Interview: Jon McGregor, Author

Published on Friday 29 January 2010 18:00

ON MY way to meet Jon McGregor, a man stops me in the street in Nottingham. Could I spare some change, he asks. Only him and his mate normally sell The Big Issue, but they could only afford ten copies today, and could I just help him get enough for a hostel? And I feel like I'm looking at someone who has walked straight out of McGregor's new book.

Even The Dogs submerges the reader in the world of the marginalised and dispossessed, of begging, stealing, cheating for the next meal, the next bottle, the next fix. Of flyovers, car parks and night shelters. Of ducking and diving, accessing services but avoiding authority. Of violence, and rough camaraderie, and knowing how to tap a pound out of an unsuspecting passer-by. A world we all know exists, but seldom touch.

McGregor's journey into it began with a death. One of those anonymous deaths you read about in the papers: a body found in a filthy flat after neighbours complain about the smell. "It's not even an unusual story," he says. "It happens fairly regularly, but something about it really struck me. I heard the man was an alcoholic. I started wondering what the flat looked like, did he have friends?"

He wrote a first chapter in an experimental narrative voice, a kind of chorus from which individual voices emerge and fade, a disembodied group following the man on his last journey weaving their own broken stories around his.

At that point McGregor had just published his first novel, If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize. An episodic, sensitively observed account of a single day in a Northern town, it later won both the Betty Trask Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. He says it was partly inspired by the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana; he wanted to illuminate ordinary lives.

McGregor, who grew up in Norfolk, taught himself to write while "bluffing" his way through a course in media technology and production at Bradford University. He followed If Nobody Speaks… with So Many Ways To Begin, also Booker long-listed, the story of a middle-aged museum curator from Coventry and his attempts to understand his life and his marriage.

When it was finished, he returned to the book which would become Even The Dogs, a radical departure from its predecessors. "I assumed there would be a certain section of people who liked the first book, and for the same reasons enjoyed the second book, and won't like this one. But in a way it was very liberating.

"It put me in the same kind of place I was in when I wrote the first book, writing for the sake of finding out what I can do with the idea, just enjoying the process."

If Nobody Speaks… has been described as a snapshot of contemporary life, and So Many Ways… as "an intimate tale with penetrating things to say about the wider history of 20th-century Britain". In that context, surely Even The Dogs is a damning indictment of a society that fails the most vulnerable.

"I spent quite a lot of time in the early stages thinking about why I was writing it, what I wanted people to take from it, and the thing I kept coming back to was that I didn't want there to be a point, a message," says McGregor. "I didn't want it to be a story about people who are homeless, or alcoholics, but just a story about these specific characters.

"I guess, on one level, it's very easy to be simplistic about the situation these characters are in, to say society's let them down, it reflects back on us as a culture, but it's always more complicated. It's easy to think of people as victims, when it's a lot more nuanced."

However, in as much as it is a book about addictions, it is written in reaction to the rash of novels celebrating drug culture which followed Trainspotting in the 1990s. "When I first read Trainspotting, I was hugely impressed, it felt very fresh, very new. But then most of young British fiction tried to replicate that sensibility and failed miserably. Then, when the film came out, it felt like it skated over the reality of intravenous drug use in Edinburgh by portraying it as a rebellious lifestyle choice. I was fairly clear I wasn't writing that kind of book."

In fact, what drives this book is the same thing which drove his first two novels, the desire to illuminate the invisible, to make ordinary lives count. "The one thing I was trying to do was to show a little piece of how some people live. The harshness of it, but also the creative energy of it, the resourcefulness, the almost perverse way people manage to survive. I was trying to show something that a lot of people don't know."

After the interview, I look down on from my hotel room window in Nottingham – the streetlights and the motorway flyovers and the waste ground – and think about that other world existing alongside our own, and realise that McGregor has succeeded. v

Even The Dogs by Jon McGregor is published by Bloomsbury, 12.99

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, January 31, 2010