“Have you a library?”
“We have two: one for film and one for music. I am in charge of the latter.”
“What about books?”
“Books?”
I read it first I think when I was in my late teens. It is coupled in my memory with Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers , and I’m not entirely sure why. I suspect I must have read them at the same time, or one after the other, or perhaps Burgess’s endorsement of Alasdair Gray got me to Lanark (“Gray is the best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott”). Anyway. Earthly Powers has some explicit gay sex scenes, and Lanark confused me. So one of them was regularly consulted and the other was read once, fast, and I wasn’t sure that it had fully settled in me.
Lanark was too disturbed to feel the tears on his face. He said,
“You don’t know me. I’m not called Thaw. I’ve been none of these things. I’m something commonplace that keeps getting hurt.”
And although reading it now is much like reading it for the first time, there are scenes and lines that are suddenly, acutely, familiar; and I have had the occasional nagging sense that ideas in it have found their way into my own work. Though I may be mistaking being human for being a writer. It’s a book full of recognition. I’m like that . Or, I know someone who does that . Or - this is the way it works .
Duncan shut his mouth. After a few minutes Mr. Thaw said on a note of pleading,
“Tell me the matter, Duncan.”
“I had a wish to be an artist. Was that not mad of me? I had this work of art I wanted to make, don’t ask me what it was, I don’t know; something epic, mibby, with the variety of facts and the clarity of fancies and all of it seen in pictures with a queer morbid intense colour of their own, mibby a gigantic mural or illustrated book or even a film. I didn’t know what it would have been, but I knew how to get ready to make it. I had to read poetry and hear music and study philosophy and write and draw and paint. I had to learn how things and people felt and were made and behaved and how the human body worked, and its appearance and proportions in different situations. In fact, I had to eat the bloody moon!”
A quick summary … is difficult. There are four Books, and they are presented to us in the order 3, 1, 2, 4. Books 1 and 2 form a structurally straightforward, realist account of the short life of Duncan Thaw from boyhood to early adulthood in and around Glasgow. He wants to be an artist. He is doomed. Books 3 and 4 bracket this conventional narrative with the peculiar adventures of Lanark, a version of Thaw in a version of Glasgow called Unthank - and other places - that is fantastical and absurd and which echoes what we know with the grotesque distortion of what we suspect. Lanark wants sunlight and love. He is doomed.
Lanark ran to his bed, grabbed the radio and flicked the switch; he said, “Get Dr. Munro! Get me Dr. Munro!”
A small clear voice said, “Who is speaking, please?”
“I’m called Lanark.”
“Dr. Lanark?”
“No! No! I’m a patient, but a man is dying!”
“Dying naturally?”
“Yes, dying, dying!”
He heard the voice say. “Will Dr. Munro report quickly to Dr. Lanark, a man is dying naturally; I repeat, a man is dying naturally.”
It’s often funny. Earnest young men usually are. And it’s an easy, relaxed read, despite its length and the peculiarity of the structure. Things happen. People talk. It fairly gallops along. It’s full of bits you’ll want to mark and come back to. It’s quotable. And it has Gray’s own beautiful bookplates to ruin your eyesight on.
Like a lot of readers, I am moved more by the story of Duncan Thaw than I am by the rest of it. I find it impossible to read of the death of Mrs Thaw without weeping. And I love Mr Thaw. I love his good sense and his dignity, and his patience with his son. I love his love. Thaw himself is a pain in the arse of course, but my god, he’ll break your heart. And he is, more than Lanark, the emotional centre of the book. He’s where the reader stands. This reader anyway. Despite the fact that his life is narrated to Lanark, and that Lanark is the container, it is Thaw that makes sense to me. The book insists that what we understand about Thaw is bracketed by what we don’t understand about Lanark. It is from the sunless confusion of Unthank, up to the familiar streets of Glasgow, and then back down again, that the book and the reader moves.
I wanted madness to blot out the memories with the strong tones and colours of a delusion, however monstrous. I had a romantic notion that madness was an exit from unbearable existence. But madness is like cancer or bronchitis, not everyone is capable of it, and when most of us say, “I can’t bear this,” we are proving we can.
But I can’t really get along with Unthank, the Institute, Provan, the Council - all the elaborate architecture that exists in Books 3 and 4, and which seems ultimately, to me, to do not much more than elucidate by deprivation what we get from books 1 and 2. As with all delineated fantasy a fair bit of time is spent on exposition. Time spent explaining a metaphor is time spent weakening it. The best bits of 3 and 4 are the formless, drifting intuitions and impressionistic resignations of Lanark. When he simply falls into a sad acceptance that he doesn’t know what the hell is going on, and that it isn’t fair. Which is when he is mostly Thaw. Sometimes you get the feeling that his (Thaw’s, Lanark’s and Gray’s) fear of women might derail things completely, or that the voluble self-conscious nervousness about everything will swamp us. The trouble taken to get him into politics towards the end, and have him attend the Council assembly in Provan, feels to me less like a nod to Kafka and more like a kind of epileptic fit to him. It does create a powerful pathos, finally, but it seems like an over amplified insistence on universality, on extrapolating the cruelties of Thaw’s small world into a larger one.
“Attention, please note! Attention, please note! The expansion committee announces that after the hundred and eighteenth all twittering is to be treated as a sign of hopelessness.”
I have a dim memory of feeling that Books 3 and 4 were over my head the first time I read them. Now though I get the sense that Unthank is half vision of the messy innards of the capitalist mistake, and half a topography of Gray’s own lack of confidence. Because there’s too much of it, for me. And it’s too clever - its contrivances laid bare and pointed at are contrivances nevertheless. There is too much elaboration and emphasis. By the time Gray himself appears, as Nastler, the king, to tell Lanark how it’s all going to end, and to parade his “Index of Plagiarisms” (they are no such thing), I’d had about enough.
Which is probably why Gray brings it all to a halt not long after. It’s too fine a book, and he is too skilled a story teller, to ever actually lose the reader. And in any case, he anticipates and undermines this sort of criticism, sometimes by directly making it himself, from inside the text, more often through his wonderful sense of pace and timing and tone. Lanark is persistently engaging. For a book that is 560 pages long, written over the best part of 30 years, that is some achievement.
And make no mistake. I’m the man who climbs a mountain and is moved to tears by the view but complains then about the ache in his knees. Lanark is one of the great books. There is nothing comparable really. Idiosyncratic and berserk, it swells in my nit-picking consciousness with a generosity of spirit and an ache of love and sadness that did, it seems, after all, settle in me all those years ago, hidden, like a piece of advice, waiting for me to be old and broken down enough to hear it.
And it’s what Thaw, and Lanark, and Gray are really interested in and long for - kindness, fairness, and love - that Lanark delivers. Gray’s socialism and his furious compassion for people animate this book. It’s full to bursting, but with a very calm centre, and if there are stutters and hesitations and missteps, Gray is well aware of them, and they are honest and involving. And Lanark trips through this clutter of obstacles and doubts and diversions, and emerges as a bright, sunlit memorial to the ideas of art and decency and generosity and love. And when all that fails - as it inevitably does - we are left at least with the hope of “annihilating sweetness.”
I fear that the men of a healthier age will think my story a gafuffle of grotesquely frivolous parasites, like the creatures of Mrs. Radcliffe, Tolkien and Mervyn Peake. Perhaps my model world is too compressed and lacks the quiet moments of unconsidered ease which are the sustaining part of the most troubled world. Perhaps I began the work when I was too young. In those days I thought light existed to show things, that space was simply a gap between me and the bodies I feared or desired; now it seems that bodies are the stations from which we travel into space and light itself. Perhaps an illusionist’s main job is to exhaust his restless audience by a show of marvellously convincing squabbles until they see the simple things we really depend upon: the movement of shadow round a globe turning in space, the corruption of a life on its way to death and the spurt of love by which it throws a new life clear. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write a story in which adjectives like commonplace and ordinary have the significance which glorious and divine carried in earlier comedies. What do you think?
