A stroke of genius
In a brilliantly dramatic opening , a scientist suffers a stroke while in the grip of an Antarctic storm. Then he’s forced to embark on a new adventure – to relearn language and his own identity
It begins like a thriller. ‘When the storm came in it was unexpected and Thomas Myers was dropped to his knees. The air darkened in the distance. There was a roar and everything went white against him. It had a kind of violence he wasn’t prepared for. He wrapped his arms around his head and lay flat on the ice to keep from being hurled away.’
We are in the Antarctic, 300 miles away from any kind of civilisation. Three men have come to work at Station K for Geographic Information Services: Robert, who is an old hand, and Luke and Thomas, who are novice research scientists. The silence creates its own sound – ‘his ears were ringing from the lack of noise’. The landscape is blank.
‘Actually featureless didn’t quite describe it; there were mountains, and ridges, and slopes of scree, and glaciers moving down into inlets and sounds. But without trees, or rivers, or buildings, it was difficult to arrange what he was seeing into any kind of perspective. There was no obvious difference between one mile and 50.’
Thomas is the official photographer. To lend a picture scale and perspective, Robert, otherwise known as ‘Doc’, had climbed up a cliff nearby. Meanwhile, Thomas had set up his camera on the edge of the ice, while Luke stayed with their skidoo a few metres away. Over the radio, Thomas was telling Doc where to stand. ‘Doc did a good polar explorer. He had the beard for it.’ And then the storm came.
‘Doc had looked up towards Everard Glacier and seen a thick rolling shadow of banked clouds, a faint orange light, a surge of weather coming down towards them. It had come out of nowhere and it had come in fast, the temperature dropping sharply.’
Their training has alerted them to the perils of the Antarctic. They had been shown slides of recorded deaths. ‘It was a long list. Navigational errors, hypothermia, climbing accidents, crevasse falls, drownings, incidents in which alcohol was noted as a factor, carbon monoxide poisoning, attack by seals, cardiac arrests, fire.’
They had also been given tips for survival. ‘It’s when you don’t feel the cold that you really need to worry; once the toe turns black you’re better off amputating before it spreads.’
Caught up in the blindness of the storm, they cannot see each other. Their radio contact is patchy, with crucial words not coming through. The storm clears almost as quickly as it came. ‘The sun burned suddenly through the blowing snow.’ Luke spots Thomas, 50 or 60 metres away. The sight unnerves him. ‘There was clear grey water between them. He didn’t understand what he was looking at. There had been movement of some sort. Something had happened. The storm must have disrupted the ice. Something was wrong.’
At this point, Luke hears Thomas’s voice on the radio. ‘Luke, you saw? You saw? I’m moving. I’m on an ice floe, I’m f***ing adrift.’
It’s a brilliantly dramatic opening, as striking in its way as the famous first scene in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, in which a hot-air balloon is shooting upwards, with a little boy crouched in its basket, and a man sailing through the air below, desperately clinging to a rope.
To this already harrowing event, Jon McGregor adds another. Doc, the veteran, suffers a stroke and falls. Within a second he has lost his grip on language. McGregor’s sentences, up to now so
spare and simple, echo this new jumble. ‘ He rubbed the numb rawness from his face,’ reads a sentence on page 63. On the next page this has become: ‘ He numbed at the rubness of his face.’ At first I thought this was a printing error. But then, five pages later: ‘He floored the numb faceness of his raw. No. Rawed the rub. The rum. The nub.’ And later still: ‘ He rawed the rum nubness of his face. No. Rubbed the rum rawness.’
We have gone from exterior to interior: what t he a ut hor o f Arcti c Dreams, Barry Lopez, called ‘two landscapes – one outside the self, the other within’. And both these landscapes have been fractured by blizzard.
To me, this is the book’s high point. Though McGregor is attempting to replicate an incomprehensible phenomenon – the collapse of language, the rapid fall from sense to nonsense – he somehow manages to do it in a way that we can follow, and even take a perverse delight in, as we might do in the writings of Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll. ‘Luke on the radio. The words tumbling jumbled out. He turned from the window and the raw froze and ell. Floor flows and fell. Rose and fell.’
Luke finds Doc in his new damaged state. ‘ Luke was looking at him. With a something expression. Instubborn. Subordinate… You sure you’re OK, Doc? Rubbed his face. It was sure where he’d fallen. Sore. He was sure. Shore lips, he said. Sore lips, I’m sure.’ The narrative then moves away from the Antarctic, first to a hospital in Santiago, then to a rehabilitation unit in Cambridge. The contrast between the unpeopled landscape of the Antarctic and the banality of everyday life in a city is severe, as it is meant to be. But somehow it is rendered even more banal by McGregor’s slightly threadbare characterisation of the newly introduced players in Doc’s story – his wife Anna, their two adult children, Anna’s forthright friend Bridget and various professional caregivers.
It is clear that McGregor has done his research. In his acknowledgments at the end he lists a good many books about stroke and aphasia, and thanks the Aphasia Nottingham self-help group, where he ‘spent several months as a regular guest’.
This certainly lends his descriptions of the world of stroke sufferers and their families a strong texture of authenticity. As you would expect, McGregor has a sharp ear for the brusquely matey language of professional care. People say to Anna: ‘How have you been, lovey?’ Cathy from home-care services ‘asked what he’d been eating, and talked about spending pennies and number twos’.
He is also remarkably adept at evoking communication deprived of language. When his wife asks Doc if he is OK, ‘he looked at her and puffed out his cheeks, widening his eyes. He did this a lot now. It seemed to mean something like: well, this is big, that’s a big question.’
His glimpses of rehabilitation units will ring a bell with those who have had experience of t hem, not l east t he hope t hat families attempt to extract from even the tiniest of signals. At one point, for instance, Anna watches as a nurse attempts to help Doc urinate. ‘The nurse wanted him to go there and then, but he was clearly too embarrassed. Anna found the embarrassment reassuring.’
Intelligent adults are reduced to toddlers. Even the most everyday routines have to be learned afresh.
‘We have some yes and no questions first of all; I know you’ve been having difficulty with no, so could you hold your hand up if you want to say no? Can we try that? Does a car hold more people than a bus?’
The person who once inhabited this body has disappeared. It is hard for those who loved the former occupant to transfer their love to the dysfunctional shadow who has taken his place. ‘It was difficult to see past that and think about him as her husband, her partner, a man she had once wanted to kiss.’
The sufferer occupies a spare, silent, featureless land, at times equivalent to the Antarctic. ‘He always had to reach for the words. As though they’d been put on a high shelf in the stores. Out of reach. Or left outside, snowed under, needing to be dug out.’
Throughout this lonely ordeal, life goes on, and nature with it, in the same reassuring and unnerving way that they did in McGregor’s great masterpiece, Reservoir 13. As Doc struggles to recall the days of the week or the suits in a pack of cards, ‘the leaves were bright and thin on the trees and the light shone through them as they moved in the wind’.
But, for all its virtues, Lean Fall Stand may leave fans of Reservoir 13 feeling disappointed. It is a strange mixture of inventive and pedestrian, beautiful and mundane. It succeeds as an exploration of language, but possibly just misses as a novel.