Haunting tales

In ghost stories, a large, atmospheric home in some state of romantic dereliction sets the stage for creepy goings-on. In two of last autumn’s more beguiling books – Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry - the house in question was tantamount to a character in itself: in Waters’ case, the run-down home of a decaying family, and in Niffenegger’s the key ingredient in a plot that brought two identical American twins to live next door to Highgate cemetery.
In Jon McGregor’s wonderful new novel Even The Dogs, the ghosts that haunt its pages are of people for whom home is a troubled, temporary situation at best. They are the street people whose tales, in real life, are rarely told and barely heard.
McGregor’s first two novels have already proved that he excels in writing about the tiny, seemingly unremarkable details in the lives of apparently unmemorable characters. In Even The Dogs, he describes the life of a group of people who, having fallen though the cracks in life and seemed to disappear from mainstream existence, are ignored in real life. Even The Dogs is populated by a cast of drug users and homeless people who congregate in the home of Robert Radcliffe, a middle-aged alcoholic whose body is removed from his wrecked flat in the early pages of the book. In the wake of his death, the spooked, shadowy voices voices of his one-time companions keep a vigil, telling their own fragmented, layered derelict’s tales. Alive, they inhabit a parallel world where they’re invisible or at least unseen; in death it’s pretty much the same story.
Even The Dogs is set apart by the uncondescending compassion with which McGregor, without ever denying the squalid reality of his characters’ lives and the tunnelling despair of their addictions, transcends underclass clichés to evoke characters more often seen as symbols of social failure than as human beings who are broken. Their voices, and stories, are heartbreaking: this is a supernatural story that feels more real than a documentary report. McGregor’s ghosts may have been forgotten in their lifetimes but in their deaths, each one of them is insistently haunting.