The need for a private writing environment prompted his setting up of the Nottingham

The need for a private writing environment prompted his setting up of the Nottingham Writers’ Workshop. I really wanted to write a book that would very easily answer that question. So I thought: what if I write about a man who gets stabbed? Then I can just say – it’s about a man who gets stabbed – and that would shut people up.”That’s a third starting point, I observe, cagily, wondering if my questions fall into his “shut up” category of conversation.”So many ways to begin,” he shrugs, with a disarming smile.Keeping others’ voices at bay seems a priority for McGregor. And here it is again, slightly tweaked, slamming abruptly into the drift of David’s life with shocking, unexpected violence.”Actually, it started life as part of this novel, not the other way around,” McGregor corrects me, slightly sheepishly “It was going to be a much bigger core of the narrative. It was one of the other starting points of the book, because I got really fed up of people asking me what If Nobody Speaks was about. “So Eleanor’s character in So Many Ways to Begin very much comes from a sense of unfinished business.”I am familiar with McGregor’s reluctance to leave his material alone, even after it has been published.

“The First Punch” initially appeared as a short story in the Guardian, then I included it in Sunday Night and Monday Morning, a locally published collection of fiction by Nottinghamshire writers. McGregor confirms this, describing that momentary wondering as “almost in the nature of a private joke” bantered between the two novels, written late on when the connection between them was fairly subtle. “The narrator’s relationship with her mother, who was always off-stage, was one of the ones that I most enjoyed writing in If Nobody Speaks,” he recalls. In one chapter, David is in Aberdeen at Eleanor’s mother’s funeral and wonders, for a moment, where their daughter Kate has sloped off to.

This suddenly chimes with the unnamed narrator of If Nobody Speaks, who became pregnant after a swift assignation at an Aberdeen funeral, and then agonises about how this development will affect her unstable mother. I’m conscious of the fact that, in a way, David is a grown-up version of the boy taking polaroids in If Nobody Speaks.”This is not the only overlap between the two books. McGregor effectively uses these totemic items to curate his own literary exhibition of the progress of David’s life.”Right from the off I had the idea that you could make an art exhibit out of all these artefacts – that if you laid them out on a table they would tell a story in the same kind of way That was my starting point,” he enthuses. “I had a strong visual image of this man and his collection of letters and photos and objects, and that was how the story would be told – each chapter would become an artefact.

Each numbered fragment is labelled with an evocative memento: “A wine cork”, “Pill bottles, prescriptions”, “A pair of cinema tickets, annotated”, “Geologist’s rock-hammer, in original case (unused wedding gift)”, “Model fishing boat, handmade c1905″. How David re-evaluates his precious artefacts, and adjusts to the changing trajectory of his life, is the meat of this subtle, clever and affecting novel.This may sound like a fairly comfortable, unchallenging, linear story It is not: it is far more enthralling. So Many Ways to Begin is made up of over 60 short fragments, superficially similar to the snippets and pens? of If Nobody Speaks but each one recording a specific incident or memory in the lives of David and Eleanor, the lass he meets by chance pouring tea in Aberdeen’s museum caf?and whom he will rescue from her overbearing and violent mother with a sudden offer of marriage). “It took a long time to coalesce, but the starting point was the character of David,” McGregor establishes. “Around the time of If Nobody Speaks coming out I wrote a very, very short story about a young boy who was obsessed with museums, and who pursued this unusual, almost geeky interest to become a museum curator as an adult.