Getting under the skin of modern drug culture

In the last issue of Hot Press, we wrote about the growing levels of heroin use in Ireland. If you’re looking for an insight into the effects of heroin abuse, Jon McGregor’s new novel Even The Dogs is required reading

Anne Sexton, 30 Jun 2010

Jon McGregor's new novel is a Ken Loach-like exploration of heroin use in modern society. There was only one problem. McGregor himself has never used the drug. In the name of research, was he tempted to pop his smack cherry?

"I've never taken heroin so I don't how what it feels like. I kept asking people but they kept saying, 'you'd have to take it to know' – but there's only so much commitment to research you can have!"

Nonetheless, Even The Dogs is a powerful work dealing with homelessness and addiction, narrated by multiple voices that weave seamlessly in and out of the story. That this depressing subject matter – the book opens with the putrefying corpse of Robert, an alcoholic – and his challenging narrative technique manages to be engaging at all is testimony to McGregor's skill as a writer. For all its bleakness, Even The Dogs is a beautifully written book.

"I assumed it would put some people off, and that made it easier to write," he reveals. "It gave me a license to get on with it. But on a practical level, I sold the proposal to the publisher at the outset, so whenever I thought it was a bit much I remembered that this is what they bought into, what they were expecting. From a technical point of view it was an enjoyable book to write."

One of the book's interesting quirks is that it has multiple narrators. Sometimes the voices function like an omniscient ghostly Greek chorus and at other times one voice comes to the fore exploring a bit of that person's story.

"It started almost by mistake," McGregor continues. "I wrote the first chapter, the scene where the body is found and just kind of instinctively wrote from the point of view of the people waiting for the police to turn up. But when the police turn up I went in with the police – 'we stand over the body'. I was kind of making it up as I went along and then I realised that this is a perspective which gives you a lot of opportunities. I also realised that I was probably writing from the point of view of some dead people, ghosts, and I felt quite ambivalent about that. I never really enjoyed other novels written from the perspective of a ghost or dead person. Although I wanted to stick with it because it began to feel like a useful perspective and a useful metaphor, I held way back on exploring the mechanics of being dead. I tried to leave it open and ambiguous for the reader to choose their own interpretation. Also what I tried to do, and I hope it comes through, is to make the reader slightly complicit in the 'we'. Hopefully it feels like you are watching and involved. So the short answer is, there's different interpretations."

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