Darren McGarvey, who this week won the Orwell book prize for Poverty Safari, his memoir of growing up in a tough part of Glasgow with an alcoholic, drug-abusing mother, is a little embarrassed by the chair of judges Andrew Adonis comparing his work to George Orwell’s. “I misread his quote and thought it said ‘It’s not up to the Orwell standard’, and I thought, ‘That’s fair enough.’ And then I read it again and realised it said it is, and I thought: ‘That’s really nice but I’m not going to buy into that idea.’ I’ve got so long to go and a writer could live five lifetimes and not match Orwell.”
It’s a pleasingly self-deprecating beginning to our post-prize conversation, and demonstrates several things that are immediately apparent about the 34-year-old McGarvey: his honesty and openness; his realisation that every conclusion he has reached so far is provisional; and a kind of qualified modesty. He knows what he has achieved is remarkable – a career in rap music under the name Loki, an increasingly influential role as a pundit in the press and on TV, now a prize-winning book. But he also realises the road to Wigan Pier is a long one.
His book is searing, and some of his recollections unbearable. His drunken mother coming after him with a carving knife when he was five – stopped only by a last-minute intervention by his father. Her setting fire to their furniture in the garden, trying to dig up the family pet they had just buried after it was run over, and openly injecting drugs. It is Trainspotting – a film he can’t bear to watch because, for him, it feels like a documentary – and then some. But the real surprise is that the misery memoir is a disguise for a much more complex book. In the book he calls it a “Trojan horse” to draw the reader in, because what he really wants to say is that the cycle of abuse and addiction can be broken. He’s the living proof of that.
Five years ago, McGarvey was an angry young man; a victim of the endemic poverty that afflicted large parts of working-class Glasgow. He had also been an addict for a decade – drink, drugs, junk food, the usual products of an impossibly stressful childhood – and was seeing a psychologist to try to control his anger. He had always wanted to write, and his rap music and blogs were starting to get a following. Around the time of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 he emerged as a powerful pro-independence voice. But today he says there was too much vituperation in his words.
“I was coming out of a drink problem. I was really idealistic, morally sure, but also delusional and naive. I hadn’t quite understood that social media is a public square as well as a megaphone.” It was also an attempt at catharsis. “There was no end goal to get a record deal or a book deal. I had to learn to express what I was compelled to communicate. All the things I learned to do were a by-product of this need to express the social inequality that I was experiencing and seeing in Glasgow.”
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
