Jon McGregor on writing If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things
“If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things started life, partly, as a book about the reaction to the death of Princess Diana. Taken aback, as most people were, by the hysteria which erupted in late August 1997, I wanted to tell a story about a street where life was going on regardless, where more important things were happening, where the word ‘tragedy’ would have a greater meaning. I was also interested in writing about a version of urban life which I felt was being neglected in British fiction of the time: fiction which seemed to equate urban life with crime, drugs, poverty, and a distinctly vacuous ‘edginess’. I wanted to take a day in the life of one street in a city, and try to show the vast multiplicity of stories which were happening there, and to look at how those stories interacted with each other in an environment where people were constantly moving in and out and rarely knew each other’s names.
The novel was written, mostly, between September 1999 and February 2001; but the idea had formed earlier, mainly while I was living and studying in Bradford. Indeed, it would be fair to say that while I’ve always insisted that the setting for the book could be “any town in northern England”, it is essentially set in Bradford.
Here’s a piece I wrote for a Swiss newspaper, NZZ, about where the idea for the opening of the book came from.
“One late summer’s night in the mid-1990s, unable to sleep, I climbed out of the attic window of the house I was then living in, scrambled up onto the flat dormer roof, and stood looking out across the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire. The air was humid and slow, and the sounds of the night-time drifted up to me in shimmering waves…”
It’s slightly exaggerated – I did once climb up on the roof of the house, but not in the middle of the night and not at the exact moment the idea of writing a novel about Bradford occurred to me – but it’s basically accurate about the origins of the book.
(You can read the rest of the article here.)
The other main starting point for the book was the number of times I saw children in that street having to get out of the way – very quickly – of cars. I was disturbed by the sight of these near-misses, and haunted by the what-if of them, and so decided to write about it. In fact, my original concept for the novel was that it would take place over the course of the thirty seconds it would take for one of these near-misses to happen or to not happen. It proved impossible to stretch thirty seconds over the course of a whole novel (although I bet Nicholson Baker could do it), and in the end my attempt was reshaped to form the closing chapter of the novel.
At a fairly early stage in the writing of this novel, I ground to a halt. Having decided that the structure would be a chronologically rigorous day-in-the-life, I’d worked my way through to just about lunchtime and was beginning to bore myself; it was, as (Arnold Bennet/Mark Twain/Henry Ford: scholars are divided) once said, just one damn thing after another. There was no pace. Then, in early 2000, I visited a friend who was teaching in Tokyo, and he took me to see the temples at Kamakura. It was here that I saw a shrine featuring these tiny figures:
[clay figures photo to follow]
which became pivotal in the narrative of the book.
Here’s how they’re described in the text:
“The figure comes from a place somewhere south of Tokyo, a place where mothers go when they have lost young children. Very young, as in not even or only just born; the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted. The mothers go to this place, a Buddhist temple on a wooded hillside, and they take tiny pieces of clothing for their ghost children, and gifts and prayers… Some of the figures are dressed up, in traditional woollen caps and shawls, or in baseball jerseys, or with tiny coloured parasols to protect them from the sun. There is one with an unused Bugs Bunny bib strung enormously around its neck. At their feet are offerings, comforts. Packets of sweets. Money. A yo-yo.”
The sight of these figures, and the thought of what they stood for, had a sharply unsettling effect on me. I was too young at the time to be thinking about children, I thought, but already people I’d been at university with were beginning to have children of their own, and to cope with the responsibilities which came with that. I began to think about one of the characters living in the street finding herself unexpectedly pregnant a few years after living there, and realised that the story of her making sense of that could serve as a framing device to the day-in-the-life which I’d already started. It would give the events on the street some context, I thought, and some afterlife, and the simple structure of two parallel stories running as alternating chapters would provide some pace which might otherwise be missing.
I came back from Japan and got to work.”
For further information on the book, including the sketch map of the street which featured in the Japanese translation, and a reading group guide from Bloomsbury, go here.
