The death of Margaret Thatcher has put wind in the sails of Maggie and Me, but Damian Barr's memoir would have managed perfectly well on its own. This memoir of deprivation and survival is shrewdly constructed and written with a winning dry humour.
Barr's starting point is the night in October 1984 when Mrs Thatcher's escape from the bombs planted in her Brighton hotel dominated the television news ("this blonde woman rises from rubble again and again like a Cyberman off Dr Who"). It was the first night that Barr, then aged eight, spent in an unfamiliar flat after his mother left the marital home to live with her boyfriend Logan.
Barr's mother was five foot nothing, his adored father "six foot everything", not exactly a New Man but still the only dad in the village who would push a pram. He worked at the Ravenscraig steel works, making the sun set twice every night, as young Damian understood it, when he emptied the furnaces at the end of a shift, sending a "bigger brighter cleaner light" through the porridge-coloured curtains of Damian's new home.
In his acknowledgements Barr describes the slow accumulation of manuscript pages, and sees his breakthrough in finding his way through as the need to remember rather than imagine. It's not memory, though, that supplies the Dylan Thomas note in this evocation of his father: "My dad is always minerals. The whites of his eyes and his smiling falsers sparkle out from the coal-black rest of him."
Barr's father worked in just the sort of heavy industry that was on the way out in the Thatcher years, while Damian and his mother ended up living as part of a ramshackle extended family dependent on benefits, petty crime and drink. They seem to personify respectively the respectable and unrespectable poor, at a time when the government was making poverty itself unrespectable (though difficult to avoid in a place like North Lanarkshire).
The schoolboy Damian's choice of another path wasn't necessarily high-minded. For a tall asthmatic boy aware of his gayness, and not particularly adept at hiding it, schools and libraries were natural places of refuge. Tweaking Blanche Dubois's celebrated line, he says he has always depended "on the kindness of teachers". Even the Scripture Union had its value, more on account of the absence of bullies than the presence of Jesus.
Barr specialises in the understated effects of double-take. When, still a schoolboy, he answers a small ad and meets his first potential partner, the man's car smells of "something that isn't Lynx". And how's this for an account of Scottish funeral manners – "All the women are crying and the headstones are more expressive than the men." With a statement such as "I'm not naturally clumsy but I've learnt to be", the implication is grimmer. Logan was brutally abusive, and when Damian's mother was hospitalised with a cerebral haemorrhage his opportunities were unlimited. Injuries during PE or on the sports field could camouflage other marks. As for why Damian protected his abuser, Logan threatened to give his little sister Teenie the same treatment if he said a word to anyone, a threat that was effective even though Damian could see that tomboyish Teenie was no natural victim. She would never be caught in the same trap as her brother. Logan hit her just the once. She kicked his shins. He laughed and learned his lesson.
Abuse isn't dwelt on, but dealt with almost lightly ("and that's the last of my baby teeth"). Logan imposes an arbitrary and inconsistent discipline: "Just when I think I've mastered eating – no clanking cutlery, no seconds, no complaining of feeling hungry – I'll chew the wrong way and …" Those three dots used to be the code that signified a sex scene, now it's a scene of abuse.
Damian's father took up with Mary, auxiliary nurse by day, country singer by night, whose taste in bright clothing earned her the nickname Mary the Canary. After a short-lived charm offensive she set herself against the children and did all she could to block access to their father. Even so, there must have been times when communication was easier than Barr lets on, if Mary helped him dress up as Alexis Colby from Dynasty – Joan Collins – for a school sponsored walk. He came to school fully made up, changing at lunchtime into a lacy black two-piece suit with pencil skirt and shoulder pads to totter round the reservoir at Strathclyde Park.
A better refuge even than the giftshop of the Lourdes Grotto at Carfin was the home of Damian's schoolfriend Heather. It was the first "bought hoose" he'd ever been in ("I thought only the council built houses"). Here he sampled such exotica as garlic chicken – he had thought garlic only came on bread, and then only on telly. There was even a dining table for formal occasions ("I stroke it like my dad would a shiny new BMW"). Chastely he and Heather play the roles of boyfriend and girlfriend, with Damian feeling guilty that he is misleading her, though it suits her to be respectably out of circulation. When the two of them lead their school team to the national finals of the Young Consumer of the Year Quiz it's a glimpse of the promised land for him, since the finals are held in Brighton. He barely has time to see young men queueing outside a nightclub, some of them blatantly holding hands, before he's back on the train home, with nothing to show for it except a Tales of the City video.
Heather doesn't come to Damian's house, or she in her turn would witness exotic habits of consumption. He lives in the centre of the Buckfast Triangle, the 10-mile area of western Scotland where 90% of "Buckie" is sold and where "countless men disappear" – Buckie the cheap strong caffeinated red wine, made for their own obscure reasons by Benedictine monks in Devon. Buckie isn't quite Proust's madeleine, but Damian's mother was prescribed it when pregnant, to build her up, so it's almost a memory from the womb. "When vomited up – as it always is – it hangs in glossy molasses-like strings, reeking like turpentine, that you've got to pull from your mouth." His mother's lover passes out, white T-shirt stained with black drool, not just a trickle of it but (typically adroit pop-culture reference) "thick sticky strands like the stuff that comes out the fat Baron in Dune".
Each chapter of Maggie and Me has an epigraph from Margaret Thatcher, such as "I am extraordinarily patient … provided I get my own way in the end." JK Rowling did something similar in The Casual Vacancy, using the seventh edition of Charles Arnold-Baker's Local Council Administration. It's a neat formal device, until near the end of the book when Barr leans too hard on it. An indictment of Thatcher's negative achievements ends with "You also saved my life … You were different, like me, and you had to fight to be yourself."
In what way "like"? The temptation to go for a big finish and a direct statement squanders a lot of the subtlety that precedes it. To claim Thatcher in a one-line paragraph as "My other mother" is a hollow shock effect. As his first mother paid him less and less attention as time went on, and delivered him up unwittingly to abuse, there should be some irony clinging to Thatcher as her deputy, but it's hard to spot.
Elsewhere Barr's control of irony has been very sharp, perhaps most of all when he's treating irony itself – indispensable adolescent ketchup splodged freely over every dish – back when he was annotating his copy of The Catcher in the Rye: "'I feel sorry for Holden. He is just SUCH a damaged individual,' I write at the end of chapter ten, my biro exhausted by empathy."
In the final pages there isn't just a forced Thatcherism but something alarmingly close to on-your-bike Tebbitry. "Be strong, Maggie told us all. Get educated. Get away. That's what she said. I listened. Heather listened. Mark didn't." The ersatz urgency of those short tabloid sentences seems imported from a smaller, weaker book.
Mark was Damian's best friend at school, at odds with his gayness, partly because by virtue of being handsome and sporty he had the option of fitting in, though at a cost. He was understandably more conflicted about the need to "get away". There will always be gay people for whom all roads lead to Brighton (where Barr now lives), or San Francisco. Others don't see uprooting in such positive terms. In that sense, if no other, the desolation of Barr's family life may have been an advantage, making his choices clear.
Barr seemed to understand this when he gave an angry address at Mark's funeral (after he had finally succeeded in killing himself), blaming the bigots who had made his life impossible. It's a shame that this admirable reluctance to blame the victim doesn't survive to the end of the book, and the brassy finale it would be better without.
