Street eloquence

The title of Jon McGregor’s third novel derives from an anecdote told by one of the many vivid, dispossessed characters whose voices burst from its pages: Steve is a homeless ex-soldier who agrees to help deliver a lorry-load of aid to a Bosnian town, but is turned back on the grounds that ‘even the dogs’ there are dead.

The title of Jon McGregor’s third novel derives from an anecdote told by one of the many vivid, dispossessed characters whose voices burst from its pages: Steve is a homeless ex-soldier who agrees to help deliver a lorry-load of aid to a Bosnian town, but is turned back on the grounds that ‘even the dogs’ there are dead. The words also recall the gospel of Matthew, where even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table — an apt echo, since this is a novel that explores the life-defining dependencies of those on the margins of society, and the ensuing guilt when co-dependency is neglected.

It is late December, and the body of Robert Radcliffe lies undiscovered in his squalid flat for days before the door is finally kicked in. The circumstances are particularly sad because, in the years that he has been drinking away since his wife and daughter left him, Robert has been a benevolent force in the lives of a whole ‘scene’ of the homeless and the addicted — giving them shelter and a place to get high, often in exchange for errands of food. But this Christmas he was forgotten, and it was the end of him.

The narrative that follows is splintered, switching between the individual voices of Robert’s friends, and a first person plural voice that seems to represent the shapeless, anonymous mass of all of them — a collective, culpable ‘we’, picking over the man’s life and death.