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.
Niven, the author of Kill Your Friends, probably the best and certainly the funniest novel ever written about the British music industry, examines the divergent trajectories of his life and that of his younger brother, Gary, or “Shades” as he was widely known – at least in Ayrshire.
The two grew up in modest circumstances in the Scottish west coast town of Irvine, which absorbed a fair amount of Glasgow’s overspill. A bookish child, Niven knew how to benefit from the support and praise of his parents, talents that Gary never developed. Wilful and afflicted by a short attention span, Gary was from an early age a veteran of corporal punishment at the intemperate hands of his father.
But no matter how harsh the beatings, they failed to reform Gary’s behaviour, serving instead only to toughen him. Niven did well at school, got to university and then entered the music business – first playing in a band and then becoming what he calls the “world’s worst” A&R man. Gary, who mixed periods of manual work with drug-dealing and a stint in prison, never left Irvine. He took his own life in 2010 at the age of 42.
Why one brother should be born with the social and intellectual skills to thrive, while the other could do little more than survive (and eventually was unable to do that) is a mystery that evolutionary psychology, or any other science, is a very long way from solving.
Niven brings a novelist’s powers of observation to the question, as he revisits moments in his and his brother’s childhood, youth, early adulthood and the stumbling transition to middle age, looking to make sense of how they came to be the people they were. It’s much more complex than a binary tale, because Niven himself is no stranger to some of the self-destructive urges and indifference to consequence that bedevilled his brother.
There is even a brief period in which Niven, having quit the music business but failing to make his mark as a novelist, seems to be on the skids, pilfering pocket money from his brother-in-law, while Gary, out of prison, makes an unlikely stab at a conventional life. But Niven’s talent, on impressive display here, comes to his rescue, while Gary simply can’t hack the mundane slog of keeping his head above water.
It’s as if genes, history, class, geography, education and all the overarching factors that shape our lives combine to leave Gary few options, and those that he does have he contrives to ruin. Yet for all the seeming inexorability of Gary’s decline, this is not a depressing book. In fact it’s often exuberant, laugh-out-loud funny, touching, sad and rueful, in the way that looking back with a wisdom achieved at a high price inevitably is.
In some respects Gary’s is not an unusual story. Rather it is Niven’s elevation into the secure and influential middle class that is conspicuous by its rarity. Readers familiar with Andrew O’Hagan’s novel Mayflies may pick up certain resonances in this book – the pair knew each other as teenagers, and shared a group of friends, several of whom are already dead.
Niven is alive to his good fortune and expensive tastes, mocking his own alienation from his beginnings. But he also pays testament to the other side of that equation, the crushing realities, savage humour and dead-end hedonism of the many people, like his brother, who are ill-equipped to escape the lives that society appears to have marked out for them.
O Brother by John Niven is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
