Alasdair Gray - Lanark (Big Book List)

There is some part of this process where I truly love the random nature of this project. I did not want to considered very much how these books came to be on this list. I took my time at first figuring out how I wanted to find the books, but once I had a few trust worthy things in place I just started adding stuff to get to 1000. Lanark must have been in that push. I don’t know if it was a Goodreads list or some random one on the internet but Lanark came to me, and I read this book. Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange – which I am not sure is on my list at all, claimed this book should be in the top 100 works of the 20^th century. I was game for a challenge. 

At this point, I will say that I am versed in the Scottish culture. Well, two of my best friends were born and live in Scotland. The introduction to Lanark was written by Janice Galloway who wants to convince the reader that the highest possible value expressed by the Scottish culture is to not show off. I will let the Scottish speak for themselves in this way. I have a lot to say about the Scots that I know and we have talked extensively about this division between what they refer to as American sincerity and whatever the opposite of that is in the Scottish sense. Gray tries to deliver upon this remark by showcasing how sort of insular the Scottish culture is, its as if Glasgow and the whole of Scotland is one small town full of people that are constantly looking for any hint of pretension in its citizenry and eliminating it. This may seem simple on the surface but what ends up coming through is a deeply fraught main character that struggles against being a truly unique individual with some mixture of mental illness and eccentricity and plain stupidity at times that rollicks between believably frustrating and unbelievably mundane.

 

Gray was a trained visual artist and there is a lot of the middle passage of this book that strikes one as too close to autobiographical to be thought significant and then the high fantasy part where the descriptions are overwrought visually to be suspenseful or believable or helpful or engrossing. It is clear that a person with a keen eye towards developing the visual experience of art has drafted these lines but he has not made it interesting at points that makes the work difficult to read. This may be the harshest review I have written yet, and I apologize for this because I want this to be a place where I heap copious amounts of praise on these works. It is easy to write positively about stuff that is tested by the weight of history to be significantly good. Most of the works I have read so far have been very, very good. This book is not a bad book. I did not enjoy it. There is an essential difference in this. Gray is very keenly aware of his own psychology and dramatizes it with a precision that is breath-taking at times. Unfortunately, Lanark/Thaw are not super likable characters (Gray is aware of this but unfortunately cannot overcome it) and the work drags because of it. By the end, I was not sure what I was rooting for, why any of this mattered, and the relationships were strained even in the text to the point where it was hard to feel anything for any of the characters or their outcomes.

 

All of this being said, Gray does something very interesting with the “End” of the book. The format of the book is unconventional as it begins with Book 3 of a 4 volume set. Then towards the end of what would be book 4, there is an “End” and then something of an index. The character Lanark meets the actual author of the book in a breaking the 4^th wall sort of move that doesn’t work exactly as I think it might have when the book was written in the early 80s. After this moment, Gray goes into an index of sorts of all the classic literature that he has referenced throughout the text. Many of the names I wasn’t familiar with but I made a list of all the names that I recognize from the Big or Small Works List:

 

Blake, William

Borges, Jorge Luis

Bunyan, John

Carroll, Lewis

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Conrad, Joseph

Eliot, T. S

Ralph Waldo Emerson has not been plagiarized

Fitzgerald, F. Scott

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Golding, William

Heine, Heinrich

Hume, David

Kafka, Franz

Joyce, James

MacDonald, George

Mann, Thomas

Milton, John

Orwell, George

Alexander Pope

Quintilianus Marcus Fabricus,

Sarte, Jean-Paul,

Shakespeare, William,

Thackeray, William Makepeace,

Thomas, Dylan,

Vonnegut, Kurt ,

Wolfe, Tom,

Zoroaster

 

Each of these entries had their own citation and reason for being at least mentioned in the glossary of terms sort of section. Gray has an interesting interplay between grim realism (especially around the main characters’ sex lives or lack thereof) and a playful sort of whimsical approach to the nature of writing, storytelling, and connection with reality. There are moments in this book that I very much love. There are moments that work that I did not enjoy but that I got what he was doing and sort of got the wink at the camera of – isn’t what I am doing clever but I know you hate it – sort of move. I read a portion of this text on a podcast that I co-host about video games because it dramatizes the most vicious form of nihilistic materialism that I can think of in the most clear-eyed way I have ever read. It is wonderful, short, and devastatingly funny. The whole scene where Thaw paints the mural on the church ceiling in order to help save the church from being merged into another church and that it fails spectacularly and wonderfully, the newspaper misquotes him but gets him right in essence is just so too true to be utterly and unbearably hilarious. The way the character relate to one another is so realistic that at times it is not enjoyable to read because they are not enjoyable people and that is not the fault of the writer that makes something so close to the uncanny valley that it freaks you out a bit. The murals throughout the text are wonderful. There is a lot of things that are very unique, wonderful, and electric in this text that made it at times very enjoyable to read. It is also a true depiction in a strange way of the nature of the Scottish experience that I am familiar with, but could be deeply misunderstanding of a complex and ancient culture.

 

I am not sure if Lanark will make the final cut of this list. I believe that works will come and go from this list and the final form will be 35 years in the making I imagine. I am just into year one now. I imagine that as I read on I may discover along the way that some work from the Small Works List deserves to be on the Big Book list and will knock off another book. I think that maybe in Gray’s case, the book I am aware of theirs was not it but that I should give the author another chance and this second book I read of theirs should be on the list and replace it. I am not sure the fate of this book, but referencing George MacDonald was a major plus here and I am glad to see it. Robert Louis Stevenson not being mentioned here as another fine Scotsman is a weird turn that I still am baffled by.