Alasdair Gray

[DaveF]

The death has just been announced of the Scottish novelist, painter, graphic artist, short-story writer, poet, translator, essayist... Alasdair Gray:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/29/alasdair-gray-influential-scottish-writer-and-artist-dies-aged-85

His first novel Lanark has been called the greatest novel of the second half of the 20th century (although it's been called lots of other things as well), and is remarkable for its illustrations and typographical inventiveness, as well as sheer imaginative and literary quality.  8 more novels followed, as well as volumes of short stories and poetry.  Scottish, and British, literature has lost a unique and humane voice.  His motto was: Work as though you were in the early days of a better nation.

Purely personally, Lanark has been my constant companion since its publication in 1981, and I am just reading - for the first time, shame on me - his last novel, Old Men in Love, published 12 years ago.  Any other Gray fans here?

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Purely personally, Lanark has been my constant companion since its publication in 1981, and I am just reading - for the first time, shame on me - his last novel, Old Men in Love, published 12 years ago.  Any other Gray fans here?

I read Lanark ages ago, on the recommendation of Anthony Burgess in his book about the 99 (or maybe 100) best novels in English. I found it hugely impressive, even if a bit uneven: the more realistic, autobiographical half of the story impressed me more than the science-fiction half of it. Haven't read any of his other works, however.

My understanding is that he was actually an artist for most of his life, and came to fiction writing quite late.

[DaveF]

Yes, Lanark was published when he was 46, which seems young to me now but is nevertheless late for a first novel.  Up until then he had made a living out of painting and illustrating, plus the odd published story and television play, plus the inevitable teaching.  His story A Report to the Trustees of the Bellahouston Travelling Scholarship is a typically downbeat and bleakly humorous account of an episode from his Art School days - purporting to be a transcript of the actual report submitted to the said Trustees, although you can never tell with Gray.

I think the two parts of Lanark are fairly intimately interlinked, despite Gray's self-deprecating comment in the book's Epilogue that these correspondences are purely matters of typography.  Elsewhere he has said that Thaw and Lanark are basically the same character, except that Thaw is an insane person in a sane world (Glasgow), whereas in the Unthank/Provan books the neuroses have moved out of the character into the outside world itself.  But, whether dark or light, sane or insane, the whole book reads like a huge song of love, sometimes very bitter and frustrated love, to Glasgow itself.  Perhaps it helps to be, as I am, only one generation away from Glasgow.  The very end, where the flood retreats and the early morning light pours over a city that is Glasgow, Unthank and Provan all-in-one is for me a particularly touching and moving passage.

And as for the other stuff... 1982, Janine seems even more daring and experimental than Lanark, although couched in the form of an almost endless pornographic fantasy.  (One of Gray's more endearing practices is to print, at the end of several of his books, unfavourable as well as favourable critical notices, and there are plenty of the former at the end of Janine - although, as always with Gray, you can never be sure if they're genuine; the "Sidney Workman", of "Linoleum Terrace", Kirkcaldy, whose letters he also prints, isn't real.)  And I also enjoyed the story collections: Lean Tales and Unlikely Stories, Mostly, and am going slowly through Old Men in Love with a good deal of pleasure, although it does seem like a slightly inferior re-write of Poor Things from 15 years earlier.  But I shall just have to re-read everything, I can see, and perhaps persuade someone to buy me the collected short stories.  I can't put it better than Will Self does in his introduction to Old Men in Love: "He's the very best Alasdair Gray that we have, and we should cherish his works accordingly."

And another link to finish with: http://alasdairgray.info/

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I think the two parts of Lanark are fairly intimately interlinked, despite Gray's self-deprecating comment in the book's Epilogue that these correspondences are purely matters of typography.  Elsewhere he has said that Thaw and Lanark are basically the same character, except that Thaw is an insane person in a sane world (Glasgow), whereas in the Unthank/Provan books the neuroses have moved out of the character into the outside world itself. 

The Duncan Thaw part is obviously autobiographical. I don't know how closely Thaw tracks Gray himself, but you can tell he's writing about some sensitive, traumatic stuff from his own early life. One critic said the Thaw story was like a particularly depressing version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I think that captures the spirit of it pretty well.

[DaveF]

Yes, completely.  Thaw's life is very like that of his author as described in the Report to the Trustees... - asthma, eczema, sexual frustration etc.  And Gray himself was from the east end of Glasgow.  There's also a rather cheeky moment in Lanark where Lanark first presents himself at the Social Security office in Unthank and astonishes his interviewer by claiming to remember his own name - although all he can recall is "a short word beginning with Th or Gr".