Lean Fall Stand – Jon McGregor

It was always going to be interesting to see where Jon McGregor would go after the stripped back minimalism of his last novel. One of the foremost UK writers from his extraordinary debut novel If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, McGregor had been honing his style through subsequent books, gradually removing any trace of style, poetic flourishes and even any sense of authorial directing of a narrative to try and get closer to expressing truth in his writing. This culminated in the stark but fascinating beauty of Reservoir 13.

Lean Fall Stand does seem like it is indeed teetering but ready to pull back from the edge, as if the previous experiment in minimalist writing was a little step too far and in fact maybe even still be seems as a kind of stylisation in its approach. Here rather the book opens with a tense sense of drama as three men on a geographical mapping research expedition in Antarctica get caught up in a sudden and dangerous violent storm. Luke and Thomas however have done the necessary survivalist training prior to the expedition and they have an experienced guide in Doc, but when the storm hits for real, it’s a different matter to training exercises.

Survival and dealing with the challenges – large and small – that life throws at you is perhaps one of the broad connecting themes you might find in McGregor’s works, but then again, that’s probably true of many works. What is different about McGregor – as we saw most recently in Reservoir 13 – is that it’s not just about surviving the “main event”. What follows is also just as important; living with surviving. Survival can mean different things from life or death in a sudden moment to quietly getting up and getting through the day. McGregor’s style has been developing to show that nothing is mundane; everything about life is remarkable and nothing is ordinary, or perhaps conversely nothing is remarkable and everything is ordinary.

Such is the simplicity and complexity of McGregor’s writing. He captures that early on when describing the survivalist training course and the start of the expedition where everyone is pretending the extraordinary journey they face is nothing special, acting experienced, as if they know it all. Everyone thinks they know what to do until something happens and they have to deal with the events of the moment. This is where McGregor has taken things now. He takes a dramatic situation in an extraordinary place and shows on a deeper more universal level how people react to events outside their experience in “ordinary life”.

But more than just act and react, he takes them to places outside their ability to translate effectively or meaningfully into language. Another of McGregor’s talents as a writer is his use of language and how he strives to find an appropriate means to capture and communicate the different levels of life as we experience it. This is what McGregor achieves in Lean Fall Stand as the impact of the storm hits and the aftermath leaves Doc with a struggle to deal with a return to ordinary life. The language too struggles to grasp the enormity of existence and survival, memory and action, the complex paths of the brain and its linguistic capacity and ability to communicate.

At times it appears that McGregor is again going down the path of linguistic cleverness with the subjective perspective of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, with words shifting and reshaping themselves, the underlying meaning becoming cloudy or misshapen, but he is dealing with language and communication. That extends from the differences between languages, with Spanish doctors and scientists, educators and therapists each having their own language and terminology, and it extends into the abstracted state of aphasia. That provides moments of frustration as well as humour in how language can communicate and fail to say anything in a phrase such as “still working to establish the facts”.

What Lean Fall Stand does brilliantly however is continue McGregor’s minute examination of the trials as well as the everyday issues of ordinary lives. In this case it’s something that many people will be familiar with – looking after a sick or disabled person and indeed being a sick or disabled person – if perhaps not having seen it documented quite as meticulously as it is here. Documentation isn’t perhaps the correct word, although there is something of that in McGregor’s writing, of recognising the drama of the everyday and giving voice to ordinary remarkable things that we all experience.