Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass

by Darren McGarvey

Overview

“Savage, wise, and witty . . . It is hard to think of a more timely, powerful, or necessary book.”—J. K. Rowling

International Bestseller! For readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Evicted, the Orwell Prize–winner that helps us all understand Brexit, Donald Trump, and the connection between poverty and the rise of tribalism in the United Kingdom, in the US, and around the world.

Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastations firsthand. He grew up in a community where violence was a form of currency and has lived through addiction, abuse, and homelessness. He knows why people from deprived communities feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain . . .

So he invites you to come along on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. His vivid, visceral, and cogently argued book—part memoir and part polemic—takes us inside the experience of extreme poverty and its stresses to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome.

Arguing that both the political left and right misunderstand poverty as it is actually lived, McGarvey sets forth what everybody—including himself—could do to change things. Razor-sharp, fearless, and brutally honest, Poverty Safari offers unforgettable insight into conditions in modern Britain, including what led to Brexit—and, beyond that, into issues of inequality, tribalism, cultural anxiety, identity politics, the poverty industry, and the resentment, anger, and feelings of exclusion and being left behind that have fueled right-wing populism and the rise of ethno-nationalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951627089
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Darren McGarvey, who is also known by the stage name Loki, grew up in Pollok on the south side of Glasgow. He is a writer, columnist, and rap recording artist who has made regular media appearances as a social commentator, including on the BBC and STV. In 2015, he became the first ever rapper-in residence at Police Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit, and he continues to work across Scotland in some of its most challenged communities. Poverty Safari, his first book, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. He lives in Glasgow.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Preface xi

Introduction xvii

1 Crime and Punishment 1

2 A History of Violence 12

3 The Call of the Wild 18

4 Gentlemen of the West 24

5 The Trial 33

6 No Mean City 44

7 Nineteen Eighty-four 50

8 A Question of Loyalties 56

9 On the Road 60

10 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 70

11 A Tale of Two Cities 78

12 Wuthering Heights 85

13 The Outsiders 89

14 The Trick Is to Keep Breathing 97

15 The Cutting Room 102

16 Great Expectations 107

17 Children of the Dead End 111

18 The Stranger 115

19 Tales from the Mall 129

20 A Disaffection 137

21 Garnethill 143

22 The Way We Live Now 150

23 Housekeeping 158

24 Waiting for the Barbarians 165

25 The Naked Ape 169

26 The Sound and the Fury 177

27 Frankenstein 186

28 Trainspotting 190

29 The Moral Landscape 198

30 The Metamorphosis 203

31 The Changeling 212

32 Rules for Radicals 227

Book Group Discussion Ideas 239

Editorial Reviews

Part memoir, part polemic, this is a savage, wise and witty tour-de-force. An unflinching account of the realities of systemic poverty, Poverty Safari lays down challenges to both the left and right. It is hard to think of a more timely, powerful or necessary book.”—J. K. Rowling
 
“Nothing less than an intellectual and spiritual rehab manual for the progressive left.”—Irvine Welsh
 
“George Orwell would have loved this book. It echoes Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to Wigan Pier. It is heartrending in its life story and its account of family breakdown and poverty. But by the end there is not a scintilla of self-pity and a huge amount of optimism. It made me see the country and its social condition in a new light.”—Andrew Adonis, chair of judges, Orwell Prize 2018
 
 “One of the best accounts of working-class life I have read. McGarvey is a rarity: a working-class writer who has fought to make the middle-class world hear what he has to say.”—Nick Cohen, Guardian
 
“His book is searing, and some of his recollections are unbearable. . . . But the real surprise is that the misery memoir is a disguise for a much more complex book. In the book he calls it a 'Trojan horse' to draw the reader in, because what he really wants to say is that the cycle of abuse and addiction can be broken. He is living proof of that.”—Stephen Moss, Guardian, “Interview”
 
“Based on the environment in which he was raised, he explores the anger, resentment, and the sense of exclusion of the underclass, trying to explain what led voters to back Brexit and right-wing nationalism and populism. . . . He assigned himself the role of 'translating between the classes,' offering what he calls an “emotional reality” about deprivation that is rarely captured by statistics and demands an “emotional literacy” to be properly understood.”—Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, The New York Times
 
“The man seems to be on his way to becoming one of the most compelling and original voices in Scotland’s, and maybe Britain’s, public debate. If Scotland’s underclass could speak in a single, articulate, authentic voice to communicate to the rest of us what it’s like to be poor, isolated, brutalized, lost, it would sound very much like this.”— Daily Mail
 
“A painfully honest autobiographical study of deprivation and how society should deal with it . . . [McGarvey] seems to offer an antidote to populist anger that transcends left and right . . . His urgently written, articulate, and emotional book is a bracing contribution to the debate about how to fix our broken politics.”—Financial Times
 
“What distinguishes Poverty Safari from a 'straight' description of a working-class life is his searing examination of the narratives that surround poverty—and the way in which no individual, least of all him, can neatly be fitted into them.”—Alex Clark, Orwell Prize 2018 judge
 
“Another cry of anger from a working class that feels the pain of a rotten, failing system. Its value lies in the strength it will add to the movement for change.”—Ken Loach
 
“A blistering analysis of the issues facing the voiceless and the social mechanisms that hobble progress, all wrapped up in an unputdownable memoir.”—Denise Mina, John Creasey Dagger Award–winning author
 
“Poverty Safari is an important and powerful book.”—Nicola Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party and First Minister of Scotland
 
“Raw, powerful and challenging.”—Kezia Dugdale, former leader of the Scottish Labour Party
 
“If The Road to Wigan Pier [by George Orwell] had been written by a Wigan miner and not an Etonian rebel, this is what might have been achieved. McGarvey’s book takes you to the heart of what is wrong with the society free market capitalism has created.”—Paul Mason, journalist and author of Clear Bright Future
 

From the Publisher

2020-06-20
The Scottish rapper known as Loki reflects on his chaotic Glasgow childhood—and on Britain’s failure “to take lower class people seriously”—in an Orwell Prize–winning debut.

McGarvey calls this memoir “a series of loosely connected rants that give the appearance of a book.” That’s not far off the mark. The narrative is essentially a collection of linked essays that mix the personal and the political as the author inveighs against class inequality in the U.K. The most interesting pieces begin with a memorable event—such as the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London or the construction of the M77 motorway on National Trust land in Glasgow—and then show how it affected people, like the author, who grew up in poor neighborhoods. One entry perceptively explains why McGarvey’s peers faulted the heavy media coverage of a blaze that gutted an iconic building at the Glasgow School of Art: “we grew up in communities where things burn down all the time.” The author also acutely portrays his alcoholic, drug-addicted mother, who shot up in front of him, burned many of the contents of their house in the front yard, tried to dig up their dead dog with her bare hands, and undercut his father’s efforts to provide stability for McGarvey and his four siblings. Homeless and suffering from substance abuse by the age of 18, McGarvey began to turn a corner after extensive psychological counseling at a nonprofit youth center and receiving generous welfare-state benefits, including “supported” housing. Though extensive therapy seemed to provide the help he needed, here, it too often leads to writing deadened by self-help bromides and talk of ills such as “low self-esteem,” “imposter syndrome,” and “negative self-talk.” This book gives an admirably deromanticized view of Scotland but in language not always as fresh as its vision.

A mixture of solid, original reporting on class inequality and a less-effective treatment of personal transformation.

Kirkus Reviews