Fourth Estate £12.99 pp292

Stuart Shorter is a violent, unpredictable criminal with a long history of jail, homelessness, self-harm and drug abuse. He has threatened his infant son with a knife, sometimes attacks people for no reason, and spends most of his days in an alcohol-filled haze of confusion and rage.

Shorter is not, then, the most sympathetic of subjects for a biography. And Alexander Masters, a middle-class writer and illustrator who spent three years tracing his subject’s footsteps, sketching his past in both prose and drawings, and trying to understand his chaotic, self-destructive life, does not disguise his frustration with and even dislike for Shorter. Time after time, his patience with the unpredictable, occasionally near-psychotic misfit runs decisively out. “He is an animal,” he writes after Shorter showers a benign policeman with abuse. “I wish he would die. Right here on the pavement.”

This openness about his feelings is one of the many things that distinguishes this remarkable biography from any other book that has been written about those who live outside the radar of the employed, the healthy, the respectable. Not since John Healey’s classic memoir The Grass Arena has life on the street been catalogued with such candour, and to such illuminating effect. And the extraordinary thing about this book is that although Masters clearly finds Shorter exasperating, a kind of tenderness shines out of the pages that makes it unforgettably moving.

Like Masters, we end up suffering emotions towards Shorter that are complex and conflicting. His self-destructiveness and his pathological hatred of a system that is often trying to help him makes us recoil. But as we gradually learn about his past (the story is told backwards, hence the title), and his equally tragic future, our sympathy cannot help but begin to jostle with our natural aversion.

The story of Shorter’s fate and the revelation of the events that destroyed him as a person when he was a disabled but highly functional 11-year-old are deeply disquieting. For all that we want to revile this head-butting, foul mouthed drunk (who sets about his biographer at one point, nearly throttling him), the rebuking ghost of the intelligent, curious, sensitive boy he once was increasingly hovers over the narrative.

Shorter, although often muddled, is anything but stupid. He engages with Masters in inarticulate but pointed arguments about morality and society in which the author is sometimes left wanting answers. The continuing battle between the author seeking to understand his subject and the subject trying to understand his biographer is at the heart of the book. The tension between the two men is constantly on the verge of tipping over into conflict, as when Shorter reads one of the author’s chapters about his schooldays. “Just talk talk talk with you in’it? Yeah, you got the house, the education, the money, the f***ing past what weren’t full of abuse . . . and now you want me all tied up in explanations. That’s what people like you want, in’it? Because then it’s all sorted, in’it . . . But you can’t. I haven’t had it that simple. Why should you get to put reasons on it when I’ve f***ing lived it, and still can’t?”

At no point while he is following Shorter through the streets, accompanying him to court trials, inviting him into his own home (with its study and piano) and joining him for hooch and “prison curries” at his squalid flat, does Masters fall into the trap of deciding that his subject is simply a victim. As Shorter observes, there are those who have been through much worse and have lived relatively normal lives. He has no explanations; neither, in the end, does Masters. They snipe, bicker and joust, trying to get each other’s measure.

The author’s spry capturing of dialogue — carefully re-creating the mutually uncomprehending but sometimes witty, even warm encounters between the two — makes the book a gripping read. Masters never solves Shorter’s mystery, although he is driven at one point to suggest bluntly that chaotic people such as his subject don’t need a bedsit and employment: “They need a new brain.”

This apparently thick-skinned approach is justified because, through Masters’s relentless commitment to honesty, we come to believe in Shorter and feel we know him. Thus, when Shorter’s fate is revealed — he died, probably deliberately, under the wheels of a high-speed train — we do not feel philosophical at society’s burden being shed or at a tortured soul finally being relieved of the terrible weight of his own life. We feel only bleakness, and sadness, and a sense that it is a real human being, however shattered, who has reached the end of a story that nobody, least of all himself, could understand.

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