The punctuation family is a close-knit one, with barely half a dozen members, but there is an outlying tribe of more or less distant cousins, not fully integrated socially with the core group. Why not call them, as a collective, parapunctuation, on the analogy of ‘paramedic’ and ‘paralegal’? Junior marks, less fully qualified, that can still play a part in shaping meanings.

¶ ç ⁁

If these three little symbols have a place in my heart it’s at least partly because they have furnished me with wryly minimalist titles for three vast novels, though I wouldn’t have chosen those words if I hadn’t liked them already. Pilcrow (2008), *Cedilla *(2011), Caret (2023) – successive volumes of a series that I used to describe as semi-infinite, since I didn’t know how I was going to bring the little fleet into harbour. Now that an end of sorts is in sight, the phrase ‘trilogy of five’, cribbed from Douglas Adams, seems more exact.

The title of the first volume, Pilcrow, has since promoted itself to the rank of ambassador for the whole series, but it arrived late on in the process. There’s a tendency for the titles of big books to aim for resonance or universality – Ulysses, *Life: A User’s Manual – *and I knew I didn’t want that. What, then? John, the friend on whose life the series is based (sometimes closely, sometimes loosely), was involved at every stage. He chose his character’s full name, John Cromer, for instance, knowing I wanted to keep those incipiently messianic initials. He also introduced me to the word ‘pilcrow’, a word I relished though I found it oddly elusive. My memory had to reach for it every time, but that wasn’t an outright disqualification – slippery isn’t the worst thing a word can be. In medieval manuscripts the ¶ symbol was used to indicate a change of subject. In some bibles it precedes certain verses with a sort of abstract trumpet blast – ¶Hear ye the Word of the Lord! On Mac computers, once formatting marks are made visible, it appears at the end of any paragraph that you highlight. So it’s both ancient and modern. On top of which, the novel contained a theme of pilgrimage and a discussion of Velcro. Pil-cro. QED. Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your aunt.

Fictional John – like John himself, the historical John – was born in the last days of 1949 and fell ill at the age of three with what was misdiagnosed as rheumatic fever. He was consigned to bed rest and told not to move, which he duly did for more than three years. The correct diagnosis of Still’s Disease (infantile rheumatoid arthritis) was only made when the damage had been done, by the treatment as much as the disease. It would have been beneficial for John to bear as little weight as possible, and to move his joints constantly to avoid their seizing up. During those bed-rest years his joints had swollen and locked, restricting his growth.

It wasn’t hard to devise a prefatory paragraph to make the title seem long considered:

‘I’m not sure that I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I’m more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of computer or typewriter. Pilcrow is the prettiest of the bunch, assessed purely as a word. And at least it stands on its own. It doesn’t perch or dangle. Pilcrow it is.’

Historical John had worked as a proofreader, and I remember that while the book was in preparation he suggested fonts he favoured (Garamond and Goudy Old Style) not so much for the text as for the pilcrow itself – to give it a good showing. Some versions of the symbol have a curved form, an Art Nouveau sinuousness reminiscent of paisley, which seemed wrong in this context. I thought of the pilcrow as a sort of ideogram of John himself, small, stiff and indomitable – though I may not have spelled this out to him – and chose a font that featured a straight-up-and-down version with the suggestion of (not particularly functional) feet at the bottom.

I thought the pilcrow might lend itself to a graphic cover design, and went along to a Faber design meeting with that in mind. When they said that this was just the sort of book they most enjoyed working on, I glowed for a minute or two, thinking that they meant ‘modern classic in the making’. After all, it is the fullest account of a disabled life in world culture (a claim I make loudly and often since it is open to refutation), and a fun rather than an earnest read into the bargain. It turned out that what they meant was ‘fat book with short title’, whose spine would be legible from across the bookshop if not the galaxy. Conversely the design job with a tendency to make them miserable was ‘skinny book with long title’, by which they may have meant, specifically, Wendy Cope’s slimline Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis.

Choosing Cedilla, the title of the next volume, wasn’t difficult, and a new passage to substantiate it seemed to write itself: ‘I was no more than a stray eyelash which the unobserving world would never know it had shed, unmissed ciliary casualty, cedilla without a c to hang from.’ That near-arbitrary prefatory paragraph for Pilcrow had smoothed the way to this pleasing formulation – pleasing to me, anyway. I wanted to emphasise – even celebrate – the disparity between my hyper-marginal narrator, a minority within a minority within a minority (gay, and Hindu by choice after an Anglican upbringing) and the mainstream reader’s expectations. Why apologise for that? If the minority is always right then John is clearly infallible – both Johns certainly seemed to think so at least some of the time. By representing the apotheosis of a speck, the title Cedilla stands in for the whole novel series, which takes someone who would be peripheral in most fiction, if visible at all, and puts him in the driving seat of the story.

The logic that had led to Cedilla argued for Umlaut for volume three, but there’s no getting around the facts. This is a lumpy and disobliging word. For a while I was tempted by Untittled, if only for the sake of the double-take involved, and even wrote a passage to justify it:

In typography it often happens, in the interests of elegance and legibility, that ‘f’ and ‘i’ are merged on the page to create the digraph ‘fi’. Consonant slyly reaches for vowel, vowel responds to consonant, and in the embrace that follows the two marks melt into a single glyph. The ‘f’ chivalrously shares its hood, while the ‘i’ loses all shyness along with its dot. It becomes untittled. I use the words tittle and hood because they are the proper technical terms and not because I find them in any way voluptuous. Dot my tittle, cross my tattle, hope to die.

John’s career as a proofreader is still in the future tense of the narrative, but I was hinting at it as far back as the first volume – ‘Blessèd are the proofreaders, for they shall seek sense. They will read everything twice.’

In the end Caret seemed a more sensible choice, representing perhaps John’s desire to insert himself back into the shared world that others take for granted. A fresh prefatory paragraph was required to bed the notion down:

‘Caret’ means only ‘it is missing’ or ‘there is a lack’. Its symbol resembles a lambda pointing the wrong way. It’s a sturdy little jemmy, able to prise open a sentence for as long as it takes for missing elements to be restored to the body of the text.

For the fourth volume Interrobang has to be a possibility. An authentic piece of punctuation this time, though an upstart that bundles together two existing marks (? and !) rather than starting from scratch. It’s a bit brash and a bit smug. An argument in its favour is that there is at least one episode of terror in the book, but I’m not sure that’s enough to clinch things. For the concluding volume the odds favour Obelus (the dagger symbol †) despite its lack of appeal to the mind’s eye. This is a mark with two distinct meanings – to indicate that a passage of text is spurious or doubtful, very much apropos in fiction that ventriloquises disabled experience, mixing testimony with free invention. Next to a name, though, the obelus indicates that someone is no longer alive, and historical John died in April 2022, when flu, pneumonia and Covid ganged up on him. The end of an unusual intimacy, during which he sometimes referred to me as his ‘husband in another life’ while I made non-committal noises. As a good Hindu with a mystical bent John was dedicated to dissolving his ego, but there’s no denying the kick he got from being translated into fiction. Sometimes he would retell to me as fact an episode I had invented, so it’s fair to say that the boundary between historical John and fictional John wasn’t watertight. And as long as I can go on writing first-person sentences in John’s point of view, I don’t need to know he’s dead.

Anyone who starts a novel sequence must accept the possibility of leaving it unfinished. Did Proust complete his magnum opus? It’s a moot point. Closer to home, Richard Hughes (best known for A High Wind in Jamaica) began a trilogy in 1961 with The Fox in the Attic, and followed it in 1973 with The Wooden Shepherdess. He died three years later, with little to show in terms of the final volume. He left his arch short of its capstone, having lost what he was fond of calling the race between publisher and undertaker. Perhaps he was betting against himself by choosing such a grandiose title for his trilogy – The Human Predicament. I’d rather not hitch my wagon to a statement of universal significance. An unassuming piece of parapunctuation is much more my cup of tea.

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