Harsh lives, rendered with compassion

FICTION: Even the Dogs, By Jon McGregor, Bloomsbury, 195pp. £12.99

SOMEBODY FINALLY raises the alarm: it’s the neighbour who had often complained about the noise, but doesn’t even know the names of those people who keep banging around in the flat next door. But suddenly it has been very quiet, no one has been seen coming or going. All is a bit too quiet; it’s disturbing, this unusual silence, and it’s Christmas and all. The police arrive, and before they find the body, they can smell it. Briton Jon McGregor’s stark, lyrical third novel is devastating, on all counts, graphic and exact; chronicling the present, the now, our reality, and written with all the beauty of a terrible lament.

The dead man is Robert, an alcoholic who lived alone apart from whoever happened to come and get drunk with him and collapse into a sleep beyond sleep. Robert stayed in his flat, fat and too weary, too weak to move. In return for allowing various drunks and addicts to stay in his flat, he sent them for messages, or accepted the food they brought him and his dog. Long after his wife had given up on his drinking and taken their child and moved away, Robert, an ex-service man who was never quite right, remained in the flat they had once decorated together. He stayed on there, drinking and remembering but usually forgetting.

McGregor has an interest in the point at which the ordinary descends into tragedy, the sort of tragedy that might just about make a line of a news report – or, more often than not, is merely sucked into statistics. His first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002) was hailed by many as a masterpiece. It looked through a detached lens at several lives during a late summer’s day. It was limpid, accomplished and choreographed if ultimately cold, too stylised. The scene shifts moved between a group of characters who never quite engaged. It was an exercise in technique, albeit an impressively skilled exercise. So Many Ways to Begin followed in 2006, a less stylised performance and far more compelling through the characterisation of a tormented couple, David and Eleanor. It was more quietly received than his debut.

The players in Even The Dogsnot only engage, they tear at one's guts. They are the walking wounded – or rather, the living dead caught in a dope hell. McGregor has looked at the marginalised with an intensity that is candid and honourable. There is nothing voyeuristic about this astonishing work; it is profound and humane. He has entered a world with respect, not irony, and has tried neither to explain, nor justify, but to understand. The narrative is concerned with what happens, and why it happens.

Robert’s body is examined while on the floor of his filthy flat; he is assessed. Later, in the morgue, he will be dismantled by a medical team intent on determining the cause of death. In Robert’s case, it could be one of several reasons. Except that he was not beaten. Those bruises and cuts are from falling about while drunk, which was often and constant.

A chorus of invisible mourners observe the proceedings: “We stand together in the hallway, the crackle and mutter of their radios. We can hear footsteps moving around upstairs and somebody laughing.” This chorus recalls Robert’s life, the “we” piece together the past that has led to this present, this death. McGregor makes effective use of an all-seeing chorus as narrative device, as did US writer Jeffrey Eugenides in The Virgin Suicides (1993).

The flat is a battlefield as the chorus observes: “Wine bottles have been broken against the doorframes, bleeding long red stains down the walls. The lino tiles have been studded with cigarette burns, and half of them peeled up off the floor. People have come and gone, and come and stayed, and left their rubbish piled up in the hall.” The chorus sees all and is struck by a feeling of powerlessness. “We get up, and we leave the flat. We’re not sure what else we can do.” Meanwhile there is Danny, an addict, who has got into the locked flat via the garage roof; he slipped “and ran off looking for someone to tell”. He panics. McGregor articulates confusion, the mental turmoil, that inability to think clearly. Danny needs to tell someone, perhaps Laura, Robert’s estranged, now grown daughter, an addict who doesn’t think she is one, and is in rehab but still intent on that last fix. Danny also considers telling Mike, a strange figure in a long coat. Mike is always shouting threats into a mobile phone. Maybe he is a dealer? Maybe he is the Devil? And then there is Steve, an ex-soldier who brags about serving his country while blaming that country on what has happened to him. Danny needs to talk, but he does not want to talk to the police. “I found this body but it ain’t nothing to do with/ I climbed in and out the window/but I ain’t done/ I don’t know . . .”. Danny can recall sleeping out in a yard on a night so cold that when he woke he “found a whole bunch of dead mice about the place, frozen solid.”

The dirt, the aimlessness, the apathy are described with impressionistic flourishes, McGregor has achieved many miracles in this book. It is a work of art as well as a subtle polemic, but above all his graceful, vivid prose conveys an eerie reality, existence as endured by the marginalised. There is no sentimentality and for all the detail, the narrative is cinematic, creating the illusion of a camera sweeping over the horrors.

As the narrative unfolds, pieces emerge about the lives. The chorus ponders Robert’s death. “And how many times had he been lying on his floor like that. Over the years. Waiting. The way he waited when Yvonne and Laura first left.” Note is made of Robert’s laugh. The last time the chorus heard it, it “was like a ruined accordion, wheezing and guttural, reeking of damp and ash. Steve doesn’t remember it being like that when they first met, but he can’t be rightly sure. Can’t be rightly sure of much, now. There are too many gaps.” In contrast to the lyric bursts, the half-finished sentences are the official language of the autopsy and later of the inquest.

Heather is a ruined hulk of a woman who claims she once played in a band, though it is more likely she followed it. With her faded tattoo of a third eye in the middle of her forehead she shoots up and later helps Laura find a vein. McGregor describes the bizarre delicacy used in performing the deadly procedure seeking euphoria or relief or oblivion – and all on the tip of a dirty needle.

McGregor's layering of language is remarkable, as are his tone shifts and linguistic control. The only novel comparable to Even the Dogsis Jim Crace's wonderful Being Dead (1999). It says a great deal about McGregor's art that he has rendered such harsh, sad stories into a work of authentic, austere beauty; every word, each image, has humanity and compassion. Here is a brave, masterful novel that lives and weeps and most emphatically, tells the stories behind those faces that no one seems to see.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times and author of Second Readings: From Beckett to Black Beauty, published by Liberties Press