"Unauthorized autobiography" is, on the face of it, an implausible oxymoron, but Ray Davies's memoir of his life and times as lyricist and lead singer of The Kinks until their temporary decline in 1973 is offered in the guise of a novel. Set circa AD2004, in a sub-Orwellian future of blanched Statist conformity, the book is narrated by a naive and nameless young graduate who is ordered by the monolithic global Corporation to interview Davies, ostensibly for reasons of historical research. This framing device, patently loopy and only sketchily realized, does not detain the reader for too long, but it does enable Davies to recount his life at one remove, usefully casting doubt on his own pronouncements and establishing what he appears to see as his defining characteristic: a quirky, quintessentially English individuality.
Most pop groups and artists who have dwelt on England and Englishness as their subject rather than aping transatlantic peers and predecessors have sounded, deliberately or not, an elegiac note. Morrissey's extraordinary laments for an idealized, Carry-On, 1950s Britain, and the attendant accusations of racism now levelled at him, perhaps form the most striking example, but the dissatisfactions expressed first in the punk era and then in the mod revival of the early 1980s have been equally alert to decadence and decline. Davies's own unusual but much covered pop singles are a lasting monument to an eccentric nostalgia culminating in an LP entitled The Village Green Preservation Society.
Davies's caricature of his sexagenarian future self is disconcertingly crude and bitter, but given to sudden flights of sentimentality. The young narrator cheerfully criticizes the curmudgeon on occasion, frequently anticipating the likely response of the reader and thus displaying an acute self-awareness on the part of the author. "Davies" in turn leers knowingly back – "Oh yes, oh yes, the tits, the broads, the cunt, the excess, that's what you want" – in a fair comment on the expectations of the genre in terms of sexual misbehaviour, chemical abuse and hotel japes. The reciprocation of scorn is certainly equitable.
The story does not disappoint from this angle, although it stops short of the band's revival and Davies's engagement to Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders. Instead we have the early years, from the Muswell Hill childhood through to the formation of The Kinks and the sudden plunge into stardom and legend, ending in the familiar routine of demoralizing legal wrangling as contracts signed in the myopia of teenage enthusiasm turn out to be Faustian compacts. These stories are narrated with a detail and sensitivity – and apparent honesty – lacking in similar accounts, as are Davies's marriage to Rasa, the daughter of Lithuanian refugees, and the birth of their children. Rasa herself left him, Davies became mad and reclusive, the biography ends with the despondent rock star spending Christmas going back and forth on the Central Line with a six-pack of lager, rueing the loss of his family, his audience and his creative drive.
Davies made an unusual star partly because of his very ordinariness. "When Raymond Douglas Davies hit the big time, he went for the antithesis of stardom and headed straight for the most ordinary lifestyle imaginable. He got married, moved into a bedsit in Muswell Hill and pushed his newly born daughter around in a pram." His younger brother Dave, expelled from school when his headmaster caught him in flagrante with a schoolgirl on Hampstead Heath, continued as a womanizing hellraiser within The Kinks, but Davies, who had always perceived himself as a misfit, turned ever more in on himself. He periodically makes explicit his states of mind, as the machinery of pop promotion overtook the young group and the two public-school bohemians who inexpertly managed them, but at times motivation is hidden and the often painful narrative is left to speak for itself.
Davies, as the punning title hints, is attempting a portrait of not only "the outer and the inner person" but also "the third person, a spiritual driving force that constantly intermingles" with both. This justifies the employment of the shuttling impressions of two narrators, neither the "real" Davies. Even so, certain points of interest are still unclear, not least questions of sexuality. The man who wrote "Lola", a gentle yet uneasy rendering of an encounter with a transvestite, does not explain the (documented) story behind the song; furthermore he is here portrayed as aggressively defensive on the subject of homosexuality, yet bisexual and homoeroticism constantly – deliberately – surface, and are treated with considerable sympathy only to be gruffly tolerated or disowned. If it is possible to mince belligerently round a topic, Davies does so here.
The sci-fi subplot is resolved as Davies dies, apparently too dangerous to the Corporation as an emblem of individuality in a faceless world. That said, the idiosyncratic and not unsophisticated structure of the book itself bears out Davies's picture of himself as an utterly individual talent. It is also a brave, convincing account of a North London lad who never outgrew the attachments and values of his formative years. It is not inappropriate that a man who felt broken by legal disputes over his own work should write a book which places in doubt even the authority of his autobiography; the result is a psychological portrait of the man as he was and perhaps will be, a plausible version of the X-ray for which he so urgently strives.