Books & Poetry

Writing the follow-up to any successful novel is a daunting prospect. But when your debut has been praised not just for its brilliant structure but for the poetic beauty of its style, the weight of expectation must be particularly hard to bear. Jon McGregor’s first book, ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’ pulled off a feat of imagination in its portrayal of a single day in a single street, creating a mosaic of tiny, intimate insights through the use of multiple, alternating perspectives.Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he has chosen to do the exact opposite in his second, ‘So Many Ways to Begin’. Feature continues

The narrative stretches from the 1940s to the present, focusing on the progress of one man’s life in a long, unhurried arc. And the writing is powerfully spare and unadorned.‘It took me a long time to begin,’ says McGregor. ‘And then I felt very self-conscious about what I was writing and how I was writing. When you write a first novel, you’re just trying to get a book published and you don’t think any further than that. If it hadn’t been published I doubt if I would have had the time or the money – or the guts – to write another one. Basically, I find writing novels very difficult – both times I’ve looked for some kind of scaffolding to hang the writing on, to give me an idea of where I’m going. The structure of both books was the original starting point. As soon as I had the character of this curator, this boy who was obsessed with artefacts and history, that was an immediate way of arranging the story. It was a rich seam to mine.’

The curator, David, has a job at Coventry Museum, but in many ways his life’s work is an attempt to curate himself. From boyhood onwards, he amasses and catalogues objects which resonate for him. When, as an adult, he discovers that he was adopted, he begins a quest to find his birth-mother and present her with this archive – a complete and orderly representation of the person she gave away as a baby. Each chapter begins with one of these objects – a train ticket, a door key, a photograph – and the history of David’s family ripples outwards from these concrete artefacts.

Setting the book in Coventry was a decision McGregor made early on, ‘partly because I’ve got an aversion to setting any book in London, just because everybody else does and it seems like the default option. But as soon as I realised I was writing about history and memory and new beginnings and migration, Coventry jumped out. The history of Coventry is the history of England in miniature. It was one of the first cities to experience industrialisation and the associated population boom. Then there was the bombing in World War II which destroyed large parts of the city, and the slightly ill-advised 1950s reconstruction. So there was a sense of new beginnings. David’s family moved there specifically to begin again, and that’s a familiar story for Coventry. And that didn’t quite work out because there was a severe recession there in the ’60s and ’70s. The Specials wrote “Ghost Town” about Coventry, of course.’

Alongside these broad themes – and despite David’s one-track purposefulness and the narrative structure it imparts – ‘So Many Ways to Begin’ is also an immensely sympathetic portrait of a marriage which survives through a kind of low-key, dogged devotion. It becomes clear that, while David is consumed by the romance of his mysterious origin, it’s his wife Eleanor who has most reason to be defined and constrained by the past. A childhood of intense emotional abuse from her mother has left her battling in adulthood with chronic depression, yet David’s monomania leaves him struggling to know how to help her.

This theme of missed connections is one that McGregor has tackled before, and it’s the link between his two very different novels. ‘In a way,’ says McGregor, ‘David’s character was a riposte to the other, quite similar, character in “If Nobody Speaks…”: the boy who was taking photos of everything and collecting bits of junk and who had this idea that you could archive everything. David has to learn that it’s impossible to archive everything, and ultimately fairly pointless. Constantly looking to history and secrets and things you don’t know about can get in the way. Human relationships are what counts.’

McGregor mentions that Philip Larkin, too, was a child of Coventry. And perhaps the unwritten epigraph to his novel comes from ‘An Arundel Tomb’: ‘What will survive of us is love.’

‘So Many Ways to Begin’ is published by Bloomsbury at £14.99.