The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Antarctic brain-freeze
Jon McGregor follows Reservoir 13 with a tense novel about a doomed polar expedition, in which language itself breaks down
LEAN FALL STAND by Jon McGregor 288pp, Fourth Estate, T £12.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £14.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
Jon McGregor’s new novel, his first since the Costa Prize-winning Reservoir 13, opens as excitingly as any work of fiction I’ve recently read. There are three men at a research station in the Antarctic, out on the ice, not far from base. The weather is sharp and clear. One walks away from the other two up a crest to supply a figure to give a photograph perspective. Then, bam! A storm comes in. Whiteout. The three are separated. The narrative jump-cuts between their points of view, as disorientation gives way to panic – here the voice shouting into a radio over the wind; there fragments of it crackling out the other end.
It’s extraordinarily tense and atmospheric – and McGregor’s prose is tight as a wire. As the urgent situation unfolds, we learn a little of the backstory. Two of the men, Luke and Thomas, are Antarctic greenhorns – geographers on their first trip to the research station. The older man, Robert, known to them as “Doc”, is senior, if not in rank – he’s a “technical assistant” – then at least in experience. He has returned to Station K year after year – leaving his wife and children on the other side of the world for months at a time.
As he expresses it, coming home each year is “a shock to the system. Everything so dirty and chaotic. Cluttered. […] It made a man miss the simplicity of life down South. The purity of it. The clarity.” The clarity of that landscape, and the spaces in it, are especially well evoked:
The night-time was no such thing. The continent kept its face towards the sun and the ice slowly softened. The mountains climbed sharply away from the valley and the glaciers tongued down towards the sea. In the crevasses that ran across the lower mountain slopes the light fell bluely down, dimming towards the depths.
But this is a book that, like the Antarctic weather, starts as one thing and turns into something else. What seems to be an adventure story turns out to be the preamble to a slower and more meditative tale. During the storm, as the three men struggle to reconnect to each other, Doc suffers a stroke and only just survives. Language itself breaks down in his disordered mind: “Blood pulse. Luke face close say words. Question. Crack. Gap. Train station upstate. Wanter un a hound is for. Want purse, purse, he.”
The larger section of the book deals with Doc’s recovery from what happens on the ice that day. After hospital treatment in Santiago, he is repatriated to Cambridge. He starts to recover his speech and movement, thanks to a support group for victims of strokes. “Doc” is now just Robert; and his wife, Anna, and grown-up children, along with a supporting cast of care workers and fellow aphasics (each given superbly plausible and idiosyncratic disorders of speech), crowd in.
The reader, I should say if I’m entirely honest, can’t help mourning just a little the loss of the crisp pace of that virtuosic opening section. But what follows has other virtues, and its own integrity. Unanswered questions about what happened that day continue to give the story shape. The three words of the title, Lean Fall Stand – which are what might happen to you alike in an Antarctic blizzard or in a municipal room in a Cambridge suburb – are given a workout in all sorts of ways.
The Antarctic isn’t anything so crude as a governing metaphor. But it’s important to the story – not only the location of the initial catastrophe but an environment of isolation, self-reliance and radical simplicity that stands in tempting but perilous counterpoint to ordinary society.
Robert, angrily struggling to recover his language and his sense of self, tries to make sense of his experience in the Antarctic and the unlikelihood that he’ll ever return. But, humbled, in working with others he finds a new approach to the experience. It’s really, I think, a book about human interdependence, its costs and its rewards: how the need for it – and the dream of escaping from it – shapes an identity, and can break one, too.
In prose as tight as a wire, he evokes a frozen world