John Niven is a virtuoso prose writer. Lauded most of all for his novel, Kill Your Friends, he has made a career as an A & R man in the music industry, as a novelist, and as a scriptwriter. He is the Irvine boy made good.
His brother died by suicide when left unattended in hospital. This book is an unpicking of that event and a recognition of his brother’s life in Irvine. Although there are grim aspects to this avoidable death, it goes along with a raucous, full on energy. At times, we are are as near to the literary speakers as we can get.
John, the elder brother, sketches out his life in music. The high point of which, in both senses, is his meeting with Joe Strummer of The Clash in the darker, hiding place of The Groucho Club. He throws demo tapes of Muse and Coldplay into the bin. His one hit wonder is just that. Wonderwall it is and it isn’t. This part of the story is self deprecating and at times comical. His rise to LA script writing roles is played down as are the trappings of the new lifestyle – the Merc, the transatlanticism, and the world of the South East, more than a country away from Ayrshire’s poverty and the life of his brother.
John’s story alternates with that of his brother. John is academically brilliant, Shades is not. They seem to have been typecast from childhood. One on the edges of employment, one continuously busy, one mobile, one fixed. One of the clearest demarcations is speech. Demotic, West Coast of Scotland speech from Shades, stands alongside the Standard English of John Niven, language that tingles with life even amongst death:
“We are gathered again in the family room of the ICU (the dust-furred plastic flowers, the pastel prints, the magazines: a royal in a jungle setting, a breakfast TV presenter’s anthracite kitchen) as the doctor will explain what will happen in the morning.” it is as if John is speaking to his congregation.
And there is Gary/Shades trainspotting his way through the language with a few expletives along the tracks:
“YA DAFT WEE COW!” Gary explodes. “ AH NEED THAT MONEY NOW!”
The narrative has its own ascents and descents. Gary laughs at his brother’s musical decay, with Indie subsumed by the pulsing beats of Acid House. Gary accompanies the Acid House scene as a middle ranking supplier. His friends (?) shady and unknown, lurk at his funeral.
At the end of the memoir, there are pages of virtuoso writing as John enters Gary’s brain and lives through his death. It breathes empathy:
“You find you can remember everything. You’re looking up at the moon, through a window, you’re safe and warm, all bundled up, someone’s holding you, and John’s there, right next to you… [and your father]. he is huge and you are tiny as his smell envelops you – Swarfega and Embassy Regal and Old Spice and grouse that was Famous.”
If you enjoy reading about youth, both doomed and miraculous, this book takes you through two lives with care. If only John could have been the paramedic in the ambulance. Perhaps the book is a way of saving his brother.
“I can hear the tom- toms pounding up as they come to join it, the bass beginning to throb, and then all of us are leaping into the air as as the power chords and snare crash in together. Did Joe (Strummer) see any of us that night? Did he see our faces bathed in the lighting, our eyes blown open in wonder, mouths open, soaked to the skin, all of us as alive as it was possible to be?”
The song is “Somebody Got Murdered.” The literal and the symbolic fuse together in this prose memorial.
Any Cop?: This a deep book, unfathomable in its intensities.
Richard Clegg
Bookmunch 