Saturday, August 24, 2002

Jon McGregor / Woolf at the door

 


Woolf at the door

Julie Myerson weighs up If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, a surprise Booker contender by Jon McGregor

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
288pp, Bloomsbury, £12.99

Julie Myerson
Saturday 24 August 2002

About a quarter of the way through Jon McGregor's first novel - a surprise inclusion on the Booker longlist this week - an elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel".

If the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first.

Here is a nameless urban contemporary street on "the last day of summer". It's a day when the many residents - few of them identified by more than house number or hair colour - experience a terrible, violent, communal event. What is it? You will have to wait till the final pages to find out. Meanwhile, McGregor's doom-laden narrative - told mostly by an omniscient (and well-travelled and cultured) narrator - is punctured now and then by the separate voice of a girl who, after an impulsive one-night stand in Scotland, is pregnant.

This girl spends a lot of time woefully contemplating the fluttery feeling in her belly - how you long to point her in the direction of a Marie Stopes - and feeling alone. Finally she receives a mysterious visit from a young man whose twin brother (who lives on that street on that last day of summer) fosters a secret love for her.

I know I ought just to go with the flow. This is a clean, bare, sensitive and undoubtedly well-intentioned piece of fiction by someone still in his 20s. It's admirably adventurous. Its determinedly unpunctuated dialogue more or less works. And I know what McGregor is aiming for - how he wants to create 360o pans with his juddery word-camera and show us what's going on in a whole neighbourhood. How stuff that seems small and insignificant can have huge consequences. How the whole darn street can be buzzing with life, yet people are still pregnant and dying and lonely and alone.

But the trouble with largeness, with this wide lens, is that it can be oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused. And focus, at the end of the day, is what makes us turn the page. So here, though we can see the whole street, we can't believe in any of its backdrop people, these stuck-on fuzzy-felt figures. And their comings and goings are hardly enlivened by being compared to soppy things like "wool on a loom" or "figures in a Pompeii exhibition".

There's a fatal lack of humour, but even worse is the way the narrative voice pompously tells you what the characters feel in language they'd never use. Though these people seem to be a careful racial and social mix, their preoccupations are still conveniently English Whimsical. How would it be, wonders the boy with the pierced eyebrow, "to know your own existence is a miracle?"

Yes, this is a novel about how our lives are "paler and poorer" if we don't see "remarkable" things for what they are. And yes, it's a good and true idea. But, though you couldn't say this is a poor novel (there's a writerly energy here that suggests McGregor will go far), it would be hard to imagine a paler one, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant.

· Julie Myerson's most recent novel is Laura Blundy (Fourth Estate).

THE GUARDIAN

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Jon McGregor / New kid on the block



Jon McGregor


New kid on the block


Jon McGregor is 26, lives in Nottingham and has been working part-time in a vegetarian restaurant to fund his writing. Now his first novel has made it on to the Booker prize longlist - and he's as surprised as everyone else. He spoke to Matt Seaton

Matt Seaton
Tue 20 Aug 2002 01.55 BST


Among a Booker Prize longlist notable chiefly for containing a great many established writers and few surprises, the name Jon McGregor stands out as refreshingly unfamiliar. And there is a good reason why we haven't heard of him: McGregor's entry, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, is his first novel. Another good reason is that he is only 26.

Vogue magazine has included him in a line-up of new literary talent; his fiction has appeared in Granta, and, young though he is, he has already undergone that quintessential writer's rite of passage - an appearance at the Cheltenham literary festival. But if the buzz was already beginning to build before the Booker announcement, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is still the longlist's left-field choice. Even McGregor was taken by surprise: the first he knew of it was when his dad called early yesterday morning to say that Jon's name was in the paper. So did he go straight out and buy one?



"I got dressed first," he says, with his quietly dry sense of humour. "I was pretty shocked."

Published by Bloomsbury this month, McGregor's novel has caught most arbiters of literary taste unawares - it has scarcely been reviewed to date. The notable exception, besides inclusion in a round-up in the Observer, has been a rave from Erica Wagner, literary editor of the Times, who hailed it as "a dream of a novel" and an "assured debut". The fact that she is also a Booker judge this year may have had some bearing on the fact that If Nobody was "called in" (which is what happens when the judges decide they want to read a book that a publisher has not made one of its statutory two submissions). Still, McGregor finds the idea that his name is now bracketed with such literary big-hitters as William Boyd, Anita Brookner Will Self and Linda Grant, "quite alarming".

"I need to justify that," he says. "Last week I was just someone who had had a first novel published."

A graduate in media production, McGregor became used to seeing his friends from Bradford university going to London and earning proper money in the television or internet industry, while he lived in Sheffield doing a series of shift-work jobs to support his writing: in bakeries, postrooms, textile factories. Since he moved to Nottingham with his wife, Alice, a mental health worker with homeless people, he has worked part-time in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. He may be only 26, but perhaps some dues have been paid. "Yeah, I reckon," he says.


"Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating," he says, "but a bit embarrassing."

McGregor is decidedly not the type of author to be his own publicist. About 5ft 11ins, he is slim (a vegetarian since he was 12), freckled and bespectacled. With touches of grey in his hair, he looks a little older than his years and could easily pass for a youthful Ian McEwan - to whom he bears a rather striking resemblance.

He was born in Bermuda in 1976, where his father, a vicar, had a posting as a curate. The third of four siblings, most of McGregor's childhood was spent in Norwich (he is still a keen Norwich City supporter and can now afford to go and see the games). The family moved to Thetford, in south Norfolk, when he was 12; it was a rural upbringing, he says, "but with an edge of urban decay".

"There was very little to do in Thetford: no cinema, no nothing," he says. "As a teenager, you could sneak into pubs, but that was it."

He describes himself then as a "typical Thetford teenager", but one suspects that making films on Super 8, writing poetry and playing guitar were not quite typical.

"I once saw a picture in the paper of John Hegley with 'poet' written on his knuckles, and I thought that was pretty cool," he recalls, "so I was quite up front about it."

He was still making films (video shorts) while at Bradford, but it was there that he began writing in earnest. Inspired initially by Douglas Coupland's Generation X, he started on short fiction. The breakthrough came in 1998 (his final year at university), when a series entitled Cinema 100 was published by Pulp Faction in an anthology called Five Uneasy Pieces. The following year, he decided he needed a literary agent and sent some stories off to Rose Gaete at the Wylie Agency. A friend advised him that a good question to ask a prospective agent would be who else they represented. The answer - Borges, Bellow, Roth, Amis - impressed, but fortunately so did he and Gaete took him on. On the advice that there was no future in short stories, McGregor set about a novel.

"The sparking point was the whole Diana thing," he says. "It was thinking about the contrast between the reaction to her death and the reaction to everyone else's deaths. I knew a woman whose granddad had died on the same day as Diana did, and she was very upset about how everyone was talking about Diana but nobody wanted to hear about her granddad."

McGregor's only personal experience of death was witnessing his own grandfather dying in a hospice a few years ago. "I felt very privileged and somehow it was very helpful for us all to be there. I found it very interesting."

Death, or a death, you can gather from this, is at the centre of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. From the outset, the reader is aware that something bad is going to happen, although McGregor maintains a degree of suspense about precisely what until the final pages. But it is actually much more a novel about life; the presence of death in the story is counterpointed by the narration of one of the main characters, a young woman who reveals that she is pregnant.

The novel presents a "day in the life" of an unnamed inner-city street. Like one of the characters, a young man who collects litter and junk and obsessively documents his existence with Polaroids, McGregor records people's ordinary lives through a series of snapshots on a late summer day. While the style is avant-garde, a kind of collage, rather than realist (McGregor doesn't like quote marks to denote dialogue, for instance, and his prose dips into a strongly poetic idiom at times), there is a drive to render the direct experience of the characters who populate the street: the "remarkable things" of the novel's title are very much the everyday. With its strongly visual and aural sensibility, its short scenes and rapidly edited changes of focus, it is easy to see the influence of filmmaking on his writing.

So how will the new literary status change things for McGregor?

Not much, he says. He is already signed to Bloomsbury for a second book. He will continue to live in the small, terraced house in Nottingham he shares with Alice. He will go on meeting friends for the weekly pub quiz at his local, the Frog and Onion; and he plans to grow peas and beans on the allotment he has recently taken on.

But he has quit his washing-up job at the veggie restaurant.


THE GUARDIAN


Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Forster's cynicism / Where Angels Fear to Tread



Forster's cynicism

Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster reviewed in the Guardian, August 30 1905

Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Forster
William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London

Tuesday 13 August 2002

Where Angels Fear to Tread is not at all the kind of book that its title suggests. It is not mawkish or sentimental or commonplace. The motive of the story, the contest over the possession of a child between the parent who survives and the relatives of a parent who is dead, is familiar and ordinary enough, but the setting and treatment of this motive are almost startlingly original.
EM Forster writes in a persistent vein of cynicism which is apt to repel, but the cynicism is not deep-seated. It is a protest against the worship of conventionalities, and especially against the conventionalities of "refinement" and "respectability"; it takes the form of a sordid comedy culminating, unexpectedly and with a real dramatic force, in a grotesque tragedy.
There are half-a-dozen characters in the book which count, and two of them - Mrs. Herriton, the incarnation of spotless insincerity, and Harriet, purblind, heartless, and wholly bereft of the faculty of sympathy - are altogether repellent and hence not altogether real. The other four, whatever else they may be - and they are all more or less unpleasant - are undeniably and convincingly real. It is a trick of Fortune in her most freakish mood that brings about the union of Lilis, the vulgar, shallow Englishwoman, and Gino, the courteous, shallow, and discreditable Italian.
The results of the trick are at once fantastic and inevitable. The whole is a piece of comedy, as comedy is understood by George Meredith. We wonder whether EM Forster could be a little more charitable without losing in force and originality. An experiment might be worth trying.