One day in the life of a city street, in any city, any time. The various people inhabiting the houses experience the same weather, the same noises, but a multitude of different types of crisis. British newcomer Jon McGregor's first novel sets out with great intentions, and lays them proudly bare on his author's market stall, where they are to be admired and applauded.
This much is obvious from the quasi-poetic opening sequence, which acts as if it were a prelude to an opera, all swirling colour and dramatic action. It is certainly a scene-setter; McGregor offers it as both lament and celebration, a city at work and a city at rest: "The whole city has stopped. And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again".
It is a series of glimpses, observations, intended as an eye or camera at work. It is not only true of the opening sequence, it is true to the book itself - a pretentious parade of heavily intense gestures.
For all the insights into the lives of a noticeably unhappy collection of individuals, McGregor's self-dramatising novel never succeeds in engaging or even convincing the reader as more than an exercise in style. Claims may be made for the lyricism of the language, but in fact the prose is irritatingly cryptic, and this is heightened by what is the relentless use of the continuous present tense. None of the characters emerge as more than aimless pawns set out on a chessboard of sorts. The cinematic can work in prose fiction, but more often than not it is merely a way of avoiding saying there is neither action nor narrative drive.
Cutting from one character to another can be interesting if the writer can manage to render the seams seamless. McGregor does not. Instead of achieving cohesion and continuity, he strains to keep all his players valid, never mind interesting.
There is one story; a story that in itself is very slight. The only character possessing a voice is the first-person narrator of her own saga. A young girl deliberates about calling her friend Sarah. From her first sentence, in which she says, "I'd been thinking about it", it is clear exactly what is on her mind.
This is no tribute to McGregor. Instead, it highlights the utter predictability of what is presumably intended as an experimental novel, albeit availing of a fictional technique that has been used for close on 100 years. It is important to stress that there is nothing new or fresh about If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, considering the hype - never mind its recent Booker long-listing - this is a novel that never moves beyond its self-satisfaction.
As the scene switches, or rather twitches, from an elderly couple - a long shared history at variance with the old man's new secret - to a woman hanging out her washing or the young man in number 12 "leaning out of the window, stripped to the waist. He is smoking a cigarette, holding it away to one side and making sure he blows all the smoke out into the air", the narrative never amounts to more than a series of not very interesting images, a voyeur's survey of people at rest, in strife, in thought and at play.
From time to time, however, the focus dutifully returns to the sharp young girl who, by virtue of having the only speaking part, becomes - if by default - the central character. Blonde, young, wearing glasses and watched from afar by an admirer, she battles with her news: "And at work I spent the whole day trying to decide how I could tell someone, who could I tell".
Her news, that of discovering she is pregnant by a casual encounter, misses any sense of either fear or elation. Instead it becomes a reason to examine the nature of the girl's relationship with her mother and of the character of the mother herself.
This then brings the girl home to Scotland to see her parents. Aside from the mother's well intentioned attempts to help the daughter, the few instances of insight are achieved as the girl observes her father, an awkward, sad man defeated by life: "He'd been watching one of his boxing videos again, I didn't remember seeing it before but then they all look the same to me, two men in a square of ropes, grainy black and white picture, fists slamming into faces".
Yet here, as throughout the narrative, McGregor invariably parades a clever, coldly knowing tone: "My dad, overweight and unexercised, is a great boxing fan, knowledgeable and opinionated and passionate". His young female narrator - clever, sharp, hardly vulnerable, never convinces, nor does her tentative friendship with a young man who attempts to help her.
Several of the players are also choreographed to participate in an accident scene that is intended as the climax of the novel. Such is McGregor's determination to impose a director's eye rather than a novelist's vision on his episodic project; the narrative repeatedly falters into arch self-consciousness.
Aside from the main theme, that of the young girl in trouble - which loses its impact through the archness of the style - the other small fragments of story never cohere. What's more, it simply doesn't matter.
Fiction such as this, dominated by its misplaced belief in its own profundity and technique, is almost as problematic as it is irrelevant. Many over-hyped books come and go, but this irritating and indulgent performance may well be one of the poorest, and certainly the emptiest, of the new designer, all-style-and-no-content novels published in recent years. Even more seriously, to present it as yet another great white hope of British fiction - and, particularly in this case, the supposed merging of poetry and music - does disservice to prose in general, never mind fiction. At no time does McGregor fully convince either the reader or himself.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things as a title heralds a work of great happenings. The text and McGregor's narrow stylistic concepts as well as his lack of urgency and energy deliver little more than nothing.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things. By Jon McGregor. Bloomsbury. 275 pp. £12.99 sterling
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
