For a Scottish novelist, I have woefully underserved Scotland at times

The Herald Scotland

16-07-2025

'I'd been spending a bit of time back in Glasgow – I want to move back actually, but I can't sell my wife on the weather! – and just walking about the West End it struck me that I'd forgotten how close to leafy Hyndland Partick is. Then you get into Whiteinch and some of those rougher areas. So I started this idea of these two guys who meet. I had the idea they would meet in front of the maternity ward on the morning they both become dads and wind up getting into involved in each other's lives in surprising ways.'
The men are Dan and Jada. Decades earlier and fresh out of Glasgow University, Dan sold a cop show idea to BBC Scotland – think Morse crossed with Local Hero and a whiff of Taggart – and is now very wealthy as a result. West End town-house? Check. Tesla? Check.
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The long-running series is titled McCallister and has rooted itself in the TV schedules and the national psyche. It's a fixture. But it's safe and Dan is bored and disillusioned and now plans to end it. Five years of expensive IVF have paid off, though, and on the morning we meet him he and his wife Grace are celebrating the birth of a baby boy they will christen Tom.
Cut to Jada. He lives on the 10th floor of a 1960s tower block in Partick and has fathered six children by six women over the past couple of decades, the oldest now in her 20s. Nicola, his current girlfriend, is only 19, and may or may not know about Jada's amorous adventures with her mother back in the day. His new baby is called Jayden. Or it might be Cayden. Whatever.
Jada's vibe is head-to-toe sports leisure with box fresh trainers. When it isn't in the pawnshop, he likes to show off his TAG Heuer watch too. His gambling debts are heavy and spread around the city with men whose nicknames are as fierce as their reputations, and servicing them relies on selling heavily-cut drugs to mugs in car parks. Things look up, however, when a dodgy contact at Prestwick Airport approaches him with a scheme for some heavy duty larceny.
Dan drinks in the Ubiquitous Chip, Jada's local is known as The Flaps. Don't ask.
And so, after a meeting outside the maternity ward where Dan is coming to terms with the spiritual elation which is the onset of fatherhood and Jada is grabbing a sly smoke, their story begins. Along the way there are scrapes, reversals of fortune, tragedies – to say too much would give away the plot – and ultimately redemption of sorts, though in unlikely forms.
There's also a tasty side serving of crime, drugs, and Loyalist paramilitaries from Belfast whose unlikely acronym is FUD. And if you want it to have a soundtrack, pick the ear-pounding house music of the early 1990s raves where Jada's life as a wheeler dealer began. Push the music metaphor further and you can even view The Fathers as a mash-up of The Blue Nile (Dan) and Gerry Cinnamon (Jada, obviously).
The Fathers is published this week (Image: free) 'I hate the word journey, but they both end up in very different places to where they started from,' says Niven. And how.
The novel is laugh out loud funny at points but its serious intentions are many. Inequality, criminality, substance abuse, class, social and economic horizons and even housing are themes which linger under the surface, alongside the numbing, dizzying forces unleashed by grief. Niven broaches all these things nimbly, though.
'I'm always with Nabokov in that I think your primary obligation is to entertain and delight the reader,' he says. 'They don't come to the novel dripping with big heavy ideas about class and social commentary. If a book's properly alive, these things come out of it, they emerge as sort of tributaries. So I guess I didn't want either Dan or Jada to be caricatures or cliches.'
Rare for Niven, The Fathers is also a novel set almost entirely in Scotland, his first since The Amateurs in 2009. 'I really felt it was time to write a book set back home again,' he says. 'For a Scottish novelist, I have woefully underserved Scotland at points.'
Less rare, it's a work which deals well the subject of men – and tellingly the cover bears a testimonial to that effect from Caitlin Moran, author of her own best-selling book on the species.
Off the page, it's a subject Niven has given much thought too. And while he isn't alone in the field of dissecting the male psyche – Irvine Welsh's latest Trainspotting novel, Men In Love, is digging into the same subject, and both Graeme Armstrong's The Young Team and Andrew O'Hagan's Mayflies deal with male relationships – it's not lost on him that novels by men about men feel vanishingly rare, either in the best-seller lists or even on the shelves of bookshops.
Does he think that's a problem?
'It is real and it's difficult,' he replies. 'I think it's well established that women buy a lot more fiction than men do, and I think the reasons for that is that when you go down to the younger generation you're losing a lot of the guys to the internet, to online life, to gaming, to whatever. For whatever reason they're not reading fiction any more. And it becomes difficult as a male novelist. You sometimes feel you're writing for market that's vanishing beneath your feet, that's getting smaller and smaller. I think if you do what I do and you write non-genre, non-literary fiction, it's a difficult space.'
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He recalls the impact of his debut novel, 2008's Britpop-era set Kill Your Friends. 'I'd meet a lot of parents here and there who would say: 'Thank you, yours is the first novel I've seen my teenage son read ever.' And I don't think the parents cared that it was a somewhat gleefully nasty novel. The fact that they were reading a novel at all was incredible to them.'
That's important, he thinks, because the act of reading means entering somebody else's head. Seeing the world through their eyes. Possibly even adjusting a world-view as a result.
'It's especially true in a first person novel where you've been asked to subsume yourself in to someone else's skin. It does teach you empathy. Without getting too grand about it, when those things go missing you're on the road the kind of world we saw in Adolescence. That kind of anchor-less, lack of empathy existence.'
Save that, though, for a novel about sons. In the here and now, it's on the subject of dads – and, happily, Glasgow – that John Niven shines his smart, funny, laser-focussed prose.
The Fathers is published on July 17 (Canongate, £18.99). John Niven is appearing at the Drygate Bar, Glasgow on July 14, Pilrig St Paul's Church, Edinburgh on July 15 and at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 13