Lanark (Canongate Classics)

Description

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Customer Reviews

It was the best of times, ...
.... Wait! No it wasn't. It was the worst of times (again!), I think. Or, the times were at least as bad as the last time. But, what's happened to time? And, what's happened to place? Most of all, what's happened to me?

We are being taken somewhere that is not like where we were, but we can't remember where we were - or when. There's that time thing again; maybe, we think, we don't need time; but we do, so we have to find a way to find some.

This book is about something, somewhen, leading somewhere with some point that Gray wanted to make. I really hope he made it. It isn't important whether I recognized it as it went by. I was trying to figure out how I could avoid being what, when and where this was.

The main character is named Lanark and/or Thaw. He, or one of him, is dead. Or, the one who was that is now dead is also the one who is now alive or this second one is the dead first one somewhere else. Whatever he is, he isn't very likable. This puts him in good company with every other unlikable person. We are told about him(s) and the others by the author or the author's author.

Is a metafiction created by the author as author the same as a metafiction created by the author about another author? Is it still a metafiction or is it only the author sticking himself into the one fiction? Does the answer to either of those questions make a bit of difference? And, was there any reason for the last question, before this, or was it presumed to be asked before it, or this second question before this question mark and after the previous?

Confused (there should be a question mark next, but I don't want this to be confused as being a part of the previous questions, so I'll consider 'Confused' (the first) to be a statement of fact rather than an interrogatory).

It is worth the price of the book to read the Epilogue (which isn't one). By the by, Part 1 is not first, either; though, given everything else going on, no one should expect it to be. And, part of the time is spent in hell. All for one inclusive price and set of pages - that include Gray's art work.

To put it succinctly, if you need a book to start at A and go to Z and say The End - run from this one. If you need a book to actually make sense in such a way that you know what's going on or has gone on - join the race to the door. If you need likable characters or characters that make sense - recite the Who's on First? routine as you put this book down (un-bought).

If anyone is left, this is not an easy book to read or like - but it is a lot of fun. That's why I spend so much time reading. I've ordered three more by Gray. Consider that statement as a recommendation for this one.

2010-07-21 (Oklahoma USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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Poor Things (British Literature Series)

Product Details

• Mould: USED - Very Good
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• ISBN13: 9781564783073

Description

POOR THINGS revises the story of FRANKENSTEIN by replacing the traditional "monster" with Bella Baxter--a young erotomaniac brought back to life with the brain of a child. Satirizing the classic Victorian novel, POOR THINGS is a hilarious political allegory and a thought-provoking contrast between the ambition of men and the knowledge of women.

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The full title of this work, Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer, reflect a bit of wacky genius at work here. Someone named Alasdair Gray has found a memoir supposedly of a 19th-century public health officer in Glasgow. The truth of the memoir is suspect, nevertheless Gray manages to change it and then lose it. And that's just the backdrop. Inside the memoir is the story of McCandless, an acquaintance named Godwyn Bysshe Baxter who takes a suicide victim, gives her the brain of her unborn child to create a promiscuous and brutal girlfriend. The book, which won the 1992 Guardian Fiction Prize, takes off from there.

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Customer Reviews

One of his best
This is one of Alasdair Gray's best books. Be prepared to learn some Scots as you read this. Gray can be compared to Mark Twain -- their compelling use of vernacular, their concern for human rights, their use of contradiction and wonder at the cruelty of their fellow peoples.

2009-06-22 (Suisse) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Eccentric alternate history/fantasy
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.

2003-01-26 | www.engel-cox.org (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 4

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Great book
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.

2002-10-22 (Staten Island, NY) | Helpful Votes: 7 | Rating: 5

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

2001-09-19 | sielaff68 (Chicago, IL United States) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Merchant Ivory Gone Wrong - Poor Things by Alasdair Gray
'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.

1999-04-29 | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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Lanark (Harvest Book)

Description

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Customer Reviews

amazing
This was the first novel I read by Alasdair Gray and i wasn't disappointed in the least bit. The story is incredibly imaginative, always taking a unique turn in a direction i did not expect and have not seen with another other author. Gray's writing nails many aspects of life encountered in other books, but is accurate and meaningful.

2009-10-13 | basement safe | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Playful
One of the modern great novels, though certainly a slap in the face to academia (The Institute). Alasdair Gray has read widely and with such thought that he can be so playful with many themes. Read his Book of Prefaces, whether you enjoyed this massive and sometimes rambling headtrip of book or not. I feel William S Burroughs' Cities of the Red Night trilogy to be one of the only modern literary worlds to compare with . . .

2009-03-02 (Perth, Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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I did like the book cover though....
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

2007-11-04 (Greenville, SC USA) | Helpful Votes: 4 | Rating: 3

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A landmark in Scottish literature
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.

2001-09-24 | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 5

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A legible nightmare
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.

2001-08-27 | benonemillion | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 5

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The Book of Prefaces

Description

This book is a unique history of how literature spread and developed through three British nations and most North American states. This anthology gathers the work of great writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Lewis Carroll, John Milton, Edgar Allan Poe, and many more. The Book of Prefaces offers an unusual and unprecedented look at literature, a treat for any reader.

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The preface usually contains one of four pleasures, says anthologist Alasdair Gray. There is the biographical snippet, full of gossipy details that "make us feel at home in earlier times." There is the author's attempt to forestall criticism (in first editions) or to answer it (in later ones). There is the report on the state of civilization, both favorable (see Walt Whitman) and unfavorable (see Karl Marx). And there is the attack on other writers or translators, sometimes bridging centuries and containing spears thrown at the long dead. All four pleasures are well represented in this 640-page treasury of English and American intros, which runs from an A.D. 675 translation of Genesis to the 1920 poems of Wilfred Owen. Why stop there? "The flow is stopped at 1920," admits Gray in his own disarmingly self-effacing preface, "by costs of using work still in copyright."

This is anything but anthology-on-the-cheap, however. Gray (Lanark and A History Maker) poured 16 years of research into The Book of Prefaces, and adds considerable value with his own running commentary, which straggles down the margins in brash red ink. Gray on the God of Genesis: "This God, with revenge in mind, first makes earth ugly as hell." Among God's anthologized fellows are Mark Twain, who defends his use of Southern dialect in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Lewis Carroll, who anticipates his critics' charges of writing nonsense in The Hunting of the Snark and proceeds to prove their case; and Charles Darwin, who recalls how the seeds of The Origin of Species were sown aboard the HMS Beagle. Gray mixes scholarly research with playful eccentricities: When was the last time you saw a book's typesetter, typist, and publisher memorialized in pen-and-ink drawings? And "with this in their lavatory," writes the cheeky author, "everyone else can read nothing but newspaper supplements and still seem educated." He may be right. --Claire Dederer

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Customer Reviews

Thank You for your Efforts
What a wonderful book in so many ways. Mr Gray has always known how to produce a visually and physically appealling book. His playfulness in this wide reaching book makes the history of literature human: which, of course, it is. Alasdair Gray has not been recognised, outside his native Scotland, for the amazing talents he has; he is one writer who will last for a very long time.

2009-03-07 (Perth, Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Disappointed
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.

2001-02-05 (Westerville, OH USA) | Helpful Votes: 2 | Rating: 3

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It was worth the wait, Mr. Gray
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?

2000-06-08 | lexo-2 | Helpful Votes: 10 | Rating: 5

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A labour of love but no labour to love
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.

2000-06-02 | scottish_lawyer | Helpful Votes: 18 | Rating: 5

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1982, Janine (Canongate Classics)

Description

1982, Janine is a liberal novel of the most satisfying kind. Set over the course of one night inside the head of Jock McLeish, an aging, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations, as he tipples in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel, it makes an unanswerable case that republicanism is a state of absolute spiritual bankruptcy. For Jock McLeish, being a Republican is something he has to cure himself of, every bit as much as his alcoholism and his Sado-Masochistic fantasizing, if he is to become a human being again. 1982, Janine explores themes of male need and inadequacy through the lonely, darkly comic, alcohol-fueled fantasies of its protagonist. An unforgettably challenging book about power and powerlessness, men and women, masters and servants, small countries and big countries, Alasdair Gray's exploration of the politics of pornography has lost none of its power to shock.

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Customer Reviews

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

2007-03-21 | lwjk (Columbia, MD) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Demonstrably Demented
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

2003-12-18 | It's always Happy Hour here (Skunk Holler) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Wonders and terrors
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.

1999-12-08 | lexo-2 | Helpful Votes: 12 | Rating: 5

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Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography

Description

Alasdair Gray, author of the modern classics Lanark, Poor Things and 1982, Janine, is without doubt Scotland's greatest living novelist. Since trying (unsuccessfully) to buy him a drink in 1998, Rodge Glass, first tutee and then secretary to the author, takes on the role of biographer, charting Gray's life from unpublished and unrecognised son of a box-maker to septuagenarian "little grey deity" (as Will Self has called him). A Jewish Mancunian Boswell to Gray's Johnson, Glass seamlessly weaves a chronological narrative of his subject's life into his own diary of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, to create a vibrant and wonderfully textured portrait of a literary great.

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