Animal Magic

Jonathan Barrow was not famous. But in his brother, Andrew’s, eyes, he was on a path to greatness before his life was cut short by a car accident when he was just 22. Nearly 40 years later Andrew Barrow has written this homage to his younger brother, which entwines his memories of their life together around the text of an unpublished novel Jonathan had written in the months before he died.

Surreal, sexual, scatological, this novel – The Queue – involves the adventures of a fast-talking, sex-mad Dachshund called Mary and the narrator, who are helped on their adventures by a giant sparrow and pursued by a vicious wood pigeon. It also reveals a morbid obsession and a passage which is remarkably prescient as to the manner in which Jonathan would die.

Genius, or simply troubled young man? Perhaps both, but Barrow plumps firmly for the former as he showcases excerpts from The Queue and other pieces of Jonathan’s writings and drawings with an admiring eye, at times faintly envious, at others almost awe-stuck. Indeed, he admits he was in thrall to his younger brother and frequently felt upstaged by him, to the extent that he felt 'liberated by his death'.

Whether Jonathan Barrow would have become a famous artist or writer will never be known. But with Animal Magic he has been immortalised by a brother who knew he would forever be overshadowed by his younger sibling – in life, and, still, in death.