Bloomsbury £14.99 pp343

There’s a shock in the opening sentence of Jon McGregor’s second novel: “Eleanor was in the kitchen when he got back from her mother’s funeral, baking.” It’s not a big bang: it’s McGregor’s style to be soft-spoken. But that unexpected pronoun delivers an electrical jolt. “Her” mother’s funeral — so why is it only he who attended?

Thereby hangs a tale stretching back and forth through three generations. David Carter, the central character, is a museum curator who believes history can be encapsulated in assemblages of bits and bobs. As a child growing up in 1950s Coventry he collects oddments picked up on its bombsites-turned-building-sites. As an adult, he devotes himself to archives and conservation work, time lines and family trees. But from the age of 22, when a friend blurts out that David is adopted, he struggles to reconcile himself to the fact that his own antecedents are a blank.

This is a novel full of mothers — all of them unsatisfactory. There is Ivy, the matriarch of a family of Aberdeen seamen, a woman exhausted by the rigours of her life, who vents her anger in violent attacks on her daughters, the youngest of whom, Eleanor, becomes David’s wife. There is Julia, flamboyantly generous to friends but unable to establish any kind of relationship with her sullen son, born of a brief marriage contracted on the brink of war. There is Dorothy, who has done everything a mother could do for David, but who didn’t give birth to him. There is “Mary Friel”, the name on the hospital record that is the only clue to the identity of David’s biological mother. And there is the woman whom he tracks down to a village in Donegal in the hope that their meeting will provide him with the public he has always craved for the exhibition of his own life.

That imagined exhibition gives the book its structure. Each chapter is a recollection prompted by an object: a pair of child’s gloves, a birth certificate, a pill bottle. The device both mimics David’s faith in the power of mementoes to evoke memories, and wittily mocks it. There is so much more in McGregor’s subtly nuanced, intensely observant narrative than could possibly be conveyed by the display of these inert objects. In the end, the compulsion to store and retrieve that has been David’s defining characteristic and the novel’s shaping principle is shrugged off, as character and author turn, with the modest economy of manner typical of both of them, towards direct experience, and towards love.

McGregor’s prose is contained, its prevalent tone providing a fine foil for the moments when he lets his talent loose. David, in the first flush of love, tries to describe Eleanor and suddenly McGregor’s meticulous syntax melts into a hot flood of words. In scenes between David, his colleague and her jealous husband charges of eroticism or violence speed up the measure of McGregor’s sentences, sending them hurtling along in flurries of tight, short clauses. This is a decorous novel that rises on occasion to ardour, an intimate tale with penetrating things to say about the wider history of 20th-century Britain, about displacement and change, and about how a loss of continuity can be a gain in freedom.

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