Abnormal, psychotic, chaotic reading: "Stuart: A Life Backwards" by Alexander Masters

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.

So do we find out what made Stuart what he is? But hang on a minute, what is he? A long quote, but it'll give you an idea:

There are numerous types of homeless person: 

There are those who were doing all right beforehand, but have suffered a temporary setback because their wife has run off with another man (or, surprisingly often, another woman). Their business may have collapsed. Their daughter has been killed in a car crash. Or both. Self-confidence is their main problem and, if the professionals can get hold of them in the first few months, they'll be back at work or at least in settled, long-term accommodation within a year or two. 

Right at the bottom of this abnormal heap are the people such as Stuart, the 'chaotic' homeless. The chaotic ('kai-yo-ic', as Stuart calls them, drawing out the syllables around his tongue like chewing gum) are beyond repair. When Stuart was first discovered, Kaspar Hauser-like, crouched on the lowest subterranean floor of a multi-storey car park, the regular homeless wanted nothing to do with him. They called him 'Knife Man Dan' and 'that mad bastard on Level D'. 

What unites the chaotic is the confusion of their days. Cause and effect are not connected in the usual way. Beyond their own governance, let alone within grasps of ours, they are constantly on the brink of raring up or breaking down. Charity staff fuss especially hard over these people because they are the worst face of homelessness and, when not the most hateful, the most pitiable extremity of street life. 

Two years ago, Stuart was living out of skips. When the city outreach workers discovered him, he was a polydrug-addicted, alcoholic, 'Jekyll and Hyde' personality with delusional paranoia and a fondness for what he called 'little strips of silver' - knives to you and me. 

He still is. 

But something remarkable has happened since then: he is not quite so much of a drug-addicted nightmare. It is highly unusual, suspicious even. All chaotic people have good and bad periods, but Stuart genuinely appears to have turned over a new leaf. He has separated himself from the street community, got himself on to the council housing list, started a methadone programme to get off heroin, renegotiated his court fines and begun paying fortnightly instalments, bought himself a discount computer. None of this is normal. Many of Stuart's old friends would rather die than take a shower and pay debts, and quite a few do: overdose, liver or kidney failure and hypothermia. Rough sleepers have a life expectancy of forty-two years. They are thirty-five times more likely to commit suicide than the rest of the population. In the great bureaucracy of the police and social support services, everyone is patting their backs at Stuart's extraordinary return from this medieval existence towards respectability and secretly waiting for him to grab the nearest meat hook and run amok. 

Furthermore, not only has Stuart enough undestroyed brain cells left to describe what such life is like, but he can pinpoint, almost to the hour - between 4 and 5pm, one weekday in early summer, when he was twelve - the symbolic moment when he made the change from (in his mother's words) a "real happy-go-lucky little boy", always "the considerate, very considerate" one of her two children, into the nightmare Clockwork Orange figure of the last two decades. If his own life were not still so disorderly, he could make good money explaining to parents what makes children turn into authority-despising delinquents.

The word "chaotic" is used a lot to describe Stuart and his like. I don't think it's a technical term, but rather Masters' own word to describe the kind of person who is seemingly hard-wired to act in self-destructive, anti-social ways. It also pinpoints an important aspect of Stuart - you can't pin him down, you can't "explain" why he is this way, however tempting it is (including for Masters) to read discoveries about Stuart's early life as the source of his troubles.

The discoveries are nonetheless shocking. In case you decide to read the book, I won't "spoil" the revelations (though that seems the wrong word - these are not mere plot points), but it would indeed be extraordinary if anyone could experience what Stuart experienced and remain unchanged. However, it is a strength of this book that it steadfastly refuses to go down the avenue of straightforward - or indeed even complicated - explanations. Stuart himself, frequently, as I said, remarkably lucid, also refuses what he sees as a too neat, reductive decoding of how he is: Why should you get to put reasons on it when I've fucking lived it and still can't? The pursuit of tidy cause and effect, we understand reading this book, is both futile and perhaps also an impediment to real understanding.

This comes across not only intellectually, but also emotionally. For all that the relationship between writer and subject becomes one of confidence, friendship even, Stuart remains a truly appalling individual in many ways. Masters is often exasperated, shocked and even fearful of the "mad bastard" he has been crazy enough to let into his life. At times, he wishes never to see him again, sincerely believes the criminal justice system has been too lenient with him and awaits in dread the news of the next incident of random violence or self-harm. Masters may be the perfect candidate for the bleeding heart liberal type, but if he were heading that way, Stuart cures him. Some people, it seems, are largely beyond help.

Which doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped. The book paints another picture, beyond that of the individuals in question, that of the "system": the hostels, the social workers, the police, the schools, the prisons, the doctors, the teachers, the volunteers... On the whole, excepting the prisons and the occasionally seriously rotten apple, the portrait of the system is broadly sympathetic. To be frank, when confronted with people like Stuart, you have to be a bit of a saint to go into work at all, and you can even sympathise with some fairly heavy-handed police tactics up against a loon wielding a twelve inch knife holding his own son as a hostage.

But for all that, Stuart is not only the sum of his misdeeds, and the misdeeds of others. He is also a lively-minded and intelligent man, with a surprising capacity for self-awareness, a quick wit and sympathy for others. His life is worth something, and certainly worth the telling. This book, besides telling the story of Stuart, also tells the story of a mainly invisible British underclass. It is a a shocking story, but an important one to tell. And one that not only Alexander Masters, but also Stuart Shorter, tells well. Shame, as we learn at the very beginning of the book, that Stuart did not get to see it before he stepped in front of the 11.15 London to King's Lynn train.

So, Neil, what did I think of that? Astounding, readable, important - a great and unusual book.