Jon McGregor is the author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, which is one of my all-time favourite books. His second novel, So Many Ways to Begin, is out this fall from Bloomsbury UK.
What I loved about If Nobody Speaks was the narrative style. It was different and complex and lyrical. I wouldn’t call it experimental, but it certainly was no run of the mill novel. I resisted reading So Many Ways to Begin because one of the first comments I heard was that it was more of “a novel.” Not really what I was hoping for.
So Many Ways to Begin made the Booker longlist, which was announced a couple of weeks ago, and I know that he is coming to Vancouver to the writer’s festival. Two reasons to crack the spine so I dove into the book this weekend.
Overall I liked the novel. The narrative structure wasn’t as compelling as If Nobody Speaks, but it wasn’t entirely conventional either. There are nice looping storylines and you get the sense of spiraling in on the plot rather than following along in a linear fashion.
Without telling too much, the story is about David Carter, who grows up wanting to be a curator in a museum. He’s encouraged by his Aunt Julia, who later in the novel mistakenly mentions that David is adopted. Much of the novel is the circular way he tries to deal with wanting to meet his birth mother. The problem is that he was born during the Second World War, at a time when good English, Scottish and Irish girls were filling London to work, but also getting into a bit of pregnancy trouble. They didn’t exactly leave a lot of personal, identifying details behind.