Lean Fall Stand - Jon McGregor

 ‘When an Antarctic research expedition goes wrong, the consequences are far-reaching -  for the men involved and for their families back home

Robert ‘Doc’ Wright, a veteran of Antarctic field work, hold the clues to what happened, but he is no longer able to communicate them. While Anna, his wife, navigates the sharp contours of her new life as a carer, Robert is forced to learn a whole new way to be in the world.’

With this new story from Jon McGregor he continues to add to his impressive oeuvre of delicate, almost understated fictions that deal with so many human conditions, with grace and dignity. This deceptive volume, Lean Fall Stand opens with what seems as if it might be some kind of adventure story. The Lean sequence fools us into thinking we’re in for a protracted, subzero, survival story. It’s both exciting and interesting to read. The hallmarks of McGregors economy of language where he uses as few words as possible to say as much as he possibly can draws the reader in, anticipating more. But in fact that section takes up a bare 80 pages of the novel as a whole. And when you reach the second Fall section you begin to realise that the novel is going off at a completely different tangent. And yet that opening section sticks to the rest of the novel like glue synthesising the readers and the characters in the story. Clever. 

I’m unwilling to give too much away for I felt that another of the book’s strengths was for the reader to chance upon the unexpected. But crucial to the story is Robert’s struggles with language. How do you express yourself and explain the complexities of a pivotal event when your language is limited? I thought the book was examining how it is to have your life turned upside down so that just a mere act of surviving a day is a challenge. And so you have this incredible paradox of one person surviving in the Antarctic and surviving an ordinary, unremarkable day. Alongside that is how one event cannot only turn a suffering individual’s life upside down but those around him or her. The characters of Robert and Anna were so acutely expressed; the fragility of their existences so beautifully described.

I imagine that the author did some protracted and perceptive research to be able to write some of the Fall and Stand sequences so palpably and convincingly. And somehow I saw the frangibility of life in the snow and ice as a metaphor for the tenuousness of Robert’s situation. 

I’ve always admired how McGregor can take some seemingly bleak and unrelenting situations and  extract some redemption from them. Part of that is his prose style which is so controlled and considered, that as a reader you believe that absolutely nothing has been omitted. His ability to characterise  possesses that economy that gives us everything we need to know without overdoing it but also without underdoing it. We are allowed to actually get to know a character as we might a real person. I found my feelings towards Robert changed throughout the sections. And I liked him a lot better by the end of the book than I did at the beginning. And whilst Robert and Anna might dominate his characters the rest of the “cast“ are almost lovingly created and  depicted ensuring that the reader engages with them and roots for them in the challenging world that, through no fault of their own, they find themselves in.

Quite a unique story, unpredictable but thoroughly engaging. My thanks to Matt Clacher at 4th Estate books for my gifted proof.