Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor's last novel [b:Reservoir 13|33283659|Reservoir 13|Jon McGregor|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1481095738l/33283659._SY75_.jpg|44007812] was my favourite book of 2017, and probably a career highlight, so a very hard act to follow. This book doesn't just succeed in meeting that challenge - in some ways it is arguably even better. Reservoir 13 had an innovative structure - this time most of the innovation is linguistic.

The story is told in show more three main parts.

In the first part Lean we meet three men on a small remote Antarctic research station - while out on the ice they become separated by a sudden storm , with tragic consequences for two of them. The central character is Robert "Doc" Wright, a veteran of many years at the station - the other two, Luke and Thomas, are young scientists on their first trip to Antarctica. The first few chapters alternate between these three characters and follow their attempts to find each other with unreliable radios. Doc eventually finds his way back to their base alone, but his account story starts to become incoherent , as he suffers the first effects of a stroke, and the broken language mirrors his broken thought processes.

In the second part Fall the focus switches to Robert's wife Anna, as she is summoned to Santiago where Robert is in hospital recovering from a stroke, suffering from aphasia. Anna has a successful scientific career of her own, and their divided lifestyles suit both, and the parts of the book that deal with her sudden immersion into being a full-time carer are deeply moving and felt very real.

In the third main part Stand, the cast widens to include other members of an aphasia support group, and we see the group evolve from initial friction to allowing Robert to find a way to tell his own story. McGregor's afterword suggests that this group was modelled on a real one he observed in Nottingham.

The short final part is an almost poetic coda, returning to the events in Antarctica, and its style is more reminiscent of Reservoir 13.

Another wonderful book which has to be a strong contender for this year's Booker Prize. show less

This is the kind of book that probably divides people into love it or hate it camps. But if you love the deliberation of craft and effective, precise writing, you’ll fall into the love it camp. If you need lots of plot, action and things tied up with a bow, you’ll fall in with the haters. It is an engrossing novel, but not an exciting one. It elegantly weaves the lives of English villagers with a tragedy that haunts them. Those are mere components though; tools that work the story show more forward. The real story is the rhythm and flow of daily life and the large and small changes at its core.

The thing that is most satisfying and impressive about this book is its style and approach. I’ve read two other McGregor novels and let me tell you - he varies his language and story-telling technique to serve the story itself. In this case his sentences and phrases are repeated often as the tale goes forward. You will recognize the themes and situations, but they are ever so slightly altered in each year so that there is progress made or a new aspect shown. As an example I’ll repeat the opening lines to each chapter marking the years since Rebecca’s disappearance -

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but they were too far off for the sound to carry and no one came out to watch.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from towns beyond the valley but they were too far off for the sound to carry to the few who’d come out to watch.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from all across the village.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks from the Hunter place.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the television in the pub and dancing in the street outside.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up all across the village but from the hill they looked faint and the sound failed to carry.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks on the big screen in the village hall and the sound of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ along the street.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks in the rain, and thunder in the next valley.”

“At midnight when the year turned Rohan found Lyndsey on the dance floor at the village hall and hissed her while ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was sung.”

“At midnight when the year turned there was a fire in the caravan in the Fletcher’s orchard.”

“At midnight when the year turned there fires in three sheds at the allotments, and again they were burnt out before the fire brigade arrived.”

“At midnight when the year turned there were fireworks going up from the towns beyond the valley but no one in the village even lifted their heads to look.”

“At midnight there were fireworks in the next valley and tension in the village and no fires were set.”

All other aspects of village life are related in this repeating cycle. People’s situations and relationships, the state of bridges and well dressing, births, deaths, marriages and affairs. And not just for the humans, but animals, too - wood pigeons, springtails, foxes, badgers and the cycles of the river and reservoirs. Each aspect related is strung together one sentence to the next and not isolated in its own paragraph or section. Even though there are many actual reservoirs in the book, I think that the title refers to the number of chapters and that each one is a reservoir of village life as told over the course of one year. The deliberateness of this adds to the sense of the whole working together as one clockwork. When one thing is out of balance, all things are out of balance. It’s an amazing piece of work and beautifully rendered. show less

I’m one of many LT members that feel they don’t want to know too much about a book before I read it, so when I opted to receive Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor as an ER book, I didn’t know anything about the book. I did know that the author was long listed for the Booker Prize for a previous novel he had written. Let me save all of you who are now reading this review from the torture that is included within the pages of this novel, and I use that term very loosely, for, to call it a show more novel, is to assume it has a plot. It doesn’t.

I’ll tell you what it is and then you can decide if you want to expose yourself to this bunch of words on paper pages. Can you say “stream of consciousness”? In dialect??? Grammar and punctuation are foreign to this author for most of the book. Here’s the gist of what goes on: the dead body of an alcoholic is discovered by his friend, a drug addict (Danny). For most of the book he rants about trying to find the alcoholic’s daughter Laura, who is also a drug addict. Interlaced throughout is a great deal of profanity. Oh yeah, also looking on as Danny goes on and on all over the place looking for Laura, from one street corner and run down building to another, are all his friends. And they add to the stream of consciousness too. However, they are all also dead.
Finally, there is a coroner’s inquest and for this McGregor reverts to a script like dialogue such as:

Coroner: He hadn’t said anything about wanting to stop drinking?
Laura: No, only (inaudible).
Coroner: Only what?
Laura: Only, I mean, he knew about me going to rehab, he found out about it like. I told him, I mean. He might have thought, after that, you know.

You get the idea. Unless you prefer the stream of consciousness:

“So that’s all it was I wasn’t trying to shaft you, you know that la, you know I wouldn’t do that, it was just, it was just a pure out-of-necessity thing you know what I’m saying it was just, only it turned Benny boy was wrong and them blokes didn’t turn up neither, but still like it was I had the best of intentions it was out of necessity it was the mother of what is it like you know what I’m saying la”

Right.

Mercifully the book is short (less than 200 pages). That is it’s only redeeming quality. So be my guest; maybe this is your cup of tea. For me it was like bamboo under the fingernails. show less

McGregor's prose is elegant and lyrical. I would award If Nobody Speaks . . . 5 stars except that I am a bit suspicious of the ending. This is a novel of mirror images and parallels: There are three sets of male twins as well as two pairs of damaged hands. The novel tracks back and forth among “snapshots” of the comings and goings, both external and internal, of various residents on one street of a neighborhood in an unnamed English city and a first person account three years later by show more one of the young women who was a resident on that same street on what turns out to have been a fateful day. Although the jump cuts back and forth are at first confusing (characters are identified by street addresses and by idiosyncrasies of dress, physique and behavior), they are rich with closely observed physical and emotional detail. Indeed, the act of observation is itself a character in the novel: residents look or lean out of their windows to observe the goings on of their neighbors; and finally, it is an act of observation that precipitates the "remarkable event" alluded to throughout the novel. As readers, we also become observers, examining these characters as if viewing them under a microscope or through a telescope, and yet, we either don’t or can’t see everything about them; mysteries persist, even after all has supposedly been revealed. Our vision, although more comprehensive than that of any of the characters, remains imperfect. Perhaps even the author doesn’t or can’t know the whole story. What we get are glimpses, snapshots as it were, that, like the boy in #18, we collect in a jumble, a kind of anthropological and/or archaeological trove of miscellany that seems to point to something significant, but the importance of which may depend solely on our having looked in a certain direction at a particular moment, on having paid attention. All of which is beautifully written by McGregor. My only quibble has to do with the inclusion of what could be interpreted as a supernatural event at the end of the novel. On the other hand, one could (as I am wont to do) read the ending as not a supernatural mystery, but rather a mystery of coincidence, of accident, one allowed for by probability. "And there is an interruption in the way of things, a pause, something faint like the quivering flutter of a moth’s rain-sodden wings, something unexpected. Something remarkable . . . . And as these streets are traveled, in the time it takes for a hand to be clasped and unclasped, Shahid Mohammad Nawaz wakes gently, lifted through a gap in the way of things." (272,274)Hmmm. show less