‘‘We Wave And Call’’(2012)

John Mc Gregor

1. Biography:
John McGregor was born in Bermuda in 1976. He moved with his family to England and
spent his childhood in Norwich and Thetford, Norfolk, later studying at Bradford University
for a degree in Media Technology and Production. He started writing seriously during his
final year at University, contributing a series entitled 'Cinema 100' to the anthology Five
Uneasy Pieces . He has had short fiction published by several magazines, including Granta
magazine. He has been runner-up in the BBC National Short Story Competition twice, in
2010 and 2011.
He left Bradford for Sheffield, then Nottingham, taking a series of shift-jobs to support
his writing, and wrote his first novel, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), in
Nottingham, while living on a narrow boat. His novel has received much press attention, as
he was the youngest writer and only first novelist on the long list for the 2002 Man Booker
Prize. The Sunday Times named it a ‘‘triumphant prose-poem of ordinariness, celebrating
the miraculousness of the everyday’’. It went on to win the Betty Trask Prize and the
Somerset Maugham Award and to be shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize
(Eurasia Region, Best First Book) and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. In
2010, Jon McGregor received an honorary doctorate from the University of Nottingham, and
was made an honorary lecturer in their School of English Studies. He lives in Nottingham
with his wife and two children.

2. Summary:
In We wave and call a young man gets into trouble whilst swimming alone on an exotic
beach holiday with friends and the mood goes from sunny and relaxed to confusion and fear.

3. Analysis:
A. Characters:
There are no named characters in the story but simply a nameless narrator.
B. The setting:
The story takes place in an exotic beach while the narrator was enjoying his holiday with
his friends.
C. Themes:
1. The anonymity of modern urban relations:
McGregor has garnered a reputation for a quiet but lyrical narrative style, and for seeking out the
surprises, the delights, and the beauty and sometimes the less pleasant in the heart of the
everyday world that surrounds us. The action takes place on a single day, in a wonderful beach
where the narrator is enjoying his holiday. Thus, the beach and many of the characters remain
un-named, hinting at one of McGregor’s key themes for the story: the anonymity of modern
urban relations, the way that people can live next door to each other for years without knowing
anything about their neighbours. From early on, the reader is made aware that something out of
the ordinary takes place on this particular day, and the increasingly ominous foreshadow of this
unknown event hangs over the story as a wealth of conversations, actions, observations and
unspoken thoughts unfolds. McGregor demands some effort on the reader’s part to grapple with
this nameless cast and fragmented narrative, so he plays with the expectations he himself has
created. It is up to the reader to draw his conclusions:

And sometimes it happens like this: a young man lying face down in the ocean,
his limbs hanging loosely beneath him, a motorboat droning slowly across the
bay, his body moving in long, slow ripples with each passing shallow wave, the
water moving softly across his skin, muffled shouts carrying out across the water,
and the electric crackle of waves sliding up against the rocks and birds in the trees
and the body of a young man lying in the ocean, face down and breathlessly
still.(26)

This is the first paragraph and indeed the first sentence of Jon McGregor’s ‘‘We Wave And
Call’’. It is a sentence/paragraph that does a number of things. First, it suggests calm, distance,
detachment. The one long sentence, composed of a series of clauses, each about the same length,
divided from the next by a comma, evokes ‘each passing shallow wave’, waves which ripple
through the body of this young man ‘lying face down in the ocean, his limbs hanging loosely
beneath him’. There is presence – the young man – but absence too; where is everyone else?
There is a motorboat somewhere in the distance. It drones slowly, suggesting no urgency, so it is
not coming to him. There are muffled shouts, so they are some distance away. The only distinct
noise comes from birds in the trees. But if the young man is face down in the water, how does he
know that the muffled shouts and birdsong are happening are there? These are a grace-note from
the author to the reader.

Finally, the young man is ‘face down and breathlessly still’. We are surely supposed to
think he must have drowned. The motionlessness, the drifting, the movement up and down in
time to the waves, the twitter of the birds to suggest that, callously, indifferently, life goes on.
And, most importantly, that ‘breathlessly’. I suspect the abnormal length of the sentence is also
supposed to suggest that he has drowned, though if that is so, I think it’s undermined by the fact
that commas are intended as mental and physical breathing pauses. But let’s for now assume that
we are supposed to assume that he has drowned.

2. Style:

It is undeniably a well-constructed story as everything links together. It’s been

done competently, nothing missed, nothing left loose, not even that ‘open ending’.The
writer uses first the first person narrator and then shifts to use the second-person narrative
viewpoint, it is as though the author doesn’t trust the reader to draw the right conclusions
without controlling every moment of the encounter between reader and prose.
3. Conclusion:

The story is then a competent but also crude and unsubtle. It is a story that does
the reading for the reader.