Grief, sibling rivalry and the swinging sixties in Animal Magic: A Brother's Story

Andrew Barrow's latest book, his first for 15 years, is most peculiar and very good. As with his previous prize-winners, it hovers somewhere between autobiography and surrealism, full of the macabre characters, strange juxtapositions and obsessively recorded facts which are the hallmark of his writing.

Animal Magic is ostensibly the story of his younger brother, Jonathan, who was killed in a car crash with his fiancée at the age of 22. His funeral took place in the same church, the Brompton Oratory, on the same day that their wedding was meant to have happened. When Andrew is sorting through his brother's desk at the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather, where Jonathan was a copywriter, he finds the manuscript of a novel he'd completed in which, among other things, he'd prophesied his own death in a car accident.

Despite strenuous efforts, this novel, titled The Queue, never found a publisher but it exerted a mesmeric grip over Andrew, who interrogated it for clues to his dead brother's character, inner life and influences. This new volume is the product of all that speculation and brooding about Jonathan but it is so much more. It provides the reader with a brilliantly cranky first-hand account of the Swinging Sixties, of Andrew Barrow's personal demons and insecurities, of childhood in Lancashire, Wiltshire and living in Augustus John's former artist's studio in Tite Street, Chelsea.

Several celebrities, from Mick Jagger to decorator David Milnaric to the comedian Tommy Cooper, play walk-on parts but it is the less famous characters who stay in the mind: teachers and pupils from their prep schools, and later at Harrow, as well as many of their parents' country neighbours, make hilarious cameo appearances. Much of Andrew and Jonathan's brotherly bonding was underpinned by shared jokes about these peripheral figures and what might have become of them. There is a particularly funny character
named JA Frere, a former officer of the College of Arms who rents a
small castle close to their grandmother's house, and turns out to be dodgy. The teenage Barrow boys go so far as to compile scrapbooks about spooky Mr Frere, such is their fixation.

Barrow's memory for detail is extraordinary. At one stage he travelled everywhere with a small notebook, recording random scraps of info and conversation even over dinner, which may partly explain his recall and ear for dialogue. A typical sentence will go, "On Saturday 22 June 1968, Jonathan and I moved our possessions from Lennox Gardens to Tite Street in a hired van costing £4 11s. Od". Sometimes Andrew's obsession with his brother bordered on stalking, listening in on his phone conversations and showing excessive curiosity about his girlfriends.

This is a hilarious book, quite moving in places, with an impression of total honesty. When his brother dies, Andrew recalls, "I found I was liberated by his death. I no longer felt upstaged by him ... I often felt on top of the world."