The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The chilling silence between us
An Antarctic disaster sparks a fine exploration of the limits of language
WORDS, words, words, they’re all we have to go on,” Tom Stoppard wrote – half in melancholy, half in delight – in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Language, Stoppard tells us in his tragicomic take on the lives of two minor characters in Hamlet, is what defines us poor human creatures – it’s all that separates us from the beasts.
Jon McGregor must have been listening. His new novel, Lean Fall Stand, may ostensibly tell of a terrible accident that befalls a team of Antarctic explorers and its cruel aftermath, but in truth this taut, elegant masterpiece explores the agony and ecstasy of what it means to be a human being, and the dreadful limitations of language when it comes to explaining the human condition.
It’s not a dark book, though – the harrowing story is leavened by a sense of the exquisite joy which comes from struggling and sometimes almost succeeding in putting the right words to matters of the heart and soul. What a literary feat to pull off a work so painful and playful at the same time.
We begin at Lopez Sound near the South Pole as three British expeditionaries – Luke, Tom and Doc – do what humans often do and act stupidly. Nature roars in and changes all their lives.
The story then follows Doc as he pieces his broken body and mind back together, with the help of his wife
Anna.
McGregor showed his mastery of narration from his debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. Like Lean Fall Stand, the narrative style of his first novel flowed seamlessly between characters – our perspective entering their minds, floating there a while, leaving and passing on imperceptibly to other characters. McGregor has a talent for narration that matches Gustave Flaubert and Hubert Selby Jnr. His novels tell small painful stories with universal truths.
McGregor’s characters are like all of us: not great and powerful people, but ordinary folk, confused, desperate, joyous, silly, petty – and they suffer and struggle just like us. McGregor is commercially savvy though; his brutally deft exploration of human suffering always comes with a dose of hope.
A profound sense of the fragility – the brokenness – of language pervades the book. It begins with voices crackling over walkie-talkies.
White static, one character thinks, sounds like applause – then their mind riffs on the word applause, thoughts turning to rhyme and rhythm, triggering phrases like apple sauce, apple oars, apple saws, apple laws. McGregor is remarkably skilled at capturing the stream of consciousness babble that runs through all our heads, without making it an alienating exercise in abstract art in the mode of James Joyce.
After the accident in Antarctica, Doc is left brain damaged, struggling to explain himself to the world around him. His suffering is mirrored by most characters in the book. Anna, a highflying academic, can’t really express how she feels about being reduced to the status of a carer.
Doc’s children never quite say what they mean. Work colleagues try to be kind but are accidentally cruel and stupid.
The only time the world really makes sense is when Anna goes to a Quaker meeting and the silence there brings some sanity to her life.
There’s existential horror in that: it’s language – the physical expression of thought – which makes us essentially human, but it’s also thought which causes us so much pain, a pain we’ll never truly be able to express in words.
Yet the inherent playfulness of language is never far away. One character, Peter, who we meet on Doc’s journey towards recovery, suffers from aphasia – a condition which sees him simply spew thoughts into the air. It seems a random gush of noise, but it’s intensely poetic and within Peter’s words there are simple truths.
Here again, the book owes a great debt to drama – this time Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Peter’s “poetry” is like a version of Lucky’s famous speech. Lucky – the slave – begins his babbling monologue with a reference to “divine aphasia” and by the end has told us that God created humans and then departed: we’re all alone and best get on with it
ourselves. In McGregor’s world, it’s not so much that God is gone, but that everything is relative and utterly unanchored – it’s a very soulful look at the moral emptiness that postmodernism has delivered in the 21st century.
NOTHING really means what it says any more. Is the title, Lean Fall Stand, a garbled attempt by Doc to name the place where his life changed – Lopez Sound? When a character says the word “c**t”, he’s probably struggling with a speech impediment to say “can’t” – but is he, or is he simply using a disability to give him permission to insult?
We don’t know – and we can never know because how can we truly crawl inside another’s head? That, after all is the curse of the writer, to forever try to navigate the souls of strangers but to always fail. There are further elements of drama towards the end of the book, as Doc is reluctantly cajoled into trying out dance therapy as part of his recovery – if he can’t talk to express himself, might mime and movement help him tell his story? The three dancers enlisted to help Doc and the other patients come straight from the ancient Greek chorus. They turn the stories of shattered recovering humans into something akin to religious ritual. Right at the centre of this book is an eternal and very simple truth: people need to tell their own stories; without that we’re not really human. The loss of one’s story, the loss of the ability to tell one’s story, is a destruction of what it means to be mortal.
The book isn’t without its flaws – which makes sense for a work about the limitations of language. Some minor characters are sketchily drawn, and there’s a little narrative sag maybe two thirds through. But this is a book that’s needed right now.
Today, most literature – most film too – comes heavy with overt messaging, usually about identity politics. Lean Fall Stand has a timelessness to it. It’s not rooted in the politics of now, it’s rooted in the eternal – in the bloody, awful hard work of being alive, and the struggle to explain what it means to be human.