So Many Ways to Begin

Book Review

Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor's second novel, So Many Ways to Begin, is about the myriad aborted beginnings in a human lifetime, and all the ways that lives might be altered if different choices were made and other paths were taken - a sort of variation of the familiar Robert Frost poem, but focused on the littered possibilities accumulated over the years.

The novel begins with the purposeful march of hundreds of fathers and sons, over fields and into an Irish town for a traditional annual hiring fair.  In this event, fathers advertise their sons as "hired boys," and send them off to work for months at a time to supplement the family income.  This passage is one of the most successful ones in the novel.  In spare, yet compelling prose, McGregor is able to make the reader vividly experience this event:

"They came in the morning, early, walking with the others along tracks and lanes and roads, across fields, down the long low hills which led to the slow deep pull of the river, down to the open gateways in the city walls, the hours and days of walking showing in the slow shift of their bodies, their breath steaming above them in the cold morning air as the night fell away at their backs.  They came quietly, the swish of dew-wet grasses brushing against their ankles, the pat and splash of the muddy ground beneath their feet, the coughs and murmurs of rising conversation as the same few phrases were passed back along the lines.  Here we are now.  Nearly there.  Just to the bottom of the hill and then we'll sit down. Cigarettes were lit, hundreds of cigarettes, thin leathery fingers expertly rolling a pinch of tobacco into a lick of paper without losing a step.  Cigarettes were cadged, offered, shared, passed down to nervous young hands eager for that first acrid taste of adulthood, cupping a mouthful of it in the windshield of their open fists in imitation of fathers and uncles and older brothers, coughing as it burnt down into their untested young lungs, the spluttered-out smoke twisting upwards and mingling with their cold clouded breath as they made their way between flowering hawthorn hedges and cowslip-heavy banks, down towards the city walls.  They wore suits, of a kind, all of them: woolen waistcoats and well knotted neckerchiefs, thick tweed jackets with worn elbows and cuffs, moleskin trousers with frayed seams tucked into the tops of their boots.  The younger ones carried bundles of clothes, brown paper parcels tied with string, slung across their shoulders or clasped to their chests, held tightly in their damp nervous hands as they started to gather pace, pulled down the hill by the sight of the city, by their eagerness to be first and by the impatience of the men and the boys pressing in from behind; still foggy from sleep, still aching from the long walk the day before but forgetting all that as they came to their journey's end."

Through this introductory passage, we are introduced to Mary, a young Irish girl attending the hiring fair with her father and brothers for the first time.  After securing work for her younger brother and seeing him off for six months of work, Mary, her father, and remaining brothers board a boat bound for England.  Mary has employment arranged in the home of a wealthy family in London, where her cousin Jenny works, and the men of the family are escorting her across the water.

Mary's goal in her new responsibilities, which include cleaning and lighting the fires in the bedrooms of the family members, is to perform her tasks quietly, making herself completely invisible to each member of the family.  Increasingly, she is instructed to light the fire in the father's bedroom, and he refuses to acknowledge her cloak of invisibility, instead beckoning her to come closer and closer to his bed.  Inevitably, Mary becomes pregnant.  This is during the second World War, and so she has the baby in a hospital, gives it away, and returns home to Ireland with wages that are much less than her family was expecting.

At this point, the novel shifts, and McGregor introduces his main characters, David and Eleanor Carter.  David has just returned from a trip north to Scotland to attend his wife Eleanor's mother's funeral.  Eleanor has been busy baking, and the atmosphere in this section suggests two things that are central to the events in this novel - Eleanor did not wish to attend her mother's funeral, and there is a pronounced icy distance between the middle-aged spouses.  We also learn that David is preparing to go on a trip, for reasons unknown at this point, and that Eleanor is dubious about the wisdom of this.

The remainder of the novel serves to explain David and Eleanor's histories, their families, why they are the way they are, and why David wants so badly to go on a trip.  McGregor employs a unique device to convey this information.  David Carter is a museum curator, and his story is divulged through various artifacts he has collected over the years.  As David describes the detritus of his life, he recalls and remembers.  Some of these items include:

• Postcard from Greenwich Maritime Museum, c 1953
  
• Handwritten list of household items, c 1947
  
• Disciplinary letter, typewritten on headed paper, January 1968

David grows up in a normal existence near Coventry, with his parents and sister Susan.  They live in a brand new house, and their lives are steadily improving.  They make frequent trips to London to visit their "auntie" Julia, who befriended their mother Dorothy during the war, inviting her to stay in her house with her when they were both nurses.

Auntie Julia takes the young David to the British Museum, where he becomes fascinated by old things, by the sense of history and sheer tactile pleasure of touching these objects:

"He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug up from the earth and buried in heavy wooden storage cupboards.  He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them.  He liked the way that people's voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms.  He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them.  He liked looking at the dates of the objects and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was.  He didn't understand why people had to ask why they didn't enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher's pet.  It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time.  A thumbprint in a piece of pre-historic pottery.  The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull.  The scribbled designs for the world's first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with tea.  It seemed like some kind of miracle to him that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked."

It's not surprising that David's first job is as a junior curatorial assistant at the new museum in Coventry.  He is elated, and takes his new job extremely seriously.

His employer sends him on a research expedition to Aberdeen, Scotland, and in the museum there, in the tea room, he meets Eleanor.  He is captivated by the young, ambitious girl, who is finishing her exams and longs to be the first person in her family to go to university.  Her goal is to become a geologist.  David and Eleanor court through letters, tentative at first, and through David's occasional visits to Aberdeen.

Eleanor's parents do not approve of David as a suitor - he's from England, and he does not have a "proper" trade.  Their romance comes to a head when Eleanor passes her exams and secures a place for herself at university.  Eleanor's mother Ivy has physically and emotionally abused her daughter all her life.  When Ivy reads the list of items Eleanor will need at university, she is aghast at the thought that her daughter will require formal wear.  She forbids her to go.  Eleanor is devastated, and it is this encounter with her mother that sends her running - into David's arms, a hasty marriage, and a move to England.  She will never return to Scotland or see her mother again.

At first, David and Eleanor's marriage is idyllic.  They fix up a small apartment and make plans for Eleanor to attend university in Coventry.  As life goes on, their brightly laid plans and eager optimism fade.  University seems to be out of the question, and this, combined with Eleanor's estrangement from her mother, send her into deep depression and agoraphobia.  The birth and raising of their daughter did not help Eleanor's moods, nor did the myriad prescriptions provided by her doctors.  David and Eleanor's relationship is tired and strained, and for a time David dallies with the notion of an affair with a work colleague.

Through the personal artifacts that David has collected, it is revealed that David's parentage is not what it has appeared to be.  Before his life with Eleanor, Auntie Julia lapsed into senility, and during a rare lucid moment in a visit to her nursing home, she reveals that David was actually informally adopted.  When Julia and Dorothy Carter were nursing during World War II, a young pregnant Irish girl came into their ward. For some reason, after her baby was born, Dorothy took it instead of going through the usual procedures and giving it to one of England's charitable organizations such as Barnardo's.

When David learns that his mother is not really his mother, he is furious with her, and remains aloof from her for many years.  When Auntie Julia passes away, David uncovers something he has been looking for unceasingly - the name of his true mother, in the form of a hospital admissions card from the year he was born, with the name Mary Friel on it.  He now has the name of his mother, and his searches for her begin anew.  The novel culminates with his trip to Ireland to meet the woman he believes is his mother.

McGregor is interested in aborted beginnings, and the many beginnings in this novel enable him to explore life's possibilities.  The novel is sprinkled with these references:

"These things, the way they fall into place.  The people we would be if these things were otherwise."

Or when David is trying to tell Eleanor that he was adopted:

"I don't know.  I didn't know where to begin."

McGregor also plays with the notion of the facsimile.  Because David lived his life with false knowledge of his parentage, was his life fake, or possibly just an imitation of what his life was truly meant to be?  McGregor showcases this idea with a description of a trip the young David took with his Auntie Julia to a maritime museum, where he first learned vividly about what is real and what is merely a facsimile:

"He reminded her about the boat he'd seen in the Maritime Museum; it was sitting in a small white-washed room of its own, beached on the bare floor and propped up by a pair of painted timbers.  He'd walked around it, just able to see over the gunwales and into the plain interior, a couple of bench seats the only sign of comfort.  The display panel on the wall had said that this boat, all twenty undecked feet of it, may well have sailed across the Atlantic by the Vikings.   He'd read those words over again and turned back to the boat, a storm of excitement breaking over him, pressing his hands against it breathlessly, wanting to climb in and run his hands all over it, to push his face into the rough-grained wood and smell the salt tang of sweat and sea and adventure, to sit on the bench and imagine the lurch of the open ocean, the endless tack and reach towards an endless horizon.  He'd looked at the wood, which must have been eight or nine hundred years old, and wondered why it wasn't roped off from the public, why it wasn't a little more crumbling and worn, why the varnish was gleaming under the spotlights.  And he'd gone back to the display board, and read the last short paragraph explaining who'd built the replica and how, and he'd wanted to kick the whole thing to pieces.

It didn't mean anything, he told Julia later.  It wasn't real; it was made up.  You can't learn anything about history by looking at made-up things, he said, talking quickly and urgently.  It's stupid, it's not fair.  It's a lie, he said.  They're lying.  She held up a hand to steady him, smiling at his earnest scorn.  It's better than nothing, though, isn't it? she asked gently.  It gives you an idea at least, wouldn't you say?

 A replica is better than nothing.  Perhaps if David is to have redemption and achieve some sort of peace with the life he has created, he must come to realize that, though it is a sort of replica, his life with his adoptive mother and father had a realness of its own, and therefore real value.

This is a mature and sensitive novel, and much less experimental than McGregor's first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things.  The tone in this novel is confident, and McGregor's words are carefully measured.  Some readers might view this as dispassionate, but the language is inherently true to the novel's protagonist.  This novel does have emotional impact, and the TurboBookSnob believes that it is a work to be treasured.

"They came in the morning, early, walking with the others along tracks and lanes and roads, across fields, down the long low hills which led to the slow deep pull of the river, down to the open gateways in the city walls, the hours and days of walking showing in the slow shift of their bodies, their breath steaming above them in the cold morning air as the night fell away at their backs.  They came quietly, the swish of dew-wet grasses brushing against their ankles, the pat and splash of the muddy ground beneath their feet, the coughs and murmurs of rising conversation as the same few phrases were passed back along the lines.  Here we are now.  Nearly there.  Just to the bottom of the hill and then we'll sit down. Cigarettes were lit, hundreds of cigarettes, thin leathery fingers expertly rolling a pinch of tobacco into a lick of paper without losing a step.  Cigarettes were cadged, offered, shared, passed down to nervous young hands eager for that first acrid taste of adulthood, cupping a mouthful of it in the windshield of their open fists in imitation of fathers and uncles and older brothers, coughing as it burnt down into their untested young lungs, the spluttered-out smoke twisting upwards and mingling with their cold clouded breath as they made their way between flowering hawthorn hedges and cowslip-heavy banks, down towards the city walls.  They wore suits, of a kind, all of them: woolen waistcoats and well knotted neckerchiefs, thick tweed jackets with worn elbows and cuffs, moleskin trousers with frayed seams tucked into the tops of their boots.  The younger ones carried bundles of clothes, brown paper parcels tied with string, slung across their shoulders or clasped to their chests, held tightly in their damp nervous hands as they started to gather pace, pulled down the hill by the sight of the city, by their eagerness to be first and by the impatience of the men and the boys pressing in from behind; still foggy from sleep, still aching from the long walk the day before but forgetting all that as they came to their journey's end.

From the top of the hill, where others were only now beginning that last long downward traipse, the city looked quiet and still, wrapped in a pale May morning mist, weighted with the same brooding promise that cities have always held when glimpsed from a distance like this, the same magnetic pull of hopes and opportunities.  But as those first men and boys came into the city, their boots beginning to stamp and echo across the cobbled ground, windows were opened and curtains were pulled back, and the city began to wake.  Sleepy children peered from low upstairs windows, the hushed chatter and the rumbling of feet signalling the start of the day they'd been looking forward to, calling to each other and pulling faces at the children in the houses across the street.  Landlords opened the doors and shutters of their bars, sweeping the floors and standing in the doorways with brooms in their hands to watch their customers arrive.  Stallholders finished preparing their pitches around the edges of the square, keeping an eye on the small group of guards by the steps of the new town hall.  And from each end of the long square, from the road leading in from the bridge to the east, from the gateway under the lodge to the west, from the road winding out along the river to the south, the army of workers appeared, hurrying on with the growing excitement of arrival, calling greetings to friends not seen for the past six months, looking around for others yet to arrive, asking after health and families, and wives.  And the crowd of people in the square grew bigger, and noisier, and fathers began to lay hands on the shoulders of their youngest sons, keeping them close, wary of letting them drift away too soon, listening to the snatches of conversation echo back and forth, looking out for the farmers and foremen to start to appear, waiting for the business of the day to begin.

Mary Friel stood with her father and brothers, watching her youngest brother Tommy clutching her hand.  You okay there, Tommy, she whispered down to him.  He looked up at her, nodding, a look of annoyance on his young face, and pulled his hand away.

Soon, as if at some unseen signal, deals began to be made all over the square.  You looking for work, son? the smartly dressed men would say, glancing down.  How much you after?  And the older boys, the ones who knew their price, or the ones who could say they were experienced, stronger, would get more work done, tried their luck with eight, nine, ten pounds, while the younger ones, who knew no better or could ask no more, said seven or six as they'd been told.  Deals were made with a terse nod and a handing over of the brown paper packages, an instruction to meet back there in the afternoon, sometimes with a shilling or two to keep the boy busy for the day, sometimes not; sometimes the father taken for drinks to smooth over the awkwardness of the scene, sometimes not.

This was the first time Mary had been to town for the hiring fair.  She'd only ever watched her father setting off with her brothers before; stood in the low doorway to wave them goodbye, her sister Cathy beside her, Tommy holding on to both their hands, their mother turning away before the boys got out of sight and saying no time to be standing around all day now.  she'd had an idea of what it would be like from hearing her father those evenings he came back home alone; she and Cathy lying in bed listening while he talked in a low voice to her mother by the last few turfs of the fading fire.  But she hadn't been expecting quite so many people, or so much noise, or the way her father would stare sternly straight ahead when a gentleman approached him and said, Your boy looking for a job?

They left the square as soon as the price had been agreed, telling Tommy to be good, to work hard and to do what the man said, and to meet them back here at the next fair day in six months' time.  They walked through the town towards the river, Mary, her father, her two older brothers who were past the age of hiring now, out to the docks to catch the boat across to England.  She listened to her brothers talking to her father as they sat waiting for the boat, talking and joking about their time as hired boys, the threshing and weeding and picking of stones, the early mornings and the endless thoughts of food.  She sat slightly apart from them, looking up into the hills on the other side of the river, feeling the imprint of her young brother's hand across the palm of her own.  Other men joined them, walking over from the square, lighting up cigarettes, sitting on sacks of grain and crates of wool, talking about where they'd heard the work was that year.  Following the harvests from Lancashire up to Berwick and all the way on to Fife.  Waterworks round Birmingham way.  Munitions in Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry, Leeds.  Talking of the best ways to get there, the cheapest places to stay, the names to mention to stand a better chance of work at the end of the trip.  Some of the men looked across at Mary, curiously, wondering what she might have been doing there, wondering who she was with, until their gaze was interrupted by her father's hard glare.

They were going over the water early this year.  The weather had changed sooner than usual, and the field was dug and planted, the turf cut, before fair day came.  Work had been arranged for Mary in London, and so their father had announced that they would all make the journey together.  It's a long way for a girl to go on her own, is it not? he'd said, and her mother could only agree, making up slices of cake for their journey, taking out the brown paper from its place beneath the bed.

On the boat, the four of them found a place in a quiet corner and settled themselves in, the two brothers on either side, Mary resting her head on her father's shoulder, his heavy coat laid over them both.  It smelt of damp soil and turf smoke and the cold clean air of their two days' walking.  It smelt of him and she concentrated on the smell as she drifted into an uncomfortable sleep, broken by the tip and slide of the boat, by the shouts of other men, by the hard wooden deck beneath her, and eased back to sleep by her father's slow breathing shush.

In the morning, in Liverpool, they put her on a train down to London.  They stood on the platform for a few moments to be sure she'd got a seat, watching her put her bundle up on the luggage rack, watching her smooth out her skirt as she sat down by the window. Her brother William opened the door and jumped up on the step, leaning in to wish her a good journey, telling her to say hello to Cousin Jenny and the rest of that shower, telling her to tear up London town, laughing as he ran his hand across the top of her hair and pulled it out of its carefully pinned place.  She reached out to catch him a clip round the ear but he leant away, jumping down and slamming the door shut as she said goodbye and the guard blew the whistle with his flag raised high.  Her father and her older brother had already turned away.

She spoke to no one on the journey, as she'd been told, and waited under the clock at Euston station for her cousin, who came running up to meet her a half hour after the train had arrived.  Sorry I'm late, she said, out of breath and a little red in the face.  The bus depot was bombed last night and I had to walk all the way.  You had a good crossing?"