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STUART: A LIFE BACKWARDS

Alexander Masters, Fourth Estate

ISBN 0007200366, £12.99

STAR RATING 5/5

"I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'Somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting," writes the unreliable fictional narrator Mr Charles Pooter, a city clerk, in the introduction to George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody, first published in 1892. Indeed, Mr Pooter, indeed, writes Graham Hopkins.

One hundred and thirteen years later we have a biography of Stuart Shorter - a nobody: an ex-homeless, ex-junkie, hostage-taking, campaigning, abuse-surviving, care leaving, knife-wielding, psychotic, (and now) dead nobody. But a nobody, nonetheless.

It is also written by a nobody, but one who is clearly destined to become somebody (although Stuart has him marked as "a middle class scum ponce, if you want to be honest about it, Alexander").

Masters' first book is a neatly written, well judged, engaging and at times funny account of Stuart - a one-man social exclusion zone, a nobody's nobody.

However, the book is almost as much about the frustrations, highs and bafflements of biography writing and the author-subject relationship as it is of the remarkable man he met during the campaign to free the Cambridge Two (charity workers Ruth Wyner and John Brock) imprisoned for "allowing" some people to exchange drugs secretly at their day centre. Indeed, Stuart dismisses two years of research and writing as "bollocks boring" sending Masters back to the drawing board (well, he is an illustrator as well) in his reclusive writer's garret.


The book exposes freely and clinically how rubbish society is at dealing with or even coping with unconventional people such as Stuart. He was as much baffled by society as society was by him. They just weren't made for each other - unlike Masters and biography.
Although he loses his way a bit with Stuart's early life, this is a fine debut. Indeed, it's anything but bollocks boring.