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A review by spittingyarn
Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor
4.0
McGregor’s books are always surprising, often starting out as one thing before morphing into something quite different. They stick with you, too. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things has become part of my mental furniture, and I often imagine the events of Reservoir 13 continuing beyond the last page, accruing chapters as the years pass.
Lean Fall Stand continues the trend. A story of three parts, the first third follows Richard “Doc” Wright, the seasoned technical assistant offering sticklerish support to two young mapping nerds as they survey the inhospitable coastline of Antarctica around the evocatively named “Station K”. The book opens in the middle of a dramatic white-out storm and events unfold - Doc suffers a stroke and someone dies.
In the second part of the book, we follow Doc’s ambivalent wife, Anna as she becomes her husband’s semi-reluctant carer. The stroke has left him incapacitated and frustrated by aphasia, unable to speak with any fluency or even to say “no”. McGregor spends two full pages detailing the mundane minutiae of Anna’s days with almost too much verisimilitude. She finds respite in the silence of Quaker meetings and, as a carer myself, I was quite taken with the idea of silent meetings. If someone wants to set up a SEND support group where you are invited to sit in a chair in silence for 45 mins, I’d come.
The final part of the book charts Doc’s attempts to recover from aphasia and his attendance at a total communication group. There, fellow aphasic Peter speaks as if his words are being generated by predictive text. The result is oddly lyrical with meaning just out of reach. Sean is a compulsive swearer who provides accidentally apt punctuation and emphasis to the ebb and flow of moods in the room. Through the group - and the book - McGregor shows that the stories we tell about ourselves are important and when words fails us, we need to find other ways to tell them.
Lean Fall Stand continues the trend. A story of three parts, the first third follows Richard “Doc” Wright, the seasoned technical assistant offering sticklerish support to two young mapping nerds as they survey the inhospitable coastline of Antarctica around the evocatively named “Station K”. The book opens in the middle of a dramatic white-out storm and events unfold - Doc suffers a stroke and someone dies.
In the second part of the book, we follow Doc’s ambivalent wife, Anna as she becomes her husband’s semi-reluctant carer. The stroke has left him incapacitated and frustrated by aphasia, unable to speak with any fluency or even to say “no”. McGregor spends two full pages detailing the mundane minutiae of Anna’s days with almost too much verisimilitude. She finds respite in the silence of Quaker meetings and, as a carer myself, I was quite taken with the idea of silent meetings. If someone wants to set up a SEND support group where you are invited to sit in a chair in silence for 45 mins, I’d come.
The final part of the book charts Doc’s attempts to recover from aphasia and his attendance at a total communication group. There, fellow aphasic Peter speaks as if his words are being generated by predictive text. The result is oddly lyrical with meaning just out of reach. Sean is a compulsive swearer who provides accidentally apt punctuation and emphasis to the ebb and flow of moods in the room. Through the group - and the book - McGregor shows that the stories we tell about ourselves are important and when words fails us, we need to find other ways to tell them.