Brethren grim, lost souls of the streets

THE experimentalism of Jon McGregor's third novel comes across as something shocking.

SO much of recent English fiction has been written in bloodless, well-mannered realist mode that the experimentalism of Jon McGregor's third novel comes across as something shocking.

Eccentric punctuation pulls sentences in two directions at once. Paragraphs are regularly shorn of their last few words. Ordinary time is accelerated, paused or advanced frame by frame.

Narratorial perspective toggles between collective "we" and individual "I" in the space of a comma. How appropriate, though, for a novel set among Britain's underclass to lurch in this manner: like a rough sleeper, zigzagging with enigmatic purpose through dutiful ranks of office workers on a city street.

This is not to say that Even the Dogs lacks coherence. It is a whodunit, a murder mystery of sorts, rendered in language that blends the fierce colloquialism of Scottish authors such as Irvine Welsh and James Kelman with a sweeter strain of English melancholy we recognise in voices as disparate as Philip Larkin, V.S. Naipaul and Iain Sinclair.

The combination comes off because McGregor works hard to convince us that the novel's form must be fitted to its content. Even the Dogs' concern is with those who are destitute, addicted, homeless: the most vulnerable and despised group in modern English society. And, since we are lodged for the most part inside the heads of these men and women, it is the coarse eloquence of lives lived at absolute zero that sets the tone of the whole.

On the evidence of McGregor's novel, that tone is grim. We open with the discovery of a murder: a lone man, found dead in a house that evidently has been used as a squat for some time.

In time-lapse flashback we learn that this is Robert, a husband and father whose family left him years before.

Robert is so firmly trapped inside his grief that he succumbs to alcoholism. He takes up with a fellow drinker, Steve, a Falklands veteran destroyed by that conflict, and eventually opens his home to other lost souls.

These junkies and prostitutes, petty thieves and abandoned single mothers form the Greek chorus of a low-rent tragedy. As the narrative proceeds it is their individual stories that McGregor attempts to tell. And as each struggles with the fact of Robert's death, seeks in some small way to honour his passing, the author reveals how they got lost in the first place.

The group is linked by common mourning: so, McGregor quietly suggests, they should be seen as a community. More than this, the amateur detective-work undertaken by Danny, one of their number, joins with the testimony given by the others to form an alternative investigation. Above, through five sections, the official progress of the police, followed by the bureaucratic machinery that tests the body and organises its disposal; below, an urgent inquiry, concerning a fellow human being who is loving, beloved. The author subtly invites us to subvert the usual hierarchies of moral worth.

Nowhere is this reconfiguration of values more apparent than in the treatment of addiction. Danny, McGregor's main narrator, is profoundly unillusioned about the basis of his fellow addicts's need. He mercilessly recalls support group explanations over the years:

Jesus but. Everyone sitting around going I can't help it I take smack because my old man used to hit me or my cousin raped me or they took all my f . . king kids away . . . Whatever. And no one ever says I take smack because I f . . king like it and it keeps me well and it keeps me f . . king quiet.

The bitterness with which this position isstaked out is in direct proportion to itstruthfulness. What we get from the ragged crew who knew Robert is not meek acceptance of their sinful natures but a defiant documentation of the rules that govern their world, along with a series of job descriptions describing its alternative employment opportunities:

Always working and watching and chasing around for a bag of that. Jesus but. The man-hours that go into living like this. Takes some dedication, takes some f . . king, what, commitment.

In the recent US television series The Wire, African-American drug dealers attended investment seminars and held meetings in the function rooms of chain hotels. Excluded from the legal economy by dint of race and education, the men had nonetheless borrowed its trappings: they represented a market whose commodity was so valuable it shadowed the official world that operated apart from it.

McGregor does not suggest that his cast is empowered by addiction; far from it. But he does try to show us how those who have nothing, who are cast out of official society, form their own.

The picture he paints of what it is to be down and out in an anonymous city in England's Midlands in the present day is ugly and disturbing, even if the language he uses to describe it is often lovely.

It is, however, a world where resilience, loyalty and decency count for more because they are so much harder won.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.