Funny from a distance

SHORT STORIES: This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like YouBy Jon McGregor Bloomsbury, 262pp. £14.99

EVEN IF YOU HAVEN’T read the English writer Jon McGregor’s three novels, this assured if cryptic collection of 30 short pieces, ranging from fragments to short stories, is likely to leave you thinking that McGregor is clever – at times too clever.

The clever part is interesting, and there are some very good stories; however, the overly clever McGregor is drawn to knowing, contrived narratives, consisting of lists and small typefaces, which leave one asking, So what? Still, the good stories are sufficiently intriguing to draw a reader into an oddly bleak East Anglian fens landscape that is flat and dominated by water and sky. Vast skies feature throughout his fiction, as do dislocation and a sense of living at a remove.

In She Was Looking for This Coat, the laconic narrator – McGregor tends to employ the laconic – describes how a girl arrives at his lost-and-found department in search of her father's lost overcoat. The encounter seems set for a Fry and Laurie comedy sketch; instead it becomes vaguely suggestive.

In another story, a man, aware he is being mocked, is determinedly building a treehouse for when the floods come.

McGregor has an unsettling vision. He sees menace in the ordinary, and this preoccupation was central to his first novels, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things(2002) and So Many Ways to Begin(2006).

Both were heavily praised, but neither prepared one for the outstanding third novel, Even the Dogs (2010). In ways as singular as was Jeffrey Eugenides's debut, The Virgin Suicides, Even the Dogs, with its sense of a chorus of communal lamentation, centred on one man's tragedy while considering the plight of the marginalised everywhere in a bold, beautiful, sustained work that leaves much unsaid while speaking volumes. The pieces gathered in this collection reside somewhere between McGregor's earlier work and Even the Dogs, and there is the sensation of ebb and flow – quite appropriate, considering the amount of water.

It is coolly impressive and frequently contrived, yet when it is good it is very good indeed. We Wave and Call,written in the second person, appears to be telling the story of a group of college friends arriving at a resort in which a war has taken place a decade earlier. Masons are furtively rebuilding with new materials intended to look old. The prose is clear and atmospheric; there is a slight tone of anticipation. One of the boys remains snorkelling as his friends walk up towards the village. His thoughts are drifting between the underwater sights and the sexual possibilities he may have with one of the girls. But the harder he swims back to shore, the farther away it seems. The title describes his dilemma. No, he is not a person expected to drown on holiday.

In another of the finest pieces, Wires– broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2010 – a girl is driving along and realises that a sugar beet has fallen off the truck in front of her and is heading for her windshield, which it duly smashes. It seems to parallel her disintegrating relationship, and McGregor brilliantly conveys her suppressed hysteria. Her situation is shocking but also very funny, particularly when two gardeners come to the rescue. One of them insists that she tend her cuts with the contents of the green plastic first-aid box he fetches from his van. The bubbling humour is so effectively handled that the sinister twist comes from nowhere.

By contrast, the theme of In Winter the Sky, which appeared in Grantain 2002, is handled earnestly. A boy on his way home from being with a girl he loves accidentally kills a man walking alone. The man had been drinking – not that that excuses the crime, which the boy conceals in order to protect his future. Time passes until the discovery of the body no longer means as much.

A narrative can spin on an observation, such as a woman surveying her home and realising how empty life has become, as there is no longer anyone to look after. In another of the stronger stories, an estranged father, denied access to his daughter’s nativity play, takes action. As he is led away by the police he plots his revenge. Earlier he had been wondering where it had all gone wrong with his wife: “Maybe there were some things he probably shouldn’t have said, or done. Or broken. Breaking things had never helped.”

Throughout the collection, people are prey to random thoughts or happenings. In Close,a lonely school secretary has travelled to Japan for a tour; she meets an American man who suggests that they swap cameras for the usual holiday snapshots. She agrees but feels that she doesn't "like being in her own holiday photos. She knew what she looked like." But when he walks away with a pleasantly offhand dismissal, she realises that she must hurry back to the gardens to take some pictures before they close. She might as well have some photographs if she's not going to have a relationship.

McGregor is an original, although there are echoes of Ian McEwan and particularly of the American writer Lydia Davis’s love of adopting voices. The best thing about this book may be that many of the pieces reflect McGregor’s humour, which offsets the darker aspects of an imagination ever on the alert.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Timesand author of Ordinary Dogs(Faber)