So Many Ways To Begin

Published on Sunday 13 August 2006 00:42

Jon McGregor

Bloomsbury, 14.99

FOLLOWING the acclaim lavished upon If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor could have been forgiven the odd second-novel stumble. But with So Many Ways To Begin McGregor's steps are reassuringly unflinching, yet deft and light, as he tiptoes through a narrative of dusty memories and shrouded stories.

Digging around in the soil-ridden remnants of post-Second World War Coventry, the young David Carter dreams of curating his own museum; of laying bare in polished cabinets a history that cannot be altered. When he discovers that a Viking boat, over which he has been awestruck, is a replica, he wants to "kick the whole thing to pieces". When his Aunt Julia inadvertently reveals that he was adopted as a baby, David "kicks to pieces" the life he has lived for more than 20 years, dismissing it as a fake.

Punishing his adoptive mother, David curls into solitude, broken only by Eleanor, the radiant, twinkling Scottish girl he has fallen in love with, and whom he marries. Amassing his personal archive, through which he dreams he will one day guide his birth mother, David ushers us through his history with his fastidiously documented belongings as poignant narrative markers.

Amid the throng of recent adoption-inspired literature, McGregor's talent remains dazzlingly apparent. Much more than an honest story of a scrupulous man searching for his beginnings, the novel is also an affecting portrait of an enduring marriage, blighted by depression and by a history of childhood abuse, but redeemed by the birth of a daughter.

Above all, David learns that any artefact, however precisely documented, can only ever be "a small part of the truth". "Lives were changed and moved by much smaller cues, chance meetings, overheard conversations, the trips and stumbles which constantly alter and readjust the course of things, history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record."

With an unassuming, controlled lyricism, McGregor captures in near-poetry what it is to lose our beginnings and to recreate a past, which is all we can ever do.

Why? Because that is "better than nothing", better than the "overwhelming, unknowable, uncategorisable". We must find our way between two points - where we begin and where we end. There are so many ways to begin, and infinite ways to end.

• Jon McGregor appears with James Runcie at the Book Festival, tomorrow, 6pm