What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.
Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless exercise of his talents offered his escape. He expanded his exploration of how brutality can take hold in his novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa. Now he returns to Scotland in this moving meditation on art, love and home.
In Barr’s telling, the two Roberts meet on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art – scholarship boys drawn together, reluctantly on Robert’s part and enthusiastically on Bobby’s. They move into the attic of the wealthy socialist Mrs Cranston (“Politics is everyone’s thing, whether we like it or not,” she reprimands their tutor) and live on Bobby’s stews and a love that moves rapidly from seeming impossible to feeling predestined, driven by Bobby’s courage in seeking out other homosexual friends and allies on the fringes of Glasgow life. They’re divided by war, when Robert fights and the asthmatic Bobby doesn’t, and then become celebrated figures in bohemian London, exhibiting at the Lefevre gallery and mingling in Soho with Francis Bacon and Peter Watson (Barr has Robert driving an ambulance, just about plausibly, with Bacon).
Over the years, it’s common for couples to divide not just household tasks but talents and traits between them, so that each grows into their differences from the other. Barr is very astute on the ways that the two Roberts deplete as well as enhance each other. There’s charm in their differences: Bobby’s face is a sun, Robert’s a half moon; Bobby cries easily while Robert holds his feelings in. But more disturbingly, they divide their art too, so that Bobby paints still lifes while Robert paints people, and Bobby comes to feel that he would betray his lover if he changed this. “What started out as a joke is becoming a contract that Bobby doesn’t remember signing.” It’s not surprising that Robert, with his more fragile ego and his more ruthless commitment to work, becomes the more successful one, and that Bobby declines as Robert flourishes, until Robert, dependent always on Bobby’s resourcefulness and bonhomie, begins to decline as well. Barr’s memoir all too vividly described his mother’s drunken fights with her boyfriend. These memories must power the lurid incandescence of the brawls between the men as they drink away income and talent.
The arc of this tale is long: the book stretches from 1933 to 1959. Barr moves from the intense, intimate storytelling of the opening chapters to a travelogue that skates across place and time, and then narrates their final years by impressively imagining the letters that Bobby sends to old acquaintances begging for cash. There are moments when all this becomes unwieldy. I’d hope that a novelist with such considerable skill could do better than introducing lengthy backstory with “as the strap settles, he remembers what it took to get here, to this moment”. There are also sections where Robert remains shadowy compared with the livelier and more introspective Bobby – but it’s true of many couples in life that one is less knowable than the other. And it was remarkable how much I did care about the men’s relationship throughout, finding the prospect of their splitting up as unthinkable as they do, however unlivable their life together becomes. Barr’s care for the two Roberts is palpable. The narrator is drawn into their erotic force field, almost as if there are three people in this couple (as it happens, actual threesomes are frequent occurrences).
“Never forget where you come fae,” Bobby’s Aunt Maggie tells him as she sends him out to conquer the world. Barr dramatises the double-edged complexity of this. Insofar as it’s Barr’s own return home, this novel is a kind of love letter to Scotland – from the Ayrshire hills where the men lie “painting together, curled like commas, naked in the nest they’ve rolled in the high golden grass”, to Glasgow’s Mackintosh building, with its huge panes of glass that “bounce the north light like sails catching a wind”. But it’s a love letter that encodes diagnosis and disaster. Both Roberts flourish in London as Scottish artists, with Scottish subjects and Scottish party pieces. Yet they’re unwelcome when they make a catastrophic trip home. Barr mingles comedy and tragedy with wonderful fluidity, showing that it’s their inability to forget where they’re from and truly find a home elsewhere that destroys them, in the end.
• Lara Feigel is the author of Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with DH Lawrence (Bloomsbury). The Two Roberts by Damian Barr is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
