I was a huge fan of Jon McGregor's debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which rocked my world back in the (I choose to remember) sun-drenched and carefree days of 2002. There then followed what Coastalblog readers have come to know as The Wilderness Years when I stopped doing anything much other than working, and the memory of McGregor's classy, assured and emotionally taut writing dropped somewhat off my radar.
So it was a pleasant surprise when the Materfamilias decided to pop this in the post to her first born son, having mentioned it in passing. It was slightly less of a pleasant read, but that's more due to the subject matter rather than the writing.
Even the Dogs begins almost as a whodunit: the classic trope of a body, cooling in a flat, a tonne of questions and no answers. But it soon becomes apparent that that's not what the book is dong at all. McGregor uses this body to tease out the lives of the chaotic collection of junkies and marginalised people who congregated on the flat of Robert, our central corpse. McGregor uses "we", making the reader complicit, and we're never sure who the rest of "we" are.
This isn't a traditionally plotted novel, being structured more in five sections, from discovery to cremation. But in them McGregor spins stories around Robert, moving backwards and forwards in time and shifting perspectives from one character to another, always through the prism of the nebulous "we". We watch the junkie Danny find his body and search frantically for Roberts estranged daughter, at other points we see her arrival back at the flat for the first time. The shifting sense of time implies the transience of these people's lives, their liminal existence at the margins of society. We're never entirely sure of our ground, which is appropriate, as neither are they. Likewise one stylistic tic is the frequent use of unfinished sentences at the end of paragraphs, uncertainty, never sure what
This is grim subject matter, but McGregor is never censorious, this is empathetic writing, clear eyed and honest. Given the limitations of the characters world, simply looking to drink or to score, McGregor manages to cover a lot of ground via backstories: the juxtaposition of the Falklands and Afghanistan Veterans, similarly abandoned, reaches its apotheosis in a stunning set piece which follows the trail of heroin from its origin in the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the veins of a junkie in the unnamed city in which the book takes place, set against the wounded man being helicoptered out as if, in leaving the battlefield, he's accompanying his own eventual death home.
There are flashes of humour to leaven the bleakness, and McGregor never grandstands, showing instead an authentic ear for dialogue rather than using the characters to preach. This isn't a light read, but it's a beautifully written, unflinching piece of story-telling. He concludes the novel with an inquest, which itself leaves the questions unanswered, offering instead a variety of possibilities for what happened, and who we are, both as readers, and as a society.
So it was a pleasant surprise when the Materfamilias decided to pop this in the post to her first born son, having mentioned it in passing. It was slightly less of a pleasant read, but that's more due to the subject matter rather than the writing.
Even the Dogs begins almost as a whodunit: the classic trope of a body, cooling in a flat, a tonne of questions and no answers. But it soon becomes apparent that that's not what the book is dong at all. McGregor uses this body to tease out the lives of the chaotic collection of junkies and marginalised people who congregated on the flat of Robert, our central corpse. McGregor uses "we", making the reader complicit, and we're never sure who the rest of "we" are.
This isn't a traditionally plotted novel, being structured more in five sections, from discovery to cremation. But in them McGregor spins stories around Robert, moving backwards and forwards in time and shifting perspectives from one character to another, always through the prism of the nebulous "we". We watch the junkie Danny find his body and search frantically for Roberts estranged daughter, at other points we see her arrival back at the flat for the first time. The shifting sense of time implies the transience of these people's lives, their liminal existence at the margins of society. We're never entirely sure of our ground, which is appropriate, as neither are they. Likewise one stylistic tic is the frequent use of unfinished sentences at the end of paragraphs, uncertainty, never sure what
This is grim subject matter, but McGregor is never censorious, this is empathetic writing, clear eyed and honest. Given the limitations of the characters world, simply looking to drink or to score, McGregor manages to cover a lot of ground via backstories: the juxtaposition of the Falklands and Afghanistan Veterans, similarly abandoned, reaches its apotheosis in a stunning set piece which follows the trail of heroin from its origin in the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the veins of a junkie in the unnamed city in which the book takes place, set against the wounded man being helicoptered out as if, in leaving the battlefield, he's accompanying his own eventual death home.
There are flashes of humour to leaven the bleakness, and McGregor never grandstands, showing instead an authentic ear for dialogue rather than using the characters to preach. This isn't a light read, but it's a beautifully written, unflinching piece of story-telling. He concludes the novel with an inquest, which itself leaves the questions unanswered, offering instead a variety of possibilities for what happened, and who we are, both as readers, and as a society.
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