This is without doubt a remarkable first book! Jon McGregor’s debut novel is set in ‘a northern town’ and it is the town and one street in particular which is the lead character.
Life goes on, but the causes and effects, the ways in which people interact, sometimes with friends and colleagues, sometimes with people we could claim not to know at all, can seem like a mystery. In this case, we take a bird’s eye view of the people who live in a street and their reactions to one dramatic event.
The residents themselves are less important than what they are doing in the lead up to this particular occurrence. We don’t even know their names as they are just called by their descriptions – the man with scarred hands, the boy with the ear ring or by their house number. And what people don’t know about each other is often more important than what they do know.
Life in this street is dreary and depressing but typical if you look from the outside. Inside, people are people and this books celebrates ‘ordinary’ life.
You might be irritated by the anonymity of the characters or by the paucity of punctuation, or by the apparent slowness of the plot, as detail after detail is teased out, but you will be entranced by the poetry of the language, which is both visual and aural. A bold and distinctive novel which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when first published.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is available from Amazon
