Book review: Poverty Safari by Darren McGarvey

Darren McGarvey grew up in Pollok, on the south-western edge of Glasgow, and became known first as a rapper under the name Loki and then as a columnist and broadcaster. Poverty Safari, out from Luath Press this week, is his first book. Its subtitle promises to explain the anger of Britain’s underclass. That is a large claim, and the book is at its best when it sets the claim aside and simply tells the reader what happened.

Where it started

The title comes from a row at the start of 2016. The artist Ellie Harrison received £15,000 from Creative Scotland for The Glasgow Effect, a project in which she would not leave the city for a year. The name borrows the public health term for Glasgow’s unexplained excess of early deaths, and many people in the poorer parts of the city found the whole idea insulting. McGarvey was among the loudest, and it was he who called it a poverty safari. Later he met Harrison, decided he had misjudged her, and said so in public. That movement from certainty to second thoughts turns out to be the shape of the whole book.

The memoir

The early chapters follow a childhood in a home shaped by his mother’s drinking and violence, teenage years of fear passed off as bravado, and his own slide into alcohol and drugs. He writes well about stress as something that settles in the body and steers behaviour long before anyone makes a conscious choice, and about the way a child raised in chaos learns to read every room for danger. None of it is told to win sympathy. The prose is plain and often funny, and he is hard on himself in a way that earns him the right to be hard on others later.

The account of getting sober is the best thing here. Recovery is not offered as a prize for good character. It is daily work, done with help from people and services he had spent years sneering at, and he is honest about how galling that was.

The argument

Later chapters turn outward, and this is where readers will split. McGarvey is scathing about what he calls the poverty industry: the funded projects, consultations and professionals who speak on behalf of poor communities and, in his telling, rarely hand any power over. He is just as sharp about a left that, as he sees it, talks about structures and never about behaviour, because personal responsibility sounds like a Tory phrase. His case is that both matter at once. Low pay, bad housing and insecure work shape lives, and the people living those lives can still change some things, and telling them otherwise leaves them nothing to do but wait.

For anyone working in community development this is uncomfortable reading, and it is not always fair. The funded sector he attacks has been cut hard since 2010, and plenty of the people working in it grew up on the same streets he did. A reader who knows the sector will think of local organisations that do hand over control, and the book gives them little room.

Still, the critique lands where it counts. Anyone who has sat through a consultation built to confirm a decision already taken will recognise the scene. His insistence that a neighbourhood’s anger is information to act on, not a communications problem to manage, deserves attention from councils and funders.

Verdict

Poverty Safari is uneven. The personal chapters are exceptional; the programme for change is thinner, closer to a mood than a plan. But few books about poverty in Scotland are written from inside it, and fewer still by a writer willing to show exactly where he got things wrong. It should be read by the people it criticises. Most of them will be annoyed by it, which is part of the point.

Since then: Poverty Safari won the Orwell Prize for books in 2018.