Box Hill (2020) by Adam Mars-Jones

Box Hill, subtitled A Story of Low Self-Esteem, is a 2020 novella by Adam Mars-Jones, which was adapted into the film Pillion (2025). An awkward young gay man becomes the live-in submissive of a charismatic biker.

This essay includes spoilers for Box Hill and Pillion.

Most of the book covers the mid-1970s to the early 1980s in the life of Colin Smith, and his dominant-submissive relationship with the handsome, enigmatic biker, Ray. Colin is Ray’s live-in servant, but he never asks for more intimacy than what Ray allows.

The biggest change between film and book is that, in the film, Ray completely abandons Colin once they’ve become too intimate for him. In the book, Colin takes a break from his relationship with Ray to go on a trip with his aged mother, during which Ray suffers a fatal motorcycle accident. Colin later learns that, while dying in hospital, Ray swore his biker friends to not tell Colin anything about him: not his last name, not his background, not when his funeral was, not even his grave site’s location.

Pillion is a young man’s coming of age story, set in the present day. It ends with Colin developing a sense of his own identity as a gay man and as a submissive, and looking to the future. It’s a disillusionment narrative about Colin seeing beyond the image of Ray as a idealized dominant, to the flawed human being within.

Box Hill is written from the perspective of a middle-aged man looking back on his youth in a bygone time. It’s ultimately about loss. Colin speculates about Ray’s mysterious life and why he completely severed ties with his submissive of 6 years on his deathbed, but ultimately learns nothing new. There’s also a parallel story of Colin’s father slowly slipping into mental illness, then dying, followed by the loss of his mother.

In the later years of his life, Colin has a job as an underground train driver, a stable living arrangement, and he sees men, but doesn’t seem to have a relationship or a future, or at least he doesn’t think about it much. He’s preoccupied with the past, and in his view the present just doesn’t measure up. (There’s little or no mention of the evolution of gay culture in this time period.)

This makes me wonder if Colin is an unreliable narrator, at least concerning Ray. That is, what we get in the book is Colin’s idealized memory of Ray. All of his flaws, or even human details, are erased by Colin, consciously or unconsciously. What’s left is this image of impossible masculine perfection.

In the book, Colin’s relationship with Ray spans six years. Ray dies in 1981, right as AIDS is hitting public consciousness. Perhaps Ray, or rather Colin’s image of Ray as an idealized masculine gay icon right out of a Tom of Finland drawing, could not exist in the same world as AIDS. Colin briefly considers how Ray would have adapted to AIDS (he makes the point that Ray was an extremely safety conscious rider, though that didn’t save him) before giving up.

Colin and Ray’s relationship in the book has much the same problems as in the film: no explicit negotiation between them. Theoretically, Colin is free to leave at any time, but that isn’t saying much.

Both book and film start with the fantasy of the perfect dominant, what Quentin Crisp called “the great dark man” that haunts the sexual imagination of gay men. (In my opinion, submissives and masochists of all kinds can have this issue.) Film Colin learns to look beyond that to the human being, and to assert himself as a submissive. Book Colin never quite gets past the image of Ray, and it’s still there in his mind.

The novella is subtitled A Story of Low Self-Esteem, and that suggests the real mystery of the story is not “why did Ray sever all ties with Colin?”, but “why did Ray choose Colin at all?” In the film, shy and awkward Colin does develop self-esteem, a sense of his own worth, essential to a submissive. Book Colin never really does.