Telling tale of a man in search of himself
So Many Ways to Begin By Jon McGregor Bloomsbury, ?14.99
Justine McCarthy The over-riding dream for many adopted people is to be reunited with their biological mother, thereby clicking the final pieces in to the jigsaw of their origins. To meet a stranger over tea and family albums and to recognise oneself in the hue of her irises or the texture of her hair or the way her top foot turns sideways when she crosses her legs, that is the fantasy.
Sometimes, the search throws up more answers than the eventual encounter. The eternal puzzle of nature-versus-nurture is explored by Jon McGregor in this his second and engrossing novel, So Many Ways to Begin.
It follows the life of David Carter, an only son and an only brother, who intends being the proprietor of his own museum when he grows up. By his early 20s in the 1960s, he is working in Coventry Museum and married to Eleanor, who has severed contact with her family in Aberdeen and has relinquished her plans to qualify as an archaeologist.
It is David who keeps surreptitously in touch with his in-laws, as he and the reader slowly discover his wife's history as the youngest child of an over-protective and violent mother. It is, at least, a history and one that Eleanor seems primed to emulate in the early years of marriage, taking to her darkened bedroom to weep for days on end.
The brilliance of Jon McGregor's writing is his ability to suggest emotions without having to spell them out. There is only ever a sense that David Carter resents his wife's inability to cope when he regards himself as the victim of an historical void. At the age of 21, his surrogate Aunt Julia, hospitalised with an unspecified early dotage, has blurted out that David's teenage biological mother from Donegal abandoned him at birth.
His belief in the immutability of history leads him on a wild goose chase to Donegal, searching for the woman who will provide him with the answers he craves, just as prehistoric bones elucidate the origins of man. Years go by. He and Eleanor have a daughter, Kate, and their lives settle into a rhythm of happy normality.
When Kate grows up and leaves home, David, now aged 55, goes back to Donoegal to meet the woman he believes to be his mother, having found her through the internet. He carries with him a letter from his adoptive mother, full of contrition and love and apprehension. The twist in the end is reminiscent of the denouement of Michael Cunningham's The Hours.
McGregor is an expert story-teller, employing clean, unadorned language to create an intimate narrative. The maturity of the writing belies this Bermuda-born writer's 30 years of age. His characters are fully fleshed individuals, each one meriting a novel of their own. It is easy to see why his debut novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, won the Somerset Maugham Award.
The only irritant - a minor one - is the laboured theme of his chapter titles. Every one betokens an artifact in the characters' lives, such as a picture postcard or an art exhibition programme. It is an artifice meant to give the impression of cataloguing their development, as would an archivist in a museum, but it is over-worked.
Do not let that put you off. This is an absorbing and unexpectedly uplifting novel, with its ultimate message that circumstances, and how we react to them, are the primary influences on our destiny. It will leave you thinking long after you have put the book away on the shelf.
Justine McCarthy is chief features writer of the Irish Independent
