The Fathers (2025)
Why this one?
I was a huge fan of a couple of Niven’s early books, notably the vicious music industry satire Kill Your Friends and the dangerously funny The Amateurs. Subsequent novels that I’d checked out represented diminishing returns but I’d heard positive things about his recent nonfiction work and the subject matter of this one struck a chord, so thought I’d give it a go.
John Niven (1966- ; active 2002- ) was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, Scotland. He read English at the University of Glasgow and spent most of the 90s working in the music industry. He quit the business to start writing full time in the 2000s, first publishing a book in the 33 1/3 series (unusually a novellla rather than a work of nonfiction) on The Band’s album Music From Big Pink.
His first novel, Kill Your Friends (2008), draws heavily on his time in the music industry, referencing (generally in highly uncomplimentary terms) many real-world execs and punctuating its chapters with lists of largely forgettable music releases from around 1997/98 which (despite my own fondness for that era) act as a comic commentary on the ludicrousness of the post-Britpop excesses of the recording industry. It received a middling film adaptation in 2015, with Nicholas Hoult (somewhat miscast) as protagonist Steven Stelfox.
His next book, The Amateurs (2009), took a surprising swerve into the world of golf, but was similarly dark and hilarious. I fell slightly out of love with his subsequent work, which included two attempts to return to the brilliance of Kill Your Friends’ Stelfox - first via an unlikely cameo in the religious comedy The Second Coming (2011) and then in a full-blown sequel, 2018’s patchily amusing but even more dark than usual Kill ‘Em All. Between those came a few books that crept into the thriller space, including the proto-Richard Osman ‘oldies get into a caper’ Sunshine Cruise Company (2015), which I didn’t get on with at all.
In 2023 he published an acclaimed family memoir, O Brother, dealing with the suicide of his younger sibling Gary. He continues to work as a journalist and columnist; and 2026 will see the Birmingham staging of his first play, The Battle, about the rivalry between Britpop bands Blur and Oasis.
The Fathers will be published by Canongate on 17th July 2025. Thanks to them and Netgalley for the ARC.
Thoughts, etc.
The Fathers introduces us to its titular characters in a Glasgow hospital where both have just given birth to a baby boy. For Dan, a fortysomething TV writer living in the affluent West End of Glasgow, this is his first child with Grace, after a lengthy period of IVF and therefore seen as somewhat miraculous and awe-inspiring. Jada, a small-time criminal, by contrast, is welcoming his fifth (or is it sixth?) child Jayden (or is it Cayden?) with his young girlfriend Nicola. A chance meeting in the hospital corridor seems initially comic and inconsequential, but a tragic sequence of events will draw the two families together in unexpected ways.
As a new-ish parent myself (like Dan, in my early forties) I was initially intrigued by the concept of this book, and interested to see how Niven married his typically jet-black humour with this delicate and emotional subject matter. The early part of the book played out roughly as I expected, with well-observed (but rarely super-original) observations on the perils of fatherhood mixed in with laugh out loud funny moments of comedy. As with some of Niven’s other books, the comic moments are rarely comfortable, and not for those that are easily offended. I’m not, but still managed (as usual with Niven) to find moments that pushed me right to the edge. This one, most similarly to Kill Em All and 2013’s Straight White Male, has moments that I enjoyed but left me feeling thoroughly filthy afterwards for having done so.
More uncomfortably for me, in this one, was the constant sense I had throughout that the comedy around Jada veered too often into ‘punching down’ territory. I know that this isn’t exactly literary fiction and comedy relies on heightened contrasts and a degree of stereotyping to work, but the working class cliches heaped on Jada and Nicola felt excessive even for this purpose. Gratuitous drug use? Check. Feeding junk food to the baby? Check. Dodgy dealing petty crime? Very much so. The problem for me with this was twofold: their depictions were rarely surprising enough to be truly hilarious, and there was very little light to balance the shade, at least until a hasty redemption in the somewhat rushed coda right at the end of the novel.
A slightly more generous reading (though still not entirely a positive one) is that Jada is largely here as a contrast and foil to Niven’s real character of interest here, which is Dan. I did find him a more rounded and interesting character in general, and one who certainly goes through a lot in the course of the book. I found it difficult to decide how much Niven wants us to sympathise with him, though. He’s certainly presented superficially as the more dedicated father, when placed in contrast with the exceedingly low bar that is Jada at least, although even in the book’s early part he’s also hardly the model of the progressive, equal-contributing and present father. (He’s in the pub with mates the day of his son’s birth, for example). In the book’s second half, in which he is (quite understandably) sent into the depths of despair by a tragic event, he not only abandons Grace entirely but begins plotting a crime that would be beyond even Jada’s imagination. And yet in that hasty coda he’s seemingly redeemed and rewarded with everything totally back to normal. Are we meant to be left to make our own judgement or does Niven actually just think Dan is fairly unproblematic and deserving of his happy ending? I wasn’t sure.
Female characters have never been especially strong features of Niven’s books and it’s unsurprising therefore that they are not at the forefront in a book titled The Fathers. Nicola, like Jada, is entirely two dimensional (again, only developing anything approaching a third dimension in the book’s last few pages). Grace is more interesting, in that I feel like there’s a genuine attempt here to acknowledge that the book’s second half is a kind of mirror to Dan’s self-obsessive doom spiral and that in our focus on his reactions we are missing an important story going on largely inside Grace’s mind. I don’t think it worked entirely, and I found that Grace’s relative strength and stoicism was in itself a bit of a cliche, but it has its moments - there’s a notable playground scene featuring Grace and Nicola that was one of the most emotionally effective (and affecting) moments in the book.
Overall it’s a bit of an odd concoction. It has moments (like the above, but also its hideous, heartbreaking centrepiece) that are truly impressive and emotionally heavy. It also has its issues, as discussed, as well as some lengthy distracting (and near-redundant to the plot) sections that go too deep into Jada’s dodgy dealings, seemingly largely because Niven finds this sort of thing kind of fun. It sort of is, but only moderately so, and it throws off the balance of a book that manages in some places to pull off both comedy and tragedy to great effect.
Score
7
Despite those many issues, I’m still scoring this relatively well because its peaks are really strong (if a little traumatic for a fellow father).
Next up
TBC.
