Beatrix Potter meets the Marquis de Sade

Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew.

Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. The typescript he inherited, though ‘unedited, repetitious and often excessively scatological’, he writes, ‘appealed to me immediately . . . I found it screamingly funny.’ In this affectionate expression of sibling adulation, he describes Jonathan’s style as ‘part journalese, part satire, part Beatrix Potter, part Marquis de Sade’. Jonathan wrote about animals, birds and fish as if they were human, implicitly deriding the absurd illogicality of human social behaviour. A less sympathetically prejudiced reader, in an apt summing-up, has described The Queue as ‘surrealist whimsy’.

Jonathan was born in Lancaster in 1947, the youngest of five sons of a senior legal civil servant, eventually a Treasury prosecutor, with a home in Turleigh Combe, Wiltshire, and a flat in Holland Park. Andrew, the fourth son, only 18 months older than Jonathan, shared his creative ambitions but was not equally imaginatively preposterous, and apparently felt like a rather inferior twin.

In late childhood, both of them, Andrew recalls, were

beginning to become acutely class-conscious – partly the effect of being at the fundamentally middle-class Clifton and then at posh semi-upper-class Harrow, and partly the effect of our father’s multiple snobberies.We both had an oversimplified view of toffs and grand country life, as witnessed at a distance in Wiltshire, Savile Row tailoring and the typical Harrovian’s respect for and fear of Etonians.

Their scholastic careers were undistinguished, so they did not attempt to follow their three senior brothers into profitable conventional pursuits.