A Chernobyl of the soul
Niven salvages a complete person from the wreckage of his brother’s life story in this tender memoir
Iget the call just after 7am,’ John Niven begins. ‘The call part of me has been expecting for most of my adult life.’ A suicide attempt has left his brother in a coma. It is the summer of 2010 and Niven is a successful author, living in London, with a young family. Gary, meanwhile, is living a spliff-to-mouth existence in their home town of Irvine, some 50km southwest of Glasgow, a middle-aged ex-convict with mental and physical troubles.
Niven arrives at North Ayrshire District Hospital to find their younger sister, Linda, sitting at Gary’s bedside with their mother. ‘Right away I sense a nervousness, a tension fairly crackling off the staff,’ writes Niven. ‘My brother had, after all, managed to hang himself in their care.’ Having arrived by ambulance suffering from suicidal ideation, Gary was left alone in a small room. There he made a noose out of his jumper and looped it over a door.
In a see-saw structure, Niven alternates chapters chronicling the siblings’ early years as the children of the manager of Irvine’s grand shopping mall, with sections detailing events at the hospital as Gary’s death draws closer.
Niven recalls how, even as a child, Gary stretched the family’s patience. His father took his belt to him. His grandmother dismissed him as a ‘bad wee stick’. Gary lives up to his reputation. There are truancies, fights, thefts, debts, drugs and, eventually, a prison sentence for dealing ecstasy.
Niven, who worked for a record company in the late 1990s, lets music shape the story of their adolescence. These passages are contrasted with the awful aftermath of the suicide, as Niven finds police tape on the front door of Gary’s house, a pistol in his bedside table and a stack of final demands. There is another noose dangling in the garage.
A rich vein of coal-black humour runs through this book. Standing outside the hospital, John tells Linda that even if Gary came out of the coma, it is likely he will have severe brain damage. ‘A beat before Linda says, with perfect timing, “How will we know?” I have never loved my sister more than at that moment.’
In its way, O Brother is a detective story: a whydunnit rather than a whodunnit. And, like all good mysteries, there is a culprit. Well, several. Five years after Gary’s death, Niven successfully sues the hospital for negligence. But he also points the blame at himself: he could have cleared his brother’s debts, but he didn’t. Ultimately, he realises, trying to explain Gary’s end is a zero-sum game. Suicide triggers a ‘chain reaction of unanswered questions’ culminating in a ‘Chernobyl of the soul’. Niven describes a brother crippled by his limitations, an anger he would not or could not
contain, and the dangers of his surrounds: the poverty, drugs and crime. It is a sad picture. Yet Niven salvages a complete person from the wreckage of his brother’s biography. Here is a volatile character, but one possessed of great emotion and remorse. He is no longer just ‘a bad wee stick’.