Even the Dogs, by Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor’s debut, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002 and won both the Betty Trask Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award in the following year. So Many Ways to Begin, his second novel, was on the Booker longlist in 2006 and last month his third book, Even the Dogs (which was published in 2010), won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

McGregor’s talent is formidable, his purpose is serious and his discipline is exemplary: this novel turns an unflinching gaze on its subject — a group of homeless drug addicts in a depressed Midlands town — and expects an equal commitment from the reader. ‘I wanted to write,’ McGregor has said, ‘without making concessions to how easy it was going to be to read — to people’s squeamishness.’ He has achieved his intention to write without compromise, but the greater test is the one he sets himself: to make that writing compelling.

The novel is constructed with meticulous care around the discovery of a man’s dead body on a cold day in the vacant, half-populated week which comes between Christmas and New Year. The death has gone unnoticed, the corpse is unclaimed and the authorities are left to process its efficient disposal. As the body makes its final journey (from flat, to morgue, to crematorium) its progress is observed by a group of invisible onlookers who provide both a commentary on the present and a narrative for the past.

Individual characters emerge from a collective voice to account for themselves and provide context and history for the dead man: we learn that his name was Robert, that he was a full-time, stay-at-home alcoholic, that his girlfriend had left him years before (along with their daughter) and that he lived alone but — in return for booze and company — kept an open house for local addicts, vagrants and drunks.