Author:
• Monday, April 27th, 2009

Jon McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976 while his father was appointed as a vicar there. The third of four siblings, he spent his childhood in Norwich,Thetford in Norfolk, England, where he later joined Bradford University to study Media Technology and Production.

He started writing during his final year at university. He had a short fiction published by Granta magazine, and a short story : While You Where Sleeping, broadcast on BBC Radio 4. He now lives in Nottingham with his wife.

Jon McGregor has to date written two novels: If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things published in 2002 which won several awards and So Many Ways to Begin, published in 2006 and which took Jon McGregor three years to write and was short listed for the Encore Award in 2007 and long listed for the Man Booker Prize.

So Many Ways to Begin has an uncomplicated, slow-paced plot of an uneventful story of love, disappointments, frustrations, resentment and family secrets. A sad story where “chances” play a big part. The author recognises and celebrates the triumph of love over the hardship that life brings; it’s emphasized by the undying and intact love of David Carter for his adopted mother, Dorothy and to his wife Eleanor.

David Carter, a museum curator, dreams of one day having his own museum and leading a happy and peaceful life with the girl he loves and marries. But he ends up having his dreams and his wife’s dreams slowly suppressed and shuttered in the commotions of everyday life.

His wife, not being able to continue her studies to become a geologist, often succumbs to debilitating bouts of depression and he will never own a museum, or even succeed in keeping his job as a curator in the Coventry museum and ends up without even achieving a career.

His life will take a different turn when he finds out, inadvertently, in his early twenties, that he was an adopted child. His hunt for the truth and the search for his biological mother will begin without success. But he doesn’t give up, and when he reaches his fifties he goes on another journey of self-discovery by working out all the missing pieces of the past to unravel his roots and in order to find his own identity and with it his own salvation. As he was never able to come to terms with the ship replica in the museum, he could never accept nor live with a false identity.

The novel, set mainly in Coventry, England, covers three generations of the Carter family by going back and forth through several decades, from the first world war to the present time.
Each chapter is headed by various mundane artefacts description, like in a museum catalogue, in an attempt to try and uncover the secret behind them and to underline the strong feeling of attraction, of the main character, to debris and discovered old objects.

The author also wanted to prompt the reader to make the connections about, where does the object come from? How did David get hold of it? And what further narrative information does it bring? The characters, although somewhat distant, are described in a touching, moving and human like way, with their different emotions and their everyday trials.

In So Many Ways to Begin, the author mentions the different, unexpected things that can change one’s life, like : “chance meetings, over-heard conversations… history made by a million fractional moments too numerous to calibrate or observe or record… But what he had would be a start, he thought, a way to begin.”

In an interview with Jon McGregor, he was asked, what is So Many Ways to Begin about? His answer was : “It’s the story of a marriage; it’s the story of two people trying to make a life together, and the way their own families and histories impact upon this life. It’s also about museums, identity, story-telling, and the difficulty of starting again”.

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Category: Book Reviews
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