Quentin and Philip: a double portrait, by Andrew Barrow

It is not often that one comes across a truly original book, but here is one, constructed in the form of intertwined biographies of the defiantly self-controlled Quentin Crisp and the defiantly self-indulgent Philip O'Connor. Crisp, almost from the beginning, was making an exhibition of himself, and may be considered the first performance artist. He adopted the freedom of the mask and ended up famous, whereas O'Connor was never well-known and became more obscure as time went on.

O'Connor might have been the English Kerouac – he drank, tramped, fathered children, was a brilliant wordsmith who never revised his pages – but he was too anti-social and class-conscious to make his mark. The fact that he was born a nervous wreck, the very opposite of Crisp's cool, Zen-like abstraction, might also be relevant.

Their lives were slightly but significantly connected. Both were denizens of the bohemian Fitzrovia of the 1930s and 1940s and it was O'Connor, briefly working at the BBC, who made a radio programme that launched Crisp on the road to stardom. The contrast between their two styles of rebellion gives the book a fascinating symmetry, but it is Andrew Barrow's ambivalent relationship with them that supplies the emotional tension.

Barrow cultivated their friendships in his twenties, adopting both men as mentors in the ways of the world. But as the years passed he seems to have hung on to them for other reasons; there's a lot of psychological cock-teasing going on. In the end, they turn into raw material for his own work. Somewhere along the way, both Crisp and O'Connor grew suspicious of his motives, and he is candid about the knuckle-rappings he received. Chum, stalker, vampire: Barrow's roles are increasingly blurred but, being much younger than they, he is indefatigable and finally emerges triumphant with this bulky repayment of the debt.

The glory of the book is that it is mostly about unknowns, and filmed almost entirely in close-up. Barrow has traced every street, searched for every café, bedsitter or cottage, and leads us into many curious sub-worlds. Fitful lights from the beau monde do occasionally filter down, but only render more tragi-comic these lives in frustrated thrall to the arts.

So successful is the presentation that it momentarily convinces us of two very English ideas: that failure is richer than success, and that the ordinary is more surreal than the grand. When Crisp, alone among the varied cast, finally escapes his banal environment and hits the big time in old age, there is a noticeable loss of resonance. We're suddenly in the shallows of celebrityville.

Intimate, absurd and melancholy, this book is a tribute to the independent spirit in which everyone involved seems a devotee of the twin cults of bravura honesty and rampant phoneyism. I missed, however, an explanation of how the author was able to reconstruct elaborate conversations with his heroes during the 1960s and 1970s. Did he keep records from the word go? And also why – of all the mentors in the world – he chose these two weirdoes.

Duncan Fallowell

The reviewer's novel 'A History of Facelifting' will be published in February by Arcadia