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 ha...