The English novelist Rose Macaulay once sagely described croquet as “a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancour”. Smack goes the mallet against the ball and off it flies, powered by your politely simmering rage. It’s an underlying sense of this absurdity, perhaps, that makes croquet such an effective device in Thomas Jones’s debut novel. The book begins and ends with the game played by a group of thirtysomethings, uneasy in their friendships and not entirely comfortable in their skins. Jones notices seething excitations beneath the niceties, small acts of sabotage and determinations of desire that ripple through each roquet.
Game Theory is, as the subtitle pointedly explains, “a comedy”: a modern study of manners, crisply told and slyly observed. The hapless Alex has been in a relationship with Clare for 10 years, but she’s restless and unhappy. They have been friends with Henry since university. Henry, now married to Vic, is as hooray and as horrid as his name might suggest. He will sleep with one woman, leave another and stroll off with a third before the book is done.
The opening scene, with the central four playing croquet on a Kentish lawn one summer’s day, is magnificently choreographed. Alex, paired with Vic, glimpses her cleavage as she bends to strike, and is comically undone. He’s too distracted to notice the predatory Henry eyeing up Clare. And so it all unravels. Over the course of the novel the characters manoeuvre themselves into different positions, meeting and parting, sometimes conspiring and competing with each other for advantage, as their relationships change over the years.
Each chapter focuses on a different game, and so Jones prefaces the book with a pleasing “order of play” rather than list of contents. These games range from Frisbee and crosswords to chess, tennis and Scrabble. It’s a delightful device that releases him from the burden of laborious exposition. Instead, he can move freely between characters, depositing readers in the different moments of different relationships. A village cricket match lays Alex vulnerable, while a game of Snap sees Vic forging new alliances. The writing is always deft, the tone wry, and Jones’s enthusiasm for the conceit carries us along, too, because beneath it is an insight that feels compelling and true. In play, our undisguised selves seem to surface: we openly evaluate each other in ways that we might not otherwise admit, laying bare the rivalries we are most at pains to conceal.
Jones pays loving attention to the specificity of each game, showing us how each strike, stroke or shot betrays the inner life of those playing. The language of games, he knows, is loaded with innuendo and prophecy. “You can use me to put yourself through,” says Vic, irritated at Henry and offering herself up to Alex as they assess the third croquet hoop. Later, a tennis match against a new love interest momentarily goes to “Alex’s advantage” – but not for long. His trouble is that he doesn’t really care for sports, diffidently playing along in friendships, marriage and games alike. He’s fond of pool, but only its mechanics, the “thunk and rumble” of the balls and the satisfaction of arranging them before the first shot.
Jones himself is most winning in his attention to these sorts of details: Henry, in Alex and Clare’s bathroom, gazing disconsolately at “toothbrushes kissing in the mug”; Alex, late at night, standing at the window with a glass of water, a “heavy post-coital ache in his groin”, watching “the dirty sodium glow” of London. Jones is much more acute with his male characters than his female; the forlorn Clare, in particular, feels under-formulated. All the characters are incorrigibly middle class and monocultural – their circles are art, publishing, law and Oxford – but he at least has the good manners to record the self-concern of the privileged with a degree of quiet malice.
Yet what is most true in this book extends beyond those worlds. It is a sense of the complications that can trouble all friendships, the unfriendliness that sometimes lingers beneath them, and the ties that bring us back round to such friends nonetheless. Reluctantly racing Henry downhill in a chapter about skiing, Alex rapidly computes the possible outcomes: “Coming second would make him feel angry and disappointed; coming first would make Henry angry and disappointed, which would be just as unpleasant.” He lets his anxieties go, drops behind and at the finish line rejoins his headlong friend, reaching down to help the injured Henry to his feet. Sometimes, there are no winners, only players, moving out of sync and falling back into step, time and again.
• Game Theory: A Comedy is published by JM Originals. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
