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).

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