In 2004, the novelist and short-story writer Jon McGregor went to Antarctica. As is so often the way when fiction writers find themselves in unexpected places, the trip was part of an initiative – in this case, the writers and artists programme run by the British Antarctic Survey and supported by the Arts Council. There was no specific expectation or obligation to write about the experience; then again, why wouldn’t you?
But it was easier said than done. Over the intervening years, McGregor – who in 2004 was the author of a single novel, the impressive debut If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things – has built up a striking body of work, including the novels Even the Dogs and Reservoir 13. The latter was an intricate, cyclical portrait of rural life that spawned a series of pieces for radio, The Reservoir Tapes, which themselves became a collection of short stories. Yet still the Antarctic box, an assortment of notes, ideas, photographs and sketches, sat there, resisting the translation to fiction.
Lean Fall Stand, McGregor’s fifth novel, marks the end of that process; and its tripartite narrative – which moves from the south pole to a group of people living with aphasia and struggling to find a new kind of language and communication – demonstrates how complete the metamorphosis has been. What’s been going on?
On a straightforward level, McGregor tells me over Zoom from his home in Nottingham, Antarctica was simply really hard to write about. “A lot of the physical description is kind of inadequate, and often quite boring. Especially the classics of Antarctic exploration literature, it’s just pages trying to explain what an iceberg looks like, or what a moraine is. Those things are so unfamiliar that they’re almost impossible to describe without going into very long, tedious detail.” That experience made him realise how much writing works by triggering associations in the minds of readers; trickier when the place being described is so fundamentally alien to us. And, for a writer whose work is so rooted in the recognisable everyday, it foregrounded the limits of making things up: “Going to Antarctica, having this kind of real life experience, talking to people who were working there about their experiences; the prospect of turning that into a piece of fiction seemed very artificial, and very unnecessary, really.”
But an image persisted. It was of three men in a shed, and it seemed “like it would stick”. And so McGregor kept doggedly returning to his material. “I was interested in the idea of an older man working in Antarctica, who was hankering after a previous version of working there, the kind of romanticism about when they were more heroic and more self-sufficient, which was always an illusion anyway,” he says. And he came up with Robert, “the kind of warrior figure of the Antarctic explorer”, who at the beginning of Lean Fall Stand is acting as a guide to two younger expeditionary scientists. “I always knew that, for me, this was tied up in bigger ideas about male self-image; ideas of heroism and responsibility, and parenthood and sacrifice.”
Robert and his party quickly fall into desperate trouble, during which they are effectively cut off from one another by blizzards and malfunctioning radios. The sense of peril is overwhelming – and also quite different from what McGregor has written before. “One of the things in this book that was quite new to me was the idea of drama and suspense and narrative and anticipation. You know,” he adds, semi-comically, “the things that most writers try to do from the beginning.”
He credits The Reservoir Tapes with this pivot into tension; he recalls having a clear picture of someone listening to the broadcasts on Radio 4 on Sunday evenings with their hand hovering over the controls as they move between chores. “OK,” he thought, “what does it take to make someone’s hand pull back from the off switch, and stay with this for 15 minutes?”
But his joke that he’s never going to write Jack Reacher books startles me, because the terse, repetitive sentences and rapidly mounting jeopardy of Lean Fall Stand’s opening had indeed put me in mind of a propulsive Lee Child novel. Then, however, everything changes, and we enter the aftermath; a world of severe illness and gradual rehabilitation, in which we follow not only Robert, recovering from a near-fatal stroke, but his wife, Anna, who becomes the novel’s central character.
McGregor describes it as “a crashing change of gears”, and says cheerfully that he enjoyed the idea of “hijacking my own concept”. It felt a little different, though, during the writing of the book. “There was quite a long period of time when people would say: ‘What are you working on?’ And I’d say: ‘I’m writing a novel about the complete failure and absence of language.’ Hahaha. And then come to my desk and just kind of panic. Part of me relished the stupidity of that as an idea.”
Writing the second and third acts of the book involved McGregor researching aphasia, the impairment in the ability to communicate that follows an injury to the brain. As well as speaking directly to speech and language therapists, he began to go to a monthly self-help group for people living with aphasia, an experience that evidently had a profound impact on him. Partly, he says, it was that the members of the group – including carers and family – were so welcoming to him; and also the extent to which he realised how complex and varied aphasia is. “I think there’s almost as many different versions of aphasia as there are people with aphasia,” he explains; it manifests itself in semantic, cognitive and expressive difficulties, which often become tangled up.
Seeking to represent such a wide range of issues – and a condition that is still not properly understood – was inevitably challenging. “There were definitely moments,” he recalls, “when I went into quite a radical breakdown of syntax territory, working on ideas that were formally consistent with the theme that would have been borderline unreadable. I pulled right back from that, because it ended up feeling a bit indulgent. And a bit pointless. I was looking for other ways. And actually, I think by setting the last third of the book in that group, it gave me an opportunity to externalise the experience.”
There were also lighter moments in McGregor’s time with the group, perhaps most notably during the regular quiz. He felt he shouldn’t take part, but was drawn in; then he wondered if he should hold back from answering questions. “And then I just kept winning the quiz – embarrassing! – it became a bit of a running joke.”
Alongside aphasia, the novel is also concerned with ideas of parental and familial responsibility, a subject that has always interested McGregor. When his trip to Antarctica was becalmed by ice, he was offered the chance to extend it by another couple of months. But his wife was pregnant with their first child, and he came home; he is still struck by the surprise with which his decision was greeted by other members of the party. Now, he says, he rarely takes up offers to go on trips or residencies because of his childcare duties; the idea of a lengthy absence, he says, “seems nonsensical to me”. He and his wife are no longer together, but share the upbringing of their three children equally.
McGregor’s father was a vicar and consequently in his office at home a lot when his family were growing up; he would walk the kids to school and be “semi-available” even when he was working. McGregor has, he thinks, adopted the same kind of role in his family, and is suspicious of the idea of writers – usually male – who demand eight hours of unbroken quiet and solitude in order to create. They “somehow make out that they’re the ones sacrificing things. And actually, there’s a whole lot of other people running around in the background sacrificing stuff to enable that to happen.”
Reservoir 13, he remembers, was written when things were particularly busy at home, and much of it happened in half-hour bursts, often in coffee shops, its collage structure meaning that McGregor always knew where he was: “I could just launch into it and think, ‘OK, that’s what I’m doing today. Tick that off the list. In the next couple of weeks, I’ve got to write 13 paragraphs about blackbirds. That’s it, that’s all I have to do. This week, I’m going to write 13 paragraphs about the Jackson family.’ It was really focused. And I knew that when I got to the end, I was going to almost literally cut them up and stick them together and rearrange them.”
Lean Fall Stand and Reservoir 13 are two very different kinds of novel, with very different origins. Yet in their attentiveness to tiny detail and their interest in the rhythms and recurrences of human life, they are recognisably McGregor. What’s next? He is, he says, “tinkering” with a few things; he also teaches and has recently judged the Folio prize. He still believes “undramatic lives can be compelling,” he says, “and actually are full of drama for those people. But just the basic idea that it’s quite important to give somebody a reason to turn the next page, that’s become interesting.”
• Lean Fall Stand is published by 4th Estate (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
