Bookclub: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor

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.

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.

To play with time as he does - events don’t occur in a linear way - and to refuse to give most of the characters names, are very bold steps for a young novelist. But he was clearly in a brave mood: he told us that he wanted to write a plot-less story, to prove that a novel can work in a deeper way.

The reason why he succeeded is that the poetic force of the novel is immense. It’s set principally in one street in a northern town - unnamed, of course - which is rather like Bradford, where he used to live, and the texture of the story comes from people doing ordinary things. That’s not the same as saying there is no drama in the book - there is, and some of it is shocking - but it’s a brilliant example of unorthodox story-telling.

He gave us a picture of his approach: “The starting point for the book was a community who don’t see themselves as a community, living in the same street, living interwoven lives - and yet they don’t know each other, or each other’s names. They simply refer to themselves as ‘the boy at no18’, or ‘the man with burned hands’. And we do that in our lives, on our commute: ‘the man in blue suit’, ‘the woman wearing the red hat’, and that’s the extent of our knowledge and yet these people are part of our lives. We see them every day and I wanted to reflect that, and I didn’t want to privilege the reader over the characters and give the reader any more information than the character had.”

The effect of his technique is to produce unexpected moments of tension, and just as a painter might use thick layers of colour to produce a feeling of depth, we build up an extraordinarily intense feeling for the anonymous characters who are going about life as we might do ourselves.

One of our readers thought of it as ‘prose poetry’ and I think it’s a good description of the book. Not having read it until I prepared for the programme, I didn’t quite know what to expect. Jon’s reputation has grown greatly in recent years, and you can see in this book just how committed he is to the craft of writing. This isn’t a story that is built on a cleverly-concocted plot with lots of twists and turns, but a journey under the surface of our lives.

So how does he get you to turn the page? Well, we learn that something has happened in the street, and we know that we won’t find out until the end. It’s as simple as that. There aren’t enough writers around with that kind of style.

I do hope you enjoy hearing Jon McGregor.

Happy reading,

Jim