If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor
A rather beautiful book about the mostly mundane events in the lives of ordinary people.
I hadn’t heard about this book or read any reviews when I saw it on the library shelf and grabbed it because the title appealed to me, but it turned out to be a lucky choice. The book describes the lives of people living in an ordinary street in Britain. Early in the book, we find out that a tragedy occurs in the street, but we don’t know the details until the very end. There are teasing references and partial descriptions, which could have been irritating, but I found that they just drew me deeper into the book. The book takes the first person perspective of most of the characters in turn, but keeps coming back to and focussing on a girl who has moved moved away, and is remembering the inhabitants of the street during a crisis of her own.
The dialogue style is unusual, and almost none of the characters are named, but are referred to by description. That takes a little getting used to, and I found myself losing track of one or two of the characters, but it’s quite a powerful device. Jon McGregor captures the hesitancy and incomplete thoughts of natural speech, and his descriptions of both people and events is ravishing — it’s a very vivid book, and a moving one.
I finished the last few pages this morning, and found myself with tears in my eyes as all the threads of the story were woven back together. He has created some great characters very economically, and like all good books, you find yourself wanting to read another book with more about some of the incidental characters. For example there was an elderly couple whose relationship was beautifully painted, with all its long familiarity, unspoken tenderness and secrets — I would love to read a whole book about them and their lives.
