When the Power of Language is lost…

I was given Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor by my friend Annie as a birthday present. She chose it because the novel begins in Antarctica, and we have always shared a fascination with reading about Polar exploration. The Polar setting promises excitement and delivers. The first section is incredibly tense, immersing the reader in the horrors of a sudden ice storm, enabling us to experience the white out and the white noise from the perspectives of the three staff of Station K. It also foregrounds a much greater concern of the novel, the importance of language as a means of communication and what happens if language, and therefore communication, fails.

In the second part of the novel, we learn that Robert ‘Doc’ Wright, the station General Technical Assistant and a veteran of Antarctica, has suffered a debilitating stroke. We then follow his slow recovery. A key element of his condition is the loss of language. But from the outset, as the Station K staff grapple with the storm, language is shown to be dysfunctional. And while the novel has several characters suffering from Aphasia – ‘the name given to a wide range of language deficits caused by damage to the brain’ – it is also packed full of other people ‘not knowing what to say or how to say it.’ Very quickly we are asked to think about just how much we take language as a means of communication for granted.

Anna, Robert’s wife, has language issues of her own and suffers from social awkwardness. She struggles with the everyday euphemisms that we all use, looking for precision in language, taking everything very literally. Perhaps this is the scientist in her, perhaps it is something else, but it prompts the reader to really think about the phrases that litter our daily speech. We know what they signify, but what if we didn’t? Even the most articulate of us can struggle with communication at times. How often have we been lost for words, or chosen the wrong ones, unable to make ourselves understood?

The search then is for alternative forms of communication. Some of these are non-verbal. Robert’s struggle with the physical at home parallels his earlier fight to survive the storm. But a real joy of the novel is the way that McGregor uses language so effectively to illustrate the implications of its loss. There is a real poetry in the way that the Aphasia sufferers speak and learn to understand one another. McGregor unpicks language and invites us to really think about what each word means – or doesn’t. And there is a triumph in the way that the characters find ways to make themselves understood. Language in this novel is everything and nothing, it is precision and euphemism and white noise, lost in the vast silence of an alluring, compelling and terrifying Antarctica, and the mystery surrounding the events there haunts the whole book.

More like this please, Annie!