If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

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He sees a boy and a girl, the boy is sleeping, they are both naked and tangled up in each other, the light in the room is clean and golden and happiness is seeping out through the window, the girl looks at him and smiles and whispers good afternoon.” ~ If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor In this Booker Prize–nominated “dream of a novel,” ordinary middle-class lives converge and collide one summer day in England ( The Times ). This book is full of lovely characters doing those kinds of lovely things. I stood in awe of McGregor's ability to draw out the beauty and greatness in the most average of people. It's not only the people but the narratives in which they play: from the profoundly momentous to the profoundly mundane, McGregor reveals the importance in every moment of life in this excellent novel.

I read this novel as a follow-up to Jon McGregor’s superb Reservoir 13, which was my standout contemporary read of 2017. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (henceforth INSoRT) was McGregor’s first novel, published in 2002, when he was twenty-six years old and a complete unknown. It put him straight on the literary map when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize, as an out-of-left-field choice. But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose. Some years later, a woman who was part of the unpremeditated symphony of everyday coexistence in the aforesaid community summons her memories of that fateful evening while facing major disruption in her current life.We got a group of readers together in the Déda dance centre, which is a remarkable space, to talk to Jon McGregor. I only just avoided an on-air howler with Jon, who, because he lives in the East Midlands I was going to describe as local. The trouble is that he lives in Nottingham which, although only a bike-ride away for him, is the object of so much rivalry in Derby that it might as well be on the moon. So, with relief, we turned to his novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, written just after the turn of the century when he was in his twenties, and a dazzling book. McGregor’s second novel, while continuing some of the themes and preoccupations of his first, deliberately treads different ground. So Many Ways to Begin (2006) focuses on a smaller group of characters, but with a much greater temporal sweep. Set for the most part in Coventry (a place McGregor chose because ‘the 20th century history of Coventry is a microcosm of the history of England’), the action of the book moves from the period of the First World War to the present day.

Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.Then the awe of the knitting needles twirling in blurred images, somehow holding it all together and with infinite care delicately purls the minute threading into its barely seen connecting pattern and a harsh gasp at the end. We took Bookclub to Derby Book Festival for this month’s programme, because it’s always worth celebrating something new, and this was the city’s first book festival. Judging by its debut, it will find a permanent place in the calendar - very well organised, with enthusiastic audiences and a great crop of writers. This much is obvious from the quasi-poetic opening sequence, which acts as if it were a prelude to an opera, all swirling colour and dramatic action. It is certainly a scene-setter; McGregor offers it as both lament and celebration, a city at work and a city at rest: "The whole city has stopped. And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again". I say too much of what, he says too much of everything, too much stuff, too much information, too many people, too much of things for there to be too much of, there is too much to know and I don't know where to begin but I want to try. I cannot write a review now just finishing reading but possibly…no there is no future, only now and all there is to see, to know, to feel; to read and reread this book over and again. To live in this world. The moment of this world.

Where the book did not work so well was in terms of the overall structure or plot, and in this it shows an issue I often find with modern English literature. Of course, I don't know how this book was written, but it feels like this to me: take a very talented writer, and then write to a predefined plan / plot and structure with a known outcome; don't allow any variation from that plot or structure; make sure the outcome is strongly hinted at all the way through so there is a sense of mystery being unraveled; don't unravel the mystery until the very end. This can work, but it all needs to be more subtle. Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways To Begin, was published in 2006 and his third, Even The Dogs, in 2010. His novel Reservoir 13 (2017) won the Costa Book Award for Best Novel, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize. A companion novel, The Reservoir Tapes, appeared later in 2017. The novel examines several different ‘beginnings’ – both of individual lives and of relationships. Unsurprisingly though, with McGregor’s strong sense of balance, it also focuses on endings (Julia’s slow descent into dementia, the deaths of David’s father and Eleanor’s mother). Finally, resting somewhere in-between, it becomes a quiet celebration of the triumph of continuation, of how things endure, despite the odds. As in If nobody speaks…, McGregor expects a lot from his readers. It is common and more tolerable for those of us who see down-and-outs in the street to think of them as nameless faces, of people without intelligence or feelings: It is common for authors to look at down-and-outs from afar, as if they were another race, try to make excuses for them, judge them or use them as didactic material, but McGregor lets the narrative and the thoughts of the characters speak for themselves. By giving voice and detail about such persons, by seeing them as individuals and showing the workings of their minds McGregor gives them an identity, a humanity that is unusual in literature. It is up to readers to observe and make their own conclusions – such conclusions are personal and human and reach out to our darkest fears that “there but for the grace of God might go I”. In the stories That colour and In Winter the Sky we return to the intimacy of couples in day to day activities that was the focus of So Many Ways to Begin. In That colour a woman observes the autumn colours of the trees and points them out to her partner as he does the washing up “I dried my hands and went through to the front room and stood beside her. I felt for her hand and held it. I said, but tell me again”. In winter the sky describes how a man reveals to his wife a dreadful hit and run accident he was involved in as a 17 year old - the accident has somehow shadowed their relationship for years and, although his wife has been unable to understand what the problem was, because of their closeness and intimacy she has sensed his discomfort as they have lived their lives, developed their farm and looked after his ailing father over the decades.This is the most boring book that I have ever forced myself to get through. I had read an extract from the book and thought it was worth reading because the small extract that I read was very good at setting a scene. I think the poetry like prose and the heavyweight descriptions would be wonderful but only in much smaller doses. It was just too much when every single line of the book was overworked. I didn't enjoy or appreciate this author's writing style at all. And then he pulls a face and wipes his forehead with his hand and he says well less disconnected than other people at least. He moved with his family to England and spent his childhood in Norwich and Thetford, Norfolk, later studying at Bradford University for a degree in Media Technology and Production. He started writing seriously during his final year at University, contributing a series entitled 'Cinema 100' to the anthology Five Uneasy Pieces (Pulp Faction). He has had short fiction published by several magazines, including Granta magazine. He has been runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Competition twice, in 2010 and 2011.