This isn't the sort of thing that happens to someone like you

 

    Jon McGregor's most recent collection of short stories This Isn't The Sort Of Thing That Happens To Someone Like You will be out in paperback in a few days' time, and I've been reading it with enormous admiration for the author and the way his mind works.

    He strikes me as a kind of verbal or behavioural archaeologist, finding a vocal inflection, a tic, a mannerism, and constructing from that fragment or detail a whole person with a past, a present dilemma, a predetermined fate or future. He takes situations and describes them or approaches them obliquely; his focus, or way of looking at things, is unusual and narrow and all the more telling and effective for it. He gets below the surface of things, probing, sifting, ultimately unearthing the clues to his characters from their behaviour, their thought processes or the mundane places in which they find themselves. He is surprising and original and at times experimental and audacious, but he's also authentic and convincing and his writing has an impressive integrity.

    This collection includes stories which are witty and whimsical while others are gritty, bleak and stark. The sharp-edged sit well alongside those worn to a smoothness by a regular rhythm or a reiterated motif. There are long pieces here, and others which in just a page and a half dissect a life; one comprises a mere ten words. Some play with language, using words with a common initial letter as punctuation to the narrative, for example, while another's currency is  semi-officious verbal padding, jargon and business-speak, and a third threads a person's Facebook status updates through a dramatic event like a running stitch through cloth.

    The pieces share a general or originating location - the flat lands of Lincolnshire in eastern England - a place of big skies, featureless fields, fenland and a threatening sea. Peopled by an assortment of often anonymous characters who could wander in and out of each other's stories without seeming out of place, they are loosely grouped around the themes of losing things, hiding or burying them, getting away from things, facing turning points and moments of realisation - either dawning or blinding.

    Language is often demotic, settings bleached of colour, people are ciphers for situations, cryptic states of being. Some stories are like the literary equivalent of a photographic negative, the 'object' defined by the space around it. Whether sparse and spare or built up in repeating layers of meaning, each piece works on its own terms, and as a whole the collection is a masterclass in technique.

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    I have a rather fun competition connected to this book coming up in the next post, so please don't miss it!