An extraordinary book, put in my hands by my most literary friend, with the admonition: "see what you think of that". Well, what do I think of that?
But first, what is it? A biography, and the story of writing a biography. Alexander Masters is a PhD student, who - quite how we are not sure - has agreed with one Stuart Shorter, multi-convicted, long-term homeless drug-abuser, prone to outbursts of psychotic violence and surpassing flights of insight and eloquence, to write his life story.
The first attempt goes badly. Or in Stuart's words, it's bollocks boring. He has other ideas:
He wants jokes, yarns, humour. He doesn't admire "academic quotes" and background research. "Nah, Alexander, you gotta start again. You gotta do better than this."
He's after a bestseller, "like what Tom Clancy writes.
"But you are not an assassin trying to frazzle the president with anthrax bombs," I point out. You are an ex-homeless, ex-junkie psychopath, I do not add.
Stuart phrases it another way, then: "Something what people will read."
Somehow they come to the conclusion that Masters will write Stuart's life in reverse, starting with his apparently quite stable present, working back through the homelessness, the drugs, the prison terms, the violence, the abuse, back to before things went wrong. As we go back in Stuart's life, we go forward in the story of its writing, Alexander and Stuart camped out together in front of the Home Office with half of London's homeless, no-hopers and weirdoes to protest against the wrongful conviction of two managers of a homeless shelter; Stuart "losing it" and trashing Alexander's flat; Stuart showing Alexander where the dossers shoot up; Stuart explaining the brutal and bizarre bye-laws of prison, and so on. We trace the writing of the biography as the reverse biography reveals itself and we dig into Stuart's past.
