One feature of If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things is the namelessness of the characters who live in the streets; they are known instead by either a prominent characteristic (’the girl with the orange hair’) or by their address (’the boy at number 18′). Jon is occasionally asked whether he used a map to keep track of who lived where in the street. In a manner of speaking, he did:
Hand-drawn Map
When the book was translated into Japanese, the publishers were very concerned that their readers would have difficulty following the story without a visual representation of the street. They weren’t happy with Jon’s original, so they came up with their own:
Japanese Map
(Note the car, just coming around the corner into the street.)
You might be interested in comparing these maps with the Google map of where Jon was living in Bradford when he first started developing the ideas for If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things.
View Larger Map
The postcode for this area is BD7; we can at long last exclusively reveal that this is the origin of the enigmatic note in the book’s acknowledgments which thank “most of all, the Seven”.
Here’s something else which no-one ever notices: the narrator’s chapters are each written in 9 paragraphs of 9 sentences. This is a reference to the 9 months of the narrator’s pregnancy. There are 18 chapters, because the narrator is pregnant with twins. These things seem important at the time.
The exhibition which the narrator goes to on page 230 is Anthony Gormley’s Field For The British Isles which Jon saw at Sheffield’s Mappin Gallery in 1999, and liked a lot.
