If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things (2003) - Plot & Excerpts
Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things: Glints of Gold.In September I travelled to the cathedral city of Wells to speak at the Bishop’s Palace during the http://www.wellsfestivalofliterature.... Wells Festival of Literature. I was bursting with pride to be asked to do so. I had been a prize-winner of their short story competition and my brief was to give heart to the audience of writers, most of which had entered this years award, by sharing my success in writing since then. I told them about the day I’d received my prize. Salley Vickers had presented the cheques and had gone on to speak, telling us about the writing of Miss Garnet’s Angel, her first book. She’d spoken of how she’s had started this book, with a strong idea of the main character and her story. But although she had a story, she didn’t yet have a novel, there was no ‘glint of gold’ within it, no twist that would attract a reader. Salley Vickers confessed she’d had the basic idea for Miss Garnet’s Angel, in her mind for years, without finding the spark that would turn it into a novel. Then she went to Venice, and got lost in the back streets, fell upon the most beautiful church. Inside, a panelled painting, recounting the story of Tobias and the angel. This was her ‘Glint of gold; a flicker of inspiration’. Vickers says…“the very old tale of Tobias, who travels to Medea unaware he is accompanied by the Archangel Raphael [is] powerful and evocative. It has the quality of a myth or fairy story, seeming to mean much more than its literal sense. In 'Miss Garnet's Angel' I tell the contemporary story of Julia Garnet, a retired school teacher, who comes to Venice prompted by the death of a friend. She finds the Guardi panels...”The majority of writers find it hard to compose something new. We are all waiting for the glint of gold - the flicker of inspiration that comes out of the blue. So when I read Jon McGregor’s account of writing his first novel, I noticed he’d had a similar experience.Jon McGregor burst onto the scene in 2002 by being long-listed for the booker for his first novel, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things. Once again, Bloomsbury had taken a risk with a new writer and it had paid off for them, both in sales for this book and the books he’s continue to write; interesting, original, contentious, often disturbing novels.McGregor is like Marmite no doubt about it. The reviewer's were soon at each others throats over him. The Telegraph, 17th September 2002 said; "You won't read anything much more poignant than this." McGregor was awarded 2002 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the Somerset Maugham Award and a heap of other prizes for this book, yet Julie Myerson, in The Guardian, spat vitriol, as if it was her raison d’etre to make sure everyone hated the book. She called it doom-laden…oddly ungripping, colourless, unfocused, undoubtedly well-intentioned. She said the narrative voice was pompous, with a fatal lack of humour, its lifeblood sucked out by a Virginia Woolfish adherence to the fey, the pretend, the fortuitously elegant. She quotes the text; “An elderly, working-class man racked with lung cancer laughs and then "clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel", and says, “if the alarm bells haven't already rung countless times, then they certainly do at that sudden, gratuitous lurch into the world of art history. This is a novel where the contrived metaphor, the struggling simile, the romantic reference all come first. She had a book out herself at the time, and it felt like she didn’t think there was room in bookstores for both of them. I was expecting her to pull out a revolver any moment and mumble something about leaving this town by noontide. Even so, it did put me off reading the book at that time.Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976, grew up in Norfolk, went to Bradford University and began getting his short stories published, including on Radio Four. An agent heard the reading and contacted him, suggesting he write a novel. Don’t all new writers dream of such a contact? Once you have your agent on your side, it does get that little bit easier. Even so, you need your basic idea, characters, setting, plot...and a glint of gold. McGregor says… “In the summer of 1997, a boy was shot in Bolton, round about the same time that Diana died. This got me thinking about the significance that gets attached to people's lives and deaths, about perceived levels of tragedy and newsworthiness. I was interested in the anonymity of city life, the fact that I still didn't know my neighbours after three years, the damage that transience does to the community. And a few almost-terrible incidents in the street I was living in at the time gave me the magic.” He began to write If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things on a narrowboat in Nottingham.“The character of the narrator - and therefore the hook and drive of the novel as a coherent whole - didn't come until May 2000, when I went to Japan to visit a friend and he showed me the Buddhist temple at Kamakura, where they have a shrine for mothers of stillborn/aborted children. This sparked off a chain of thought about what a responsibility and a fear pregnancy must be, which gradually rolled into a storyline able to tie together what was happening in the street. So in a sense I only really started writing the novel then.”Once I’d learnt that McGregor had been visited by the ‘glint of gold, I wanted to read the book. Unlike Myerson, I was gripped and absorbed from the first page, because of the clever trick McGregor plays on that first page. He sets up an incident, and only by reading the entire book can you know what that dreadful moment really contained.I thought the book was as close to a kind of poetry as it is to prose. Its opening is evocative of inner city life everywhere. We’re in a North of England street, terraced housing packed with people going through the motions of everyday existence. This is the delight of reading Henry James all over again; although McGregor dips into their physical activities rather than their minds, and through this ‘show, don’t tell’ structure we see all of them. McGregor writes…“You must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. There are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are. If nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?” Nina Milton http://kitchentablewriters.blogspot.com
This is certainly a beautifully written novel. As in good poetry, form and content embrace, feeding off each other and creating an ephemeral "feel", rather than a story. Somehow, this "feel" manages to separate itself from the language which transports it, rather like the scent of perfume tends to linger after the liquid that carried it has long evaporated. Reading this book requires subtlety - look too hard at what you are reading and you may bring down its delicate structure, think too deeply about what is going on and you may lose sight of what is going on. As a taster, this sort of line is typical of what I mean: "... a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen..."Wow. Mesmeric. A build-up in energy, from a slow start to a breathless crescendo. There is definitely meter, but it does not conform to any of the classic Greek metrical lines. Still, the meter becomes more regular and uninterrupted by pauses half way through the passage, creating the effect that the tension builds up... Ok and the feeling is gone. That's what I meant. Look too hard and you destroy this book's ephemeral quality.And yet, I was struggling to come to terms with what is being narrated here. Right from the start there was a hypnotic quality to Jon's prose. At the danger of contradicting my own advice, I think this quality emerges as the joint effect of three devices(1) the novel does not talk about remarkable things - the narrator traces perfectly dull, everyday experiences of people living in a street in a Northern English town.(2) present tense as narrative time makes these events more immediate, but as they are dull, the reader is immersed in trivia, with a mesmerising, rather than invigorating, effect. (3) the time it takes to narrate an event (narrative time) is almost as long as the event would take to play itself out in reality (narrated time). Again, since the events narrated are dull, narrative time dilation has an intensely immersive effect. This is not "24".Indeed, the reader reads this book at his own peril. At the peril of getting exceedingly bored, in fact. What keeps the dramatic tension going is the interplay between two narrative modes. One is an omniscient narrator narrating in the present tense events that take place on the day of a traumatic event, leading up to that event. And an "I-narrator", who looks back on this traumatic event from a position three years after it happened. But again, there is a risk here. There is a very real chance that the reader may miss the omniscient narrator's point in time, and if you do so, there is a chance you miss most of the dramatic tension in the text. Not that this is what happened to me. Ok fine, so that is what happened to me. But I went back to the start and enjoyed this book fine after I got that. Still, this is a book driven by neither events nor plot. Nothing is happening here. It is an elusive feel that Jon captures masterfully. A feel that is rent apart by the traumatic event. Well worth picking up, but it needs to come with a health warning: This book demands a contemplative mood, and it deserves to be read when in such a mood - otherwise the reader will miss the subtleties that make this an extraordinary read, emotionally involving and psychologically engaging.As a personal aside: A few months after I finished this novel, I was walking down Ocean Drive, looking for a place to have dinner. On my way to the restaurant, I saw a chap lying in the middle of the street, obviously the victim of an accident, with paramedics tending to him and an ambulance waiting. The shocking part was that you could see blood on the street flowing from the victim's head - it looked bad, as if the chap might only barely survive, and if so, only with severe brain damage. That was the traumatic event.Two hours later, I walked back past that same spot. Ocen Drive was restored to its normal self. Diners looking for a place to eat, restaurants looking for diners to serve, roller-bladers and passers-by enjoying the mild climate of an early spring evening, local bums gathering on the beach, swaying drunkenly to the distant music of the bars. The blood was washed off, the ambulance gone, and there was nothing that would have reminded anybody of the traumatic event. In Miami, people do not speak about remarkable things. Ocean Drive is not Norfolk.
What do You think about If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things (2003)?
“He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?” (239)A man with scarred hands stands transfixed in reverie staring at his oblivious daughter and wonders how she will ever discern the remarkable from the ordinary if the key to the beyond continues to be stubbornly hidden behind the obtuse quiescence of daily domesticity. I reflect upon the invisible miracles that must have slipped through my fingers or been missed by my unobservant glance under the false pretence of narcotized routine and marvel at Mcgregor’s prowess in bringing this subject matter to attention with perplexing intonation and mould breaking narrative.A chain of quotidian scenes are framed in frozen stillness, Polaroid-like, assembling tiny details of anonymous and seemingly disconnected lives to create the disparate mosaic of any given neighbourhood in a city of Northern England. Twins playing cricket on the street, a little girl chasing angels, college students moving out and facing uncertain futures, an elderly couple about to celebrate their wedding anniversary, young and not so young lovers giving free reign to passion on a humid evening, an introvert boy who collects all sort of useless objects, a father whose blotched hands can’t feel the texture of his daughter’s hair. Lives rekindled, burnt and extinguished in absolute otherness, glittering with the vertigo of banality and transcendence, ignored by the indifferent eye deeply anchored to self-absortion.Some years later, a woman who was part of the unpremeditated symphony of everyday coexistence in the aforesaid community summons her memories of that fateful evening while facing major disruption in her current life. Alternate chapters interlace past and present and knit a thorough map of inconsequential details that could have changed the course of other people’s paths in giving shape to unuttered secrets and yearnings, stillborn promises and unspoken fears that locked opportunity in the trap of perfidious forlonness. The misshapen pieces are delivered at a steady pace escalating in suspicion and trepidation, combining mellifluous prose magnified by the peculiar tonality of Mcgregor’s choice of words that slowly gathers momentum in a progressively frenzied cadence until the puzzle becomes whole in a culminating explosion of mystical significance.And the remarkable things that are never spoken out loud: the tragedies of daily life, the latent loneliness, the inexorable foreboding, what is never said and others don’t see... cristalyze into a mirror in which the reader can contemplate himself.And every minutiae shines under Mcgregor’s omniscient magic wand instrumenting a succession of recurrent themes, pattern of symbols and repeated sentences that evoke a mollifying chant and bemuse in almost supernatural revelation.And ineffectual prose emerges as the self-defining mediatrix between reality and the inexplicable mysteries of bare existence.What for some might appear a far-fetched closure for a highly unconventional novel was for me a hair-raising tribute to the magic illusion that remains hidden underneath the mask of daily ordinariness. One only needs to stand still in the middle of any street after a virulent summer storm and listen to the muggy silence, the tentative twittering of birds, find the remarkable things in-between and believe. “He says, there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.”
—Dolors
I was a little skeptical about Jon McGregor's If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (confession time: I don't usually like very experimental fiction!); the conceit of not naming any of the characters and identifying them solely by some physical characteristic and their residence, combined with not having any quotations for dialogue might, I thought, get very wearying after a while. Instead, I found myself totally caught up in this tale of a single day on a street in an unnamed English city; despite the characters not having names, I cared deeply about all of them, particularly the nameless girl whose story continues three years past the events of the main story, and the elderly couple, one of them with a terrible secret. And the lack of names makes the use of one name right at the end of the novel incredibly powerful. A lovely, lovely novel - I'm glad I overcame my skepticism and am anxious to read more of McGregor's fiction.
—Bibliophile
Jon McGregor, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)In a general, very oversimplified sense, the reason we, as humans, have names is as a way to distinguish us from one another. When I was a small writer, knee-high to a grasshopper (actually, as my parents will tell you, I was never less than knee-high to a baluchitherium, but that's beside the point), one of the things I always thought would be cool was to write a novel that had no names whatsoever in it, where everyone would be distinguished by, well, other distinguishing features. A bunch of us did this with short stories in high school, and they worked pretty well, so why not a novel? Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian never actually names protagonist Sam Chamberlain, referring to him as “the Kid” the entire five-hundred-plus pages, why can't you do that with all your characters? Well, the simple reason is that eventually, you will run to too many characters. A novel is longer than a short story, and there are only so many characters one can keep straight by distinguishing features without taking notes. And while I'm a fan of taking notes while reading (not only am I am media critic, and thus take notes during everything, but I also read a good deal of nonfiction), I have to say that any novel that forces you to take notes is probably going to be too much work for most folks. And that is the situation with If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Now, in the synopsis below, I'm going to do a bit of the work for you, so take notes. I should mention that some of the below may be considered minor spoilers for the book (I'm assuming that since McGregor didn't specify some of these things, he meant the reader to gradually discover them on his own, as I did), but trust me, when you get round to reading this, I think you'll be grateful.The novel takes place in two separate time periods, in two separate places. One of them occurs three years before the other. The earlier time period concerns a morning on a lower-class street, and is full of quite beautiful descriptions of the street itself and the people living in it, many of whom are packing to leave after staying there for a summer (going back to school, presumably, or perhaps just not renewing their leases). This is the section of the book that contains no names; people are described by the house numbers where they live, and one other descriptive (there's the boy with the white shirt, the girl with the glitter round her eyes, etc.). The jacket copy tells us there's a mystery about this section of the book, but the book itself doesn't tell you that until well into itself. The later time period concerns a girl who used to live on the street-- for the life of me, though I have a general idea of who she is from the memories of the people she interacted with, I can't tell you what her number or identifying characteristic was-- who's drifted away from the people she used to know there. She has her own mystery, revealed about halfway through the book, that has nothing to do with the previous timeline. The rest of her story concerns how she deals with that mystery.I think part of the reason this book missed with me is illustrated in one of the cover blurbs, where the reviewer (I can't remember who it was, nor can I quote, as the book is now back at the library) focuses on the fact that McGregor is writing about the lower class, examining them in the same way some writer examine the more monied classes. Had that not been pointed out, I'd have never made the distinction; in fact, I'm only aware the neighborhood is lower class because of that blurb, and because (if I recall correctly) one of McGregor's characters mentions it in passing somewhere in the book. If there were other signs that these characters were living in a lower-class situation, I either missed them or don't see those markers as class distinctions. Because of this, I didn't see this book as being terribly different than any other novel of its type, save the lack of names. I do think I understand what McGregor was trying to do there-- by stripping the characters of almost all their identifying characteristics, we are forced to not make any sorts of judgments about them based on their race, sex, social status, or what have you-- but I think it was taken too far here. There's a difference between not wanting the reader to make judgments about characters and forcing the reader into a tunnel vision as equally artificial as that which stems from racism/classism/what have you. Of course, it didn't help that the big mystery is so clumsily foreshadowed in the opening pages that you'll probably have figured out what it is by the time you've gotten through the first bit (the book contains no proper chapters, only pauses between the two storylines as they alternate). I'm notoriously slow regarding things like that, and I had it figured out by page five.Not impressed with this one, sorry to say. **
—Robert Beveridge
