The Remarkable Jon McGregor

Ross Bradshaw gives an overview of the work of Jon McGregor, one of the most talented writers working in the East Midlands today.

About four years ago Jon McGregor was one of the featured writers at the Nottinghamshire Readers Day. His session, which people had a choice to attend, was packed. His second book had just come out, but most people there wanted to talk about his first book, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. In fact many of them wanted to say that they didn’t really like it, and one person said she didn’t even like it the second time she read it. Yet there they were, and all said they were looking forward to reading his new book. What did that reveal? Well, I had some sympathy with them as I was not sure about the style of If Nobody… yet eagerly bought his second book. But on re-reading I enjoyed it immensely.

I think what this reveals is that the group – and critics were in a national minority – could see that the boy had talent and wanted to see what else he could do. On this the critics were right. He has talent. And with his third book, Even the Dogs, recently released we can now have a better overview of the writer who, in my view, is the most interesting writer currently being published in the East Midlands.

If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is a novel set over one day in a street in an unnamed inner city. The setting could easily be Forest Fields in Nottingham (though it isn’t); a not very well off multicultural area with a lot of students living there. The day is the last day of summer, the students packing and leaving. There is a restlessness in the street. And we know from the start something will happen, something tragic, that will change the lives of many people in the street. We get to know the people, their individual stories.

Though seemingly unconnected, observant readers will notice one person’s story has its roots in Jon’s second book, So Many Ways to Begin. This book takes the form of a more traditional narrative: two main linked stories which must at some stage meet, when the full picture will, or may, finally be revealed. The book opens with an Irish woman leaving home for London a generation or two ago, but the two main characters are a museum worker in Coventry and his Aberdonian wife, who, from a promising start in life, begins to lose confidence. What will become of them?

In this book Jon McGregor, like the museum worker, is a collector of stories: stories given, stories hinted at and stories never explored. What impressed me most in this book is Jon’s description of the Aberdeen working class family, whose daughter is the first to be offered a university place in her family, and her whole community. There is a small party, the letter offering a place is shown round proudly. I know something of this world and Jon has a tremendous feel for the time, an ear for dialogue.

His third novel (like the others it is published by Bloomsbury) may be the most controversial of all. Even the Dogs is entirely set within a community of heroin users. There are visible traces of Nottingham city in the book, but the setting is an amalgam. What the book did for me was make me notice the city more, the people who live in the shadows. Near where I work there is a place, out of sight of CCTV cameras, where dealing goes on. I now notice the quick meetings, the furtive scurrying away to find a place to fix. I notice the people in Boots picking up their daily script, knocking back a small cup of methadone in the shop. The book has an interesting form, the narrators are always given as “we”, and, like a Greek chorus, they comment on the scene. They join us watching the dealing, the lives of the people. They are in the ambulance taking a dead man to the mortuary. One gets used to them as they, and the reader, see the story unfold. And there is one long sequence, it takes eleven minutes to read out loud, where we follow the path of the poppy seed from a field in Afghanistan, to its manufacture into heroin, to how it is smuggled into this country, to how it finds its way into the hands of a junkie, and how it is made up and how it works in the bloodstream of the user. I heard Jon read this piece at the Flying Goose in Beeston, before it was published, before anyone knew what he was working on, and at the end there was no applause, simply silence.

Ross Bradshaw runs Five Leaves Publications, the region’s “biggest small press” and jointly organises Lowdham Book Festival. For ten years he was Nottinghamshire’s Literature Development Officer, and, earlier, spent seventeen years working in a radical independent bookshop – http://fiveleavespublications.blogspot.com