Alasdair Gray Books

I was introduced to this work by Madison Smartt Bell when he read "15 February 2003" to a creative writing class a few years ago. I was very intrigued and bought the book shortly after. The short stories in this book are both visionary and hilarious. Gray has a beautiful ability to capture a deep sense of truth from minor details and quietly bizarre circumstances. He gets into some very deep psychological territory with stories such as "Aiblins," where the author himself meets a fictionalized version of himself as a young man, and "Job's Skin Game" where a man who is coping with eczema engages in quaint and grotesque skin peeling rituals. His stories are immediately engaging, very fun and easy to read though often presented in esoteric forms.

I read Poor Things a year or so after this book and liked it FAR less. That book, although a good yarn, seemed trite next to this book. It seemed a bit gimmicky; the tricks that Gray uses throughout that book were fun but didn't leave a lasting impression.
In "Ends of our Tethers" Alasdair Gray achieves a beautiful harmony between postmodern mashup of style and deep, true characters. "Sinkings" and "No Bluebeard" are stories that are presented almost as lists. The first being three brief scenarios where the narrator was emotionally damaged and insulted by the people around him, the second is a male narrator recounting the tale of his various ruined marriages, the wives referred to simply as FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD.


My favorite of these stories are those that add a touch of the surreal. "Big Pockets with Buttoned Flaps" and "15 February 2003" seem to take place in a future dystopia. The narrators of these stories are filled with an existential kind of despair.
I can't recommend this book enough. Sometimes visionary sometimes just interesting and enjoyable. Gray's illustrations also add to the experience of this book. The leering skulls seem both friendly and evil.

If we are tempted to lead another life after death,if light is an essential part in our existence,if we want to see the possible range of human degradation we should read "Lanark"and think it over.

An almost unclassifiable work, Sartor Resartus is at once inaccessible and irresitable. Repeated readings always bring new illumination and unearth previously hidden lessons. Carlyle wrote this book to instruct, entertain and, most importantly, to challenge. Its message appears more timely now than ever. Sic vos non vobis!

It bewilders me that such a fine piece of work should drop out of print so quickly, while so much that's mediocre or worse gains a wide audience and many reprints. This comic and satirical novel is written in a neo-picaresque chain-of-stories form, and is a fine companion to Gray's prizewinning _Poor_Things_. Gray himself credits the inimitable Kathy Acker for the inspiration to write it. You'll never look at a woman in leather in the same way again. The nominal epilogue--really an essential part of the structure--may be the funniest part.

I didn't like this book. I didn't like it at all----Well, let me rephrase: I didn't like Books Three or Four in this rambling tetralogy. That is, I didn't care for, didn't like, didn't fancy, was much off put by the mediocre "Dystopian" Science Fiction section and, above all, by the cutesy so-called "Epilogue." Books One and Two were really quite good, I thought, and deserve five stars. But books Three and Four were so inane that it's more than a bit of a stretch to bequeath three to the whole lot. ---Let it be noted that the books follow this sequence when reading them: 3,1,2,4. What is gained by this rearrangement, I haven't the foggiest.

A short dissertation: All this Dystopian nonsense is merely reworked Gnosticism, especially here, given Gray's theological obsessions. As the minister tells Duncan in Chapter 18 in Book One (coming, naturally, after book Three), "...the spirit ruling the material world is callous and malignant." This pretty much sums up Books Three and Four in a nutshell. And, as Bertrand Russell once put it, if something can be contained in a nutshell, it's better to leave it in a nutshell. Really, if the reader wants to read truly gripping fiction of this sort, let him or her read any of the early Cormac McCarthy works, particularly Blood Meridian and Suttree or, more broadly, anything before All the Pretty Horses.

As for Books One and Two, high laud indeed! - A very poignant and harrowing, obviously autobiographical account, of the artist vs. society, an artist modelling himself very much on William Blake, as Alasdair Gray obviously does.

An epilogue on the "Epilogue": I truly hated this section for several reasons, but not primarily for the reasons Gray, as the "King" or author seems to suggest the reader likely will. Really, it's the icing on the Pomo cake of Books Three and Four. It's obvious that Gray has taken from other authors, as all authors do in one fashion or the other. It's the influences he leaves out, much better books, that bother me. To wit:

1.) The Private Memoirs And Confessions of a Justified Sinner by fellow Scotsman James Hogg

2.) The Recognitions by William Gaddis

I strongly suggest that any reader piqued by the better parts of this tetralogy delve into these other two works of genius. The first is quite possibly the most profoundly eerie book ever written. And the second, coming in at a bit over 1,000 pages, is a true masterpiece detailing the breakdown of modern artistic values and one man's struggle against it, all the while maintaining humour and verve. Malcolm Lowry, author of Under The Volcano, called it "A secret missile of the soul" shortly before he died. Gaddis never wrote anything to match it in his later efforts. The point is that, after reading these two works, you will see this one, however good in parts, as a pale shadow in comparison.

Happy reading then and taking a cue from the last page herein: GOODBYE

Reading Lanark is like reading an alternately baffling and lucid nightmare, the prose taking you places you probably don't want to go, but places that you're morbidly curious about anyway. Suicide, self-obsession, frustration and the inescapable horrors of capitalism: these are the cheery themes that Gray investigates, using his characteristically jet-black irony to tell us that maybe laughter is the only answer. A typical scenario: Lanark, the protagonist (he doesn't deserve to be called a hero) has a job with the DSS in a dying future city. Asking why he shouldn't tell the residents straight out of their fate (unavoidable catastrophe) he is informed of the government's strategy of compassion: "It is important to kill hope SLOWLY." Tracing the life of an artist obsessed with attaining perfection in creation, and an antithetical character who is bounced around unkindly by Fortune, the novel posits many philosophical conundrums. Is Thaw Nastler; are the two narratives creating one another rather like MC Escher's 'Hands drawing each other'; do we in real life do as Lanark does and try to find an way out of the Borgesian labyrinth the world presents? And is it self-created and perpetual, returning eternally? Certainly the narrative of Lanark is circular. Enough. Five stars. But only because there aren't more than five. Brilliant. Dark. Weird. Read it.

As a writer of prose Alasdair Gray cannot be faulted. The problems begin when he attempts to form that prose into a book. Short stories are his strength and that is what he should stick to; they are the perfect platform for his talent. And that is not in any way to denigrate the talent; that Chekhov wrote short stories is confirmation of that. In his novels Gray just seems to come across as a mucky auld perve. Might be your cup of tea, but it isn't mine.

Maybe more time is needed for literary audience, both Scottish and worldwide, to recognize this book as a new page in history of fiction literature. After Joyce's Ulysses there happened a kind of a great explosion that opened a way for numerous unimaginable ideas to push through from a vague, sometimes disordered author's mind to the reader's. After Ulysses, it seemed as if all the boundaries in literature have been trod over. Suddenly, everybody was ALLOWED to play with the language and style, to play with readers' good taste, to play with Freud, with Kafka, to jump over classics of literature. It was quite hard to be special in a case when everything possible is allowed. But, when everything is allowed, it doesn't automatically mean that everything is already used or even tried. Being special in a world with no boundaries can be achieved by overcoming the boundaries within us and not outside us. And that is certainly what Gray managed to do in his Lanark. He - or, should I say Lanark/Duncan Thaw - is not really impressed by a society that is allowed to do everything. Because he himself is not able to do everything. So the boundaries must lie within him. Because of the belief that these boundaries are still something set by society, Thaw wants to flee out of it, to be self-sufficient and independent and, moreover, alone in the world. But where to find those gates that would lead him to such kind of a world? As a real, or at least realistic being, as Thaw, he finds the only way of that transcedention in death, so he commits suicide. As Lanark - ressurected, imaginary, surrealistic Thaw - he enters big mouth. In a way, he is trying to find the gates of his own heaven, because everyone believes, or at least would like to believe, that there is a world where they could be completely satisfied. For Lanark/Thaw, it is a world without other people, so he is in a constant search of some kind of such gates. In a search of such heaven, he only finds out that he's been living in hell all the time - both in his real and surreal life. As in O'Brien's The Third Policeman - hell is all around. And not because it is in society, but because it is inside a person: in Thaw, Lanark, Gray, us. Hell is there because we can see that being without others is as impossible as being with them. And this is a boundary that could hardly be overcome.
Gray at least reached it and tried to define it. Lanark is, as far as I can say, the only book that could stand side by side to Ulysses. In a way, it is a response to it. Ulysses is a book with, in global, quite an optimistic, positive spirit. Its light-heartedness can be found in an answer to the question about the word that all the people in the world know. Less as a Christian soul, but more as a pure, sincere human being, Joyce answers: LOVE. And since then love seemed to be the only hope. But Gray can't be satisfied by that. By his opinion, LOVE could be the word all the people in the world know, but he fears that most of them can't do better than just to say it. Lanark is thatways in a search of some kind of a new hope. But the world he lives in seems to be too fluid, too slippery to find any firm point that one could rely on. Even when one would just give himself to the fate because everything is written, Lanark comes to the conjuror, to the creator of the whole world he lives in just to find out that even the creator's mind is not defined completely. Finally, Lanark finds his own rest and satisfaction in giving himself completely - not to fate, but to the people. In the moment of his death he finds out that accomodating and compromising can bring at least a bit more satisfaction than being completely individual. Like Molly Bloom, in his bed, in his last moments, he says YES to everything that should come.

As much as being that global, this book also works on a local basis, being one of the rare and possibly the first books to expose all the secrets and wrongs of Scottish society. It is Gray's intimate contemplation on a somewhat sad existence in/of an industrial city such as Glasgow, where everything seems to be rid of heart and soul. While revealing it, Gray at the same time still gives something to that society to be adorned with. And that is certainly this precious book. A masterpiece that only needs to be recognized as such.

This book is a lot easier to read than you might think. Folks have compared it to Joyce's Ulysses mostly because of its complicated structure (the parts are numbered Four, Prologue, One, Two, Three, Epilogue, and the last few chapters) and detailing of a single city (Scotland's Glasgow) but the similarities really stop there, though I imagine if you dig fairly deep you can find lots of others. It's a great novel though, definitely the work of someone working from a highly personal visual, everything screams the voice of the author, from the forthright illustrations to the style of the prose in the book. Basically it's the story of Lanark a young man who lives in the strange city of Unthank. After some weird adventures there (and I mean strange . . . if you don't believe me just go read part four and tell me that it's not deeply weird) he winds up hearing the story of the person he apparently used to be . . . a Scottish lad/man named Duncan Thaw. Thaw's parts are almost like an entirely separate novel and take up a good portion of it, his youth is interesting and even though he's not the most likeable character, neither is really anyone else and there's a certain nobility to his unwavering desire to just live life as he sees fit without caring what anyone thinks. The adventures go back to Unthank then and the book gets a little slow in some parts and becomes more surreal and episodic, it's hard to figure out just what's going on in some parts. But Gray has a definite knack for description and a way of conveying complicated tangled and hard to understand emotions (mostly negative ones, it's not a very cheerful novel) in ways that lesser authors would cry for. Some of the characters are distant and cold, and Lanark isn't easy to deal with most of the time, especially toward the end when he becomes a bit ineffectual. But the Epilogue is one of the funniest sections in the book (it's got a list of all the things he plagarized to write the novel listed on the side) and I think a solid influence on the end of Grant Morrison's run on the comic book Animal Man (anyone with me on that?). In fact, I think most Scottish writers that started after this book was published were influenced in some way by it, I can read famed Scot Iain Banks in this book as well, it's a novel that has a foot firmly in the old Scotland while not being so obscure that non-Scots can't read and enjoy it. Well worth your time if you can find it or track it down, if you get past the trappings of "postmodernism" and just read it to enjoy the story, you'll find that there's a rollicking good novel in there, one that you won't be sorry you read.

I make it my job to read some pretty weird books--as an aficionado of science fiction and fantasy, I sometimes run into some doozies-- but this novel by Gray has to be one of the strangest that I've run into recently. The fact that this novel was not published in the genre, and won a couple of mainstream awards makes me wonder what else I'm missing in the "mundane" fiction shelves.

Poor Things is supposedly non-fiction, as illustrated by its full title on the title page: "Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer, Edited by Alasdair Gray." But this is all part of its mystique. Gray has constructed a literary puzzle, a Frankenstein's monster of a book that takes its inspiration from that novel by Mary Shelley as well as the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G. Wells. McCandless is the titular biographer, but the story is actually that of the eccentric Scottish doctor Godwin Baxter and his "creation," Bella Baxter, later known as Dr. Victoria McCandless. Set in Glasgow in the 1880s, the plot entails how McCandless met Baxter, how he then met Baxter's protege Bella and fell in love with her, her subsequent departure, and the circumstances of her return. To reveal any more would be to dilute the heavy stuff of the novel's innovative twists.

If Gray were writing with the Fantasy label stuck on the spine of his books, I would have termed this one a "steampunk" novel for its revisionist look at medicine and technology in a pre-auto world. Fans of Tim Powers and James Blaylock should definitely check this one out.

'Poor Things' is the perfect example of how Gray understands the power of the medium he works in. Just as two poets could destroy the Eastern Empire in 'Unlikely Stories, Mostly', Gray playfully toys with the reader's perception of reality and truth and how it is influenced by the media. Rather than being the author of Poor Things, Gray purports to be merely an editor, who has discovered a manuscript and letter, which he presents for the reader's examination. His personae in this instance implies that the novel has been 'received' rather than 'created'. This lends the rather bizarre proceedings a strange air of credibility, and stops the reader pondering over the likelihood of some of the more extraordinary events occurring. For example, Baxter's "skeely, skeely fingers" performing the "skilfully manipulated resurrection" of a young woman is the stuff of fairy tales, but due to Gray's web of fibs, it is understood as a rational medical discovery rather than a magical act. The main body of the book is presented as a first-person narrative, written by one Archibald McCandless. In it, he describes how an eccentric friend creates a woman from a dead body, in the manner of Baron Frankenstein. However, a letter accompanying the narrative (according to Gray) states that it is little more than a pack of lies. The letter has been written by the very woman who the narrative covered. On top of this confusion, Gray has annotated and analysed the text, and professes to believe the original narrative as true. In this fashion, the novel is as 'stitched together' as Bella herself, every 'fact' seems to be contradicted later, true history is marred by pure fiction, almost making it impossible to separate truth from falsehood. From the very beginning of the novel, the reader is confronted by colliding facts, and must make a choice as to who he or she believes: Archibald or Victoria. Because the choice has to be made between the two characters, Gray's own 'facts' are never brought into doubt. Even the erratum slip in the endpapers adds unnecessary confusion to the proceedings, stating: "The etching on page 187 does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac." Apart from the fact that the accuracy of this one etching has little if no effect on the reader's perception of the novel, Gray has once again abused the power that has been vested in him by creating unnecessary confusion. If Gray himself was responsible for the illustrations, would he choose to draw the wrong character deliberately, or would he draw the correct one but deliberately try to mislead the readers with an erratum slip? Alternatively, is the etching of someone completely different (i.e. neither Charcot or Count Robert)? Whatever the identity of the etched man, to mislead the reader in this way would be entirely pointless. Therefore, the only rational answer is that the illustrations were done by William Strang and Gray is indeed only the editor. In this fashion, Gray leads the reader to ridiculous conclusions throughout the novel. Another example of this trickery can be found in the medical terminology used within the novel. When describing Bella being shot in the foot by Blessington, McCandless states that the bullet had punctured "the integument between the ulna and radius of the second and third metacarpals". However, Bella, in her letter, describes this terminology as "blethers, havers, claptrap, gibberish, gobbledegook" and then describes the actual wound as "puncturing the tendon of the oblique head of adductor hallucis between the great and index proximal phalanges without chipping a bone". Unless the reader is aware of medical terms for various parts of the foot, neither sentence makes more sense than the other. Gray is fully aware of the power of the written word, as if he had not brought the statement into question, the great majority of his readers would have accepted it as a sound medical analysis. However, as he takes on the persona of the editor, he has put himself into a position to make the reader aware of this power. In a similar way to the etching, the accuracy of the medical description has no bearing on the novel, but is Gray's way of making the point that what is written cannot be assumed to be fact. Although this may seem rather obvious, if I personally looked back over the multitude of books that I have read, there must have been countless occasions of me blindly accepting a similar statement without a second thought. In this way, Gray has used his persona as editor to provoke thought and contemplation in the reader over the book that they have just read. What better way could Gray have found for his piece of writing to have a lasting effect on its reader? Once again, Gray has hidden the key to the entire novel in the epilogue, on this occasion on pages 274-5 of Victoria's letter. The sentence reads: "If you ignore what contradicts common sense and this letter you will find that this book records some actual events during a dismal era... it is as sham-gothic as the Scott Monument". Gray fully realises that his novel is fantastical and the period in which it is set is outwith his own experience. However, Poor Things is the kind of novel which, when read for a second time, offers the reader a whole new perspective on the goings-on and Gray is actively encouraging his readership to do this. By printing the book in a certain order, each section offers a new perspective on the previous ones, encouraging re-reading.

Work as though you lived in the better days of a younger nation

Not for everyone, but it will appeal to those with macabre humor.

I just finished the book a few hours ago and it's the best book I've read in a while. "Poor Things" is the story of a lonely doctor, Godwin, who reanimates a beautiful woman's body who commited suicide (in a unique Frankenstein-esque fashion). Godwin's creation was meant to be for his own selfish desire but like every Frankenstein story it goes horribly awry. The books goes into detail bringing you into points of view from every character, not letting you forgot what happened, and using excellent foreshadowing. Make sure you read the extra writings at the end of the book to get the full impact of Alisdair Gray's skills.

This is a powerful and unusual novel. I'm surprised that Gray isn't more widely known. His writing is challenging but rewarding.

The story behind 1982 Janine's publication is a suitably rabelasian fable in its own right. Upon original publication, the novel displeased critics who had previously praised Gray, as Anthony Burgess (though not as harshly as Gray's supporters would have you believe; see Homage to QWERTYUIOP for the proof) and led the terminally 'politcally correct' and others of their ilk to outrightly condemn it. The latter mob were fussing over nothing. Gray has described this as his favourite among his novels. It is certainly one of the 'big three' (together with, of course, Lanark and Poor Things) in Gray's oeuvre, and while it does not scale the heights that Lanark did (which Gray wrote over almost twenty years), it is still a great achievement in its own right.

It has all the typographical pyrotechnics Unlikely Stories, Mostly had, which are always to the point, and never mere exercises in chaotic artlessness certain types would have you believe they are. This is most true of the famous 'breakdown chapter', which Irvine Welsh has difplagged time and time again. Jock McLeish is the Holy Fool, living on fragments of memory, alcohol and sex fantasies, leading up to a confrontation with God and a decision to take his own life by the horns and work as if he was living in the early days of a better nation. Neither Jonathan Coe or the late B.S. Johnson (the latter was almost Gray's equal; the former tries to be) could match this novel's achievements, depth and honesty. The introduction by Will Self (in the new Canongate edition) is good reading, too. Buy.

1982 Janine is set in the consciousness of a middle-aged inspector of security systems, holed up in a small Scottish hotel with a bottle of whisky, trying to have sexual fantasies. So far, so unpromising. The trouble is, his memories of his (far from satisfying) life keep getting in the way. And so the book continues, with Jock's baroque and teeth-gratingly embarrassing fantasies (big-breasted women in leather skirts, behaving badly) displaced more and more frequently by the shabby and unflattering truth - Jock is aware that he is a small, not very brave man who has spent his life making bad decision after bad decision. Eventually he swallows a bottle of sleeping pills. And that's not even the third last chapter, so I'm not spoiling anything for you. This is a brilliant novel - Gray's style is (as ever) classical, measured and almost pedantically correct, but it fits Jock as well as the three-piece suits he's worn since his college days. There are some barkingly insane typographical maneuvres in the wake of the pill-swallowing episode, but that's all just to set up what comes next. The comedy is grim and the sadness is awful, but there's real catharsis there for those who can appreciate it. My favourite of Gray's novels - leaner and tougher (if not as wild and ambitious) than Lanark, and less whimsical than much of his later work. The paperback edition is completed with his now-characteristic inclusion of snippets from the book's worst reviews.

I have a headache. This book was one of the most bittersweet reads I can remember: a page where I'm engrossed, followed by a page where I'm grossed out (by the author's style, not the content). I'm open to all sorts of subtle and not-so-subtle literary devices, and Alasdair Gray's 1982 JANINE embarks on a journey of writing creativity with all the tenderness of a sledgehammer.

The premise of Gray's story is interesting: a burned-out, middle-aged businessman drowning his sorrows in a shabby motel room while concocting a series of farfetched sexual fantasies--all in an effort to smother the overwhelming dreariness of his actual life. A plot dripping with existentialism, to be sure, and Gray's furious (often unreadable) style creates a mood of despair and frustration that conjures up enough alcohol-induced pink elephants to fill the San Diego Zoo. Yet the style also works against the story, as it becomes redundant to the point where its impact is lost. And as an aside, Gray's (through his protagonist) preoccupation with white silk blouses and button-down denim skirts became downright annoying. I would have preferred to have seen a little spandex, myself.

This is no "light" read; the author's style requires the reader to pay close attention. Yet there is a literally unreadable chapter--when Jock, our protagonist, takes a bottle of sleeping pills on top of his fifth of whiskey--where my heart went out to the copy editor who had to tackle all the nonsensical and upside down prose. The author waits until the end of his story to tell us the intimate details of Jock's trials and tribulations, then gives us an anticlimactic ending in the form of a very weak epiphany that doesn't measure up to all of the madness running rampant through the preceding pages. So as I reach for the aspirin, I would like to believe that 1982 JANINE is a metaphorical Mae West: when it's good, it's very, very good--when it's bad, it's blathering nonsense.

--D. Mikels

Maybe I missed something, but this didn't do a lot for me. It's a jumbled up ragbag of ideas which don't fit together coherently while its characters are unlikeable and without much individuality.
The story starts in a depressing world called Unthank, and follows the character Lanark as he arrives in town. He craves for sunlight in a world where there is none and since he's fast turning into a dragon he decides to throw himself down a large mouth in the ground (as you do...).
He comes out the other end in an institute where he is cured of his dragonhide and becomes a doctor for a short while before, like me, getting very bored and frustrated with the place.
So he decides to leave but that's quite dangerous involving a trip across an intercalendrical zone. Inevitably he leaves the hospital and takes along his girlfriend who, unsatisfyingly, doesn't seem to display any affection towards him at all.
In the intercalendrical zone, time moves erratically, and his girlfriend discovers she's heavily pregnant. They return to Unthank in the expectation that shortly the place will be swallowed by an even larger mouth and they'll be transferred to a sunnier land.
But Rima leaves Lanark, taking the (talking) baby with her. Lanark is then sent on a mission to return to the institute to ask them to save Unthank, which has suffered a pollution spill that threatens to destroy the place. At the institute he is stitched up by his rivals and finds time to meet the author of the book, who spends a chapter trying to explain what the hell the book is about. Lanark returns from the institute to Unthank in time to witness the place destroyed.
Books one and two in the middle tell the story of Duncan Thaw (Lanark before arriving in book three) and surprisingly this part of the book is a lot more readable. The chapters follow Thaw as he grows from a child to a sickly adult. There are some parallels with the Lanark story (Thaw is emotionally inhibited, he suffers an illness as a result, he can't keep hold of the girl he likes). In my opinion, if this story stood alone it would be a much more satisfying read. It's very reminiscent of the writer Iain Banks who no doubt was inspired by Gray. Interesting also the split between contemporary fiction and sci-fi which Banks also practices. However, in my opinion, a book like Walking On Glass by Banks is far superior to Lanark in that it made me think about the connections between the strands of the stories.
I suppose my review is a little biased because I'm not a huge fan of science fiction any more. But since the author asserts in his incarnation as god in the final chapters that he doesn't write science fiction I suppose I shouldn't worry.

I don't know if no one has reviewed this tome for fear of where angels tread lightly or what, but I have to say something about this amazing book, if for no other reason than to start a dialogue.

I first heard of this book from a Village Voice article about the republication of "Lanark" in a four-volume set. The structure of this edition is that it begins with Book 3, followed by the Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, and Book 4 is divided by an Epilogue that takes place 4 chapters from the end. This convoluted structure actually makes the book rather fascinating, in that Gray has said that he wishes for the book to be remembered in a certain order, which is why he put "Book 3" first. This edition also features artworks by the artist at the front of each Book, and the Epilogue features some interesting typesetting.

For readers of science fiction, this book will offer an interesting challenge, for books 1 and 2 are more a coming-of-age of the artist sort of affair. Books 3 and 4 center around the Lanark character, who is called Thaw in 1 and 2. The Thaw books reminded me many times of Maugham and Joyce, while 3 and 4 seemed positively Dickian. (Not to be confused with Dickensian, which slant-applies, if at all.) There's a lot of ferocious literariness going on in this book, yet there's all sorts of humor. And also a slice of life in a city I know absolutely nothing about. The depictions and commentary on Glasgow reveal a lot about the self-consciousness of 2nd-tier and below cities--the cities that are not New York, London, Florence, Paris, Moscow, etc.

I found this a wise book, filled with difficult ideas and a morose feel for the future of mankind and the difficulties of being a solitary individual in the anomie-infested modern civilization. Book 4 I think is a fascinating attempt to turn Hobbes's Leviathan into a sentient being, as viewed by the hapless adventures of the eponymous hero. I will be thinking about this book for a long time.

"Lanark" was first published in 1981, but its author spent 20 years writing it. And it's indeed a massive piece. The whole book is divided into four books (starting with book 3). I think it's one serious classic novel, sadly not as famous as it ought to be; but this here review will change that for the best. Of course.

This novel is a bit of two stories in one. There's a "surreal" story and a more autobiographical "realist" story. If I was to go into details, this would quickly become very complicated. It's not exactly an easy read, but it's worth it. I don't even know how I am going to say anything about it without going crazy...

The story begins in a world which at first seems fairly common, but quickly turns into something you're not familiar with. I won't say more on that, but it's a kind of hell, or afterlife of some sort. Within that frame, the second story occurs (or the first, since book 1 and 2 are the "realist" story and book 3 and 4 are the surreal world). The order of the books is: 3,1,2 and 4. I'm sure this sounds messy as hell but I promise it makes much more sense when you are into the book.

Book 1 and 2 are very much autobiographical of Gray's life, though not an actual biography. In short, Duncan Thaw (the main character) is a young boy living in Glasgow and we follow him throughout his (short) life, and then in the afterlife world, hence the subtitle of the book "a life in four books." Duncan is a very talented boy and grows up to be an art student (Gray worked as an art teacher for a long time, and is a great painter himself, he did all the illustrations found in Lanark). I can't say enough those two books, I think I prefer them over the surreal ones but they're not quite comparable.

As to book 3 and 4, I'll give you a tiny taste of it with the following stuff: the story begins in the city of Unthank, and it's a bit of an urban hell where the sun shines for a few minutes each day. That's where Lanark is, and he has no memories of his past. He wants sunshine and love. In that world, people "disappear," and that won't make sense till you're further into the novel. But I'll tell you what, people get strange diseases in this world, and these diseases reflect the problem with them. Eventually everyones is... can I even say that without sounding completely weird... everyone is swallowed by giant mouths into the "institute," which is a place much like hell, only it's an hospital where these people, who have "disappeared," are treated. I won't say more because it's important that you find out for yourself (and anyway summing this stuff up is just like talking about an acid trip).

Gray is a really brilliant writer and his books 1 and 2 are stuff to be worshipped. Maybe I'll post selected bits later on in this thread. I really recommend this for anyone interested in something that will surely be looked upon as one of the best novels ever written in the universe (no less). It's already a big classic in contemporary literature, but my guess is it won't cease to grow.

First published in 1981 and set in the dystopic cities of Unthank and Glasgow, Lanark: A Life In Four Books by Alasdair Gray is an emotional and starkly brilliant saga about the struggle to love despite contradictions and vices in human nature that attack bonds of care or trust. A bleak yet compelling vision of survival and the endless search for something more in life, Lanark consists of parallel tales of an eponymous hero living in a bizarre city of the future called Unthank, and Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian of the twentieth century. This edition of Lanark is enhanced with a new foreword by novelist Janice Galloway and includes Alasdair Gray's "Tailpiece" which serves as an unusual addendum to this surreal and highly recommended novel.

After a decade and a bit of footling around with pleasant but whimsical novels and the occasional killer short story, Alasdair Gray has finally delivered his long-promised anthology of English-language prefaces. And what a treasure it is. Designed and presented with the author's characteristic loving care, it's a mighty selection of beginnings-of-books from Anglo-Saxon down to 1920 or so (more recent prefaces being excluded because of copyright laws.)

Besides the sheer wealth of Stuff To Read, there are dense, canny and wonderfully sure-footed essays on the progress-or-not of English culture'n'society courtesy of Mister Gray, plus marginal glosses by a variety of highly intelligent people and also Roger Scruton. Scruton (England's dimmest philosopher) provides the gloss on the preface to Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", and offers up his customary brand of simple-minded conservatism, but it doesn't matter because Gray has already neatly undercut him several dozen pages earlier with his own reflections on the revolution.

A book to keep with you for the rest of your life and leave to someone in your will. There haven't been many such in the past 50 years. And while the errata slip isn't quite exhaustive (there are a few typos that it fails to credit), how can you resist it when it's written in rhyme?

For many years in catalogues of forthcoming publications Alsadair Gray's Anthology of Prefaces has been referred to. Some suspected a Gray type joke as the book failed to appear year on year. Was it a post modern joke? Gray after all was the man that had an erratum slip inserted in an earlier book reading "This erratum slip was inserted by mistake." The apparent joke was taken too far when one catalogue of second hand books published almost a decade ago suggested that the book had not appreciated in value and was worth roughly £20 second hand. This was not a bad sum for a non-existent text. Snippets of text appeared occasionally, and while the book remained unpublished it became apparent that Gray was beginnning to make serious progress on the work. It then became known that others were assisting Gray in his task of glossing the prefaces including crucially important Scottish writers such as Jim Kelman, Tom Leonard, Janice Galloway, and Alison Kennedy.

So now the book has arrived. The title has changed (now The Book of Prefaces, rather than an anthology). The price rather more than the suggested second hand value.

And it is well worth the wait. This will stand as a monument to Gray's achievements as an artist (of words and of pictures). His remit has been to produce a history of literature in English from the sixth century to the present day.

This is a book to revel in. Among prefaces to novels and poems (from the well known, such as Mary Shelley's genesis of Frankenstein to the less well known such as Trahern's poetry) there are prefaces (and prologues) to works of philosophy (e.g. Bentham and Franklin) and law (the introduction to Stair's Institutions, a crucially important work in the survival of Scots law as an independent legal system).

The book is beautifully illustrated, wonderfully designed, and contains a charming introduction by Gray detailing reasons for prefaces and for enjoying reading them (my favourite, enjoying watching authors in a huff).

This book will be an invaluable companion through life, and careful reading will have the desired effect of making an individual appear better read and more erudite than they really are.

Buy and enjoy this wonderful book.

I picked this book up at the library because it had an interesting look to it. It is unusually designed and weirdly illustrated. It's great to have all these wonderful prefaces in one handy volume, but Gray, who supplies an introduction and many of the glosses, writes in a kind of shorthand, staccato style that is unpleasant, and he has weak control of comma usage. I might have bought this book except for Gray's writing style.

Few authors are as inventive as Gray. This work combines both old fashioned legends and science fiction, and leaves the reader pondering the idea of what makes a hero, and why society finds the need to construct them.

How can I review a book that's essentially indescribable? For one thing, A HISTORY MAKER isn't really a novel but a Stapledonian future-history in miniature, although it's too short and succinct to fit comfortably into that rambling genre. Perhaps the closest to Gray in style, wit, and profoundly enraged (civilized) humanism is my favorite Italian, Umberto Eco -- but A HISTORY MAKER remains apart from BAUDOLINO or any other surreal, fantasy or science fiction novel I've ever read. I've devoured about 3 or 4 such books each week for the past fifty-five years, so I'm a fair judge.

If A HISTORY MAKER isn't a novel, nor a full-blown future history, what is it? It certainly is not, as the London DAILY TELEGRAPH blurb has it, "Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball." I bought the book a few years ago because a friend recommended it, but when I got it home I did a double-take at that awful blurb, which I dare say was meant as a come-on. It turned me off so I put A HISTORY MAKER up on a high shelf till this week. I'll grant the strong possibility of Borderer Walter Scott's influence, but comparing this book to "Rollerball" is hyter-styte, as Wat Dryhope might say. So's the literary review labeling the language in this book "futuristic," when it's nocht but auld lang syne Scots Lowland tongue.

"Rollerball" as I recall pandered to the superficially grown-up but socially preadolescent male who can't deal with his own testosterone but lacks the vigor to bash everything in sight -- and therefore does so vicariously. A HISTORY MAKER starts out misleading the reader into thinking that it might just be another one of those silly "heroic" war stories. But strobblin' Wat makes an unusual and highly imperfect hero -- confused, dour, educated, ambivalent, attractive to women, hating bloodshed but a braw warrior, a natural leader. I see him as Gray's future incarnation of Robert Bruce, who was no pulp fiction cowboy hero, but one of history's genuinely great men. Bruce, too, embodied the same characteristics; they even share a preference for ponies instead of gigantic warhorses.

Once we realize that Wat lives, as Walt Whitman wrote, "in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it," Gray has begun the process of standing the whole genre of male violence and hero worship on its doitered heid, and he keeps on till any sane person would be embarrassed ever again to take The Alamo, The Somme, Rambo or Iraq seriously. At the same time the author understands that male boredom and feelings of inadequacy are at the root of it all, and he sympathizes, as should we all. None the less, the older women, not the men, are the saviors of civilization in this book.

I can't really describe A HISTORY MAKER. I can only revel in Gray's use of language, the punning names, the snatches of folklore and off-color doggerel, the tweaking of asinine Thatcherism/Toryism and love of liberty, and -- in the finest sci-fi tradition -- the casual way in which his Scotland of the 23rd Century is introduced to us. The story ends like a Mozart symphony, exactly when it should. As would occur in a genuine historical document, background, a glossary of Scots words, and what-happened-next get explained in five "historical" chapters after the story's end, plus a postscript. We could compare these post-chapters to Tolkein's in THE RETURN OF THE KING, but Gray's are as hysterical as they are historical -- parodies. After such a wrap-up there can be no sequel, so enjoy A HISTORY MAKER while it lasts. It's a brief book but nigh-hand perfect.

After _Poor Things_, Gray's wonderful satire of Victorian literature, sexual politics, social convention, and who knows what else, I expected even solider and more inventive structure and style in _A History Maker_. Unfortunately the book is terribly uneven, the concluding chapters so rushed that the potentially important Delilah Puddock and the licentiousness she represents are insufficiently developed, the endnotes not carrying the comic punch of those in _Poor Things_ (or Nabokov's _Pale Fire_). Not a bad dystopian novel, better than average, but not Gray's best book either.