it more harshly or being more disappointed than might be the case if it arrived gloriously and quietly unannounced.
Rather happily, while The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers by Samuel Burr has been surrounded by an excitable cacophony of expectation for some months now, it more than lives up to the advance hype, delivering a richly affecting and emotionally honest story of belonging, community and finding your true self that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt both integral to something and yet also an outlier.
The novel centres on delightfully adventurous and curious Clayton Stumper, a 25-year-old man who dresses like an old person, largely because his adoptive family are all ageing members of the titular fellowship, brilliantly clever people who have dreamt up the UK’s crossword puzzles, mazes, jigsaw puzzles and beyond and who took Clayton in one night in 1991 when he was abandoned on the steps of the manor the Fellowship calls home.
C for Clayton?
Most prominent of all, however, were the lettered columns on the lid.
Four of them could be moved up and down in various formations to spell, presumably, a word or phrase.
This box had been made especially for him. He was meant to find it, solve it, and retrieve the answers inside.
For all of the uncertainty surrounding his upbringing and his arrival at the manor, Clayton has enjoyed a loved and special life, chiefly at the hands of the Fellowship’s founder and chief cheerleader, Pippa Allsbrook, who, as well as forging a path into the male dominated world of crossword compiling, has proved adept at creating a community of likeminded equals who have largely thrived in their commune out in the British countryside.
But then Pippa very sadly passes away, and in the aftermath of this seismic event which rocks a fading institution long past its glory days, Clayton is set to the task, through a tantalising trail of puzzles no less, of finding out where he came from and where he might go next should he so choose.
It’s a lot to deal in the wake of his mother’s death but as The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers progresses, told through chapters that alternate between the present and the past, where we gain insight into the many relational layers that make up the titular grouping of bright and inquisitive minds but also flawed if loving humans, Clayton begins to understand that while his past is a treasure to hold close, he also has a promising future where he might truly come into how own, defined not as much by where he belongs but who he is and where he originally came from.
It’s an exciting journey but one that understandably carries a lot of emotional weight for the young man who is both excited by what lies ahead and terrified that everything he has ever known is about to undergo considerable change.
(courtesy official author site)
Where will it all lead?
Clayton can’t possibly knows but intrigued and trusting Pippa and eager to have his legion of questions answered, he sets out, first to London and the further afield, all in search of insights into the shape and form of his future courtesy of critically important revelations about his past.
Full of charming loveliness but brutal honesty about the capacity of life to be both nurturer and denier, The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is an irresistibly charming story told with a joyously unravelling queer sensibility that will enrich and enliven you and remind, should you need that, of how life can be if you open to things changing in ways you might never have anticipated.
Burr beautifully balances Clayton’s fear of losing what he has with the excitement of what he might gain, not least discovering what lies in the dim, dark and distant past while exploring the joys and complexities of community.
It’s perhaps the power of community that emerges most strongly throughout the story.
While much of this journey of discovery is one that Clayton must, by necessity take alone, he is never truly without those who have raised him, those he tangentially knew through reputation or passing contact, and those new to him including someone who may hold the promise of a rich romantic future to come.
So, while The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers is Clayton’s journey for the most part, it is also the story of how an ever-growing group of people, brilliantly insightful and intelligent misfits who found each other and grew in each other’s presence, created something quite marvellous and wonderful together.
He hoped Neil would be up for joining him tomorrow. If the last few days had taught him anything, it was to put himself out there a bit. You got so much more out of life when you let people in.
It’s that love letter to community, evoked in all its glory and fallibility by Burr, who writes with a garrulous intimacy that is both reassuringly and comfortingly closed in but open to a world of wonder and possibility, which powers The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers and makes it every bit as wondrously good as the hype urged us to believe.
We all long to belong, we need to belong but we also need to do that on the basis of knowing who we are, who we truly are; while community is a joy and a calm place for the soul in the sea of uncertainty that is life, it only really impacts us and become truly worthwhile if we know intrinsically who we are.
There’s no question that Clayton has benefited hugely from the community that adopted him and which continues to love with fierce and uncompromising love and loyalty, but it’s all happened with some fairly major question marks hanging over him.
In the aftermath of unimaginable loss, Clayton is given the chance to make his place in that community more known and full of a strong sense of self, a journey which informs and delights The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers which is never less than sweetly funny, warmly alive, honest about the glories and the pitfalls of the human condition and which reassures us, with a sense of inventive and caring humanity, at every turn that when we know who we are alone we become so much in community, something which not only brings us alive but which enriches those around us too, now and well into the future.