Lean Fall Stand, by Jon Mcgregor
In the opening pages of Jon Mcgregor’s sensitive novel, set partly in the Antarctic, dialogue splutters from a crackly radio. The episode, sustained over several pages, foreshadows the protagonist’s actual loss of speech. Lean
Fall Stand is at its heart a story of the challenges and misunderstandings intrinsic to human relations.
Mcgregor structures his book around the tripartite model suggested by the title. Part One unfolds in a polar field camp in which an accident engulfs three men, one of whom, Robert ‘Doc’ Wright, a veteran technical assistant, has a stroke. Part Two concerns Doc’s rehabilitation, first in Santiago in Chile, and then at home in England. Part Three centres on his aphasia rehabilitation group.
Anna, an oceanographic modeller and Doc’s sympathetic wife, struggles to understand and accept both her damaged husband and her new role. Much of the novel’s action is seen from her point of view.
In the third part, group activities in the rehabilitation class include a ‘show’ in which aphasia sufferers ‘use movement to communicate story’. The event functions as a partial, redemptive denouement, though, overall, Lean Fall Stand gropes for what Mcgregor insists is fundamentally inexpressible: the drama of every human heart in dialogue with itself. It is a measure of his skill that he makes any headway at all.
Some years ago, Mcgregor travelled to the Antarctic on a writers’ programme. Heavy sea ice prevented him from landing, but he obviously absorbed the spirit of that remorselessly beckoning continent. Over the course of seven months travelling on the ice, as a writer on the same programme, I visited many small science camps; the author gets it right: the rituals, the vocabulary (‘manfood’ is a throwback to an era when imported huskies required dogfood) and the understandable obsession with weather, itself quantified in its own language. ‘Drear mank’, which is cited, is the term for one of the bitter white-outs that descend for days.
Above all, the Antarctic in these pages represents man’s overwhelming sense of smallness in the universe. The Big White, as chopper pilots call it, is an unowned region not subject to the complexities of life.
An element of mystery oils the narrative drive: why did the accident occur, and was Doc culpable, as his son fears? By the halfway mark, the reader knows that only Doc and the survivor from that stormy day hold the key. Appropriately for a book about the frailty of human communication, the truth never emerges.
Doc and Anna’s unlikeable adult children, Frank and Sara, function as ciphers for the occluded lack of understanding that leaves people frustrated and hurt. Mcgregor’s decision not to narrate from the children’s point of view fosters a sense of alienation. Similarly, Anna finds herself adrift. ‘I don’t want to be a carer,’ she says. ‘I never even really wanted to be a wife.’
Lean Fall Stand will speak to the carers of men and women battling to regain their use of words, or learning to accept that words have melted for ever like an iceberg. ‘It’s hard to talk about things, Robert,’ says the kindly aphasia-group facilitator.
He replies, ‘Fu**ing is it is.’