When, 13 years ago, the phone rang at 7am at John Niven’s house, he knew it wasn’t good news. “It’s about your brother,” his then partner Helen told him, handing over the receiver. Niven found himself inwardly repeating a question uttered countless times by him and his parents: “Oh, Gary – what have you done now?”
Gary, who was 42, was in the intensive care unit of his local hospital in Irvine, Ayrshire. He had rung the emergency services in the early hours saying he was depressed and had been trying to kill himself. An ambulance crew arrived 14 minutes later and took him to hospital where he was triaged as non-urgent and put in a room by himself. While waiting for a doctor to arrive, Gary again attempted suicide. After being found unconscious, he was put in a medical coma from which he never woke up.
That Gary left no note meant that, for his family, there was “no neat conclusion. The final page of the book just got ripped out.” It is this absence of closure that led Niven to write O Brother, in which he tells Gary’s story and, by extension, his own. He makes no bones about his discomfort at the book’s personal nature: “As you embark on something like this … you are confronted with something like an identity parade of former selves. You want to reach back through the years and drag them down to the cells, where you will turn off the recording equipment and get busy with the rubber pipe and the rolled telephone book.” For him, a memoir amounts to “a forced confession”.
But what a confession it is: vivid, visceral, brilliantly funny in places, dispensing sharp punches to the gut in others. O Brother is essentially two memoirs rolled into one, with the narratives of young John and Gary gradually diverging until they are living entirely separate lives. The writing comes with a clear sense of time and place, with the siblings catching the tail-end of punk (Niven’s hero is the Clash’s Joe Strummer, whom he encounters more than once) and the rave years, most of which they spend “sleepless and bent on chemicals”.
But it is Niven’s recollections of their early childhood that are most poignant, providing glimpses of the chaos and heartbreak to come. We first meet Gary aged four as his mother is struggling to get him into a jumper. Having been rugby-tackled to the floor, Gary is bucking and writhing on the carpet, banging his legs and “screaming like a heretic on the rack”, as Niven, then seven, looks on. As Gary grows older and adopts the swaggering nickname Shades, what you might generously call a mischievous streak begins to have serious consequences. Noting that Gary could “start a fight in an empty house”, his father tries to beat the bad behaviour out of him, while his grandmother calls him “a bad wee stick”.
Niven’s own life isn’t exactly plain sailing. He moves to London and gets a job in the music industry where he earns megabucks, which he duly blows on drugs and flash cars. He gets married early and has a child, but neglects his family, instead embarking on a campaign of self-sabotage until he finally sees the error of his ways. Throughout all this, Gary lurches from one disaster to the next, from punch-ups and absent fatherhood to prison and bankruptcy.
Niven’s portrait is necessarily complex and contradictory: Gary is handsome, cruel, charismatic, unpredictable, chaotic, funny, exhausting. The author doesn’t hold back in interrogating his own sense of guilt and shame either, which are common feelings for the family of people who have killed themselves. Could he have done more to help Gary? Probably, though the outcome would probably have been the same. Did his death bring a sense of relief? It’s complicated. It’s with piercing sorrow that Niven reveals their final angry exchange, prompted by Gary’s shabby treatment of their younger sister, Linda. Niven left Gary a voice message instructing him to apologise, and, until then, “just fuck off”. These were his last words to his brother.
Niven’s novels, which include the savagely funny music industry satire Kill Your Friends and Straight White Male, about a drunken, fornicating scriptwriter, are unrelentingly scabrous in their depictions of flawed humanity. In O Brother, those sharp edges are softened, though the impact is no less fierce. While Niven’s trademark black humour and blistering language remain intact, there is added vulnerability, emotional candour and bottomless love. His account of his brother’s death and the “Chernobyl of the soul” that followed made me sob more than once, and I suspect it will do the same to you.
• 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.
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
