I picked this book up back in 2020 because of the title – Box Hill – fabulous, I thought, a book about boxwood. I’ll peruse this for its respective thoughts on the plant I clip most when I make topiary.

I didn’t read the blurb on the back. Didn’t know the author (although I knew the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, as I love many of the essays they have published… so trusted the author would be worth spending time with.)

By page 2 I realised this novel wasn’t quite what I had expected.

I started the book at 10pm, after getting into bed, finished it at 2.30am. Was up for work at 5am and the whole drive down to the garden I was clipping in that day I was thinking about Box Hill… the book knocked me out, I couldn’t stop going over what I had read.

It was shocking (because of the incongruity between subject matter and the suburban lives the characters led?) and refused a Hollywood ending – they didn’t live happily ever after, they had the sort of ending life prefers to offers – a mystery as to why people acted that way and a sort of, a clutching, and an aching, to know with finality why… but it never comes for the character, as it rarely comes for people.

Just get on and live then.

This subversion of the normal story ending is, I guess, why it itched at my thinking all day and onwards after that.

It has been made into a film called Pillion, released at the Cannes Film Festival this year. I read it got a 7 minute standing ovation when it finished.

I chose this book for the “Depressing Book Club” I’ve joined at Becketts Cafe in Whitby. The club members who read it were as shocked as I was (even reading it a second time), but it opened up so much unprompted discussion… and I hope has stayed with people the way it stayed with me.

Box Hill may not offer you much new information about boxwood or topiary – though the word coriaceous is now imprinted in my mind, blinking at me behind my eyes whenever I see a boxwood leaf – but the book is so beautifully written it is a fruitful use of the few hours it will take to read and may, just may, tilt the balance of the moral landscape we so securely plant our feet in.

(King Kong Theory from the same publisher did much the same to me on reading it too.)

Happy clipping of your boxwood, and happy reading of Box Hill!