O Brother by John Niven review – a searing study of siblings who go separate ways

John Niven’s graduation day picture, with his parents. He studied English at the University of Glasgow. Photograph: John Niven

While hardly well trodden, the path from the provincial working class to metropolitan literary success is not exactly virgin territory. It’s the journey that in the 1950s and 1960s produced the new wave of writers such as Alan Sillitoe and David Storey, often referred to as “angry young men”.

That description rather did for the aspirant male working class that followed in its wake, reducing social mobility to cliche and ambition to a questionable form of masculinity. John Niven is not unaware of the pitfalls in telling this particular story, but in O Brother, his riotous and yet bracingly moving memoir, he doesn’t so much attempt to skirt around them as jump in with all his senses on red alert: a seasoned nose for trouble, an acute ear for comic dialogue and an unsparing eye for his own condescension.