Getting under the skin of modern drug culture

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."
For a book dealing with homelessness, drug addiction and alcoholism, McGregor was careful to avoid neatly explaining his characters' histories. Instead he drops hints: post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, broken homes, but without suggesting that this is a simple case of cause and effect.
"One of the things that first got me interested in writing about this context was that my wife works with homeless people and homeless people with mental health difficulties. She doesn't talk about it all that much, but the little that she did say made me realise how complicated all these people's stories are, how complicated their backgrounds are, and the possible ways out of these situations are very complicated.
"I wanted to put some of that complexity across. All their stories are different; their situations are individual. It's not as simple as saying, 'society has let down these people'. It's almost about respecting people, to be able to say that some have made bad choices in their lives. In the book, Robert has essentially drunk himself to death and although his experiences in the Falklands War has contributed to that, and the fact that his wife left him contributed to that, he still has decided to carry on drinking every day for years and years. It's not necessarily his fault, but these are the choices that he has made."
Although his wife was a useful point of contact, McGregor interviewed dozens of people to get the background of the story correct.
"I spoke to people who had lived on the streets and been heroin addicts. But I was mainly speaking to them about the logistics of it and the vocabulary of it rather than their own personal experiences because I wanted to imagine the characters. I also spoke to GPs, nurses, drugs workers and housing workers to get a broader perspective. I was interested in getting the factual details right – how much heroin costs, where you get it, how you inject it and what that experience feels like. All the little stuff, rather than any individual's life story."