Gray was repeatedly advised by his publisher that the form was problematic and that the book was best cut in two, realist novel and sci-fi trash sensibly divided. In the case of Lanark it was well ahead of its time.
This deft self-reflexivity, shift in tone, encyclopedic knowledge of literary history, and above all sense of humor, is what endears Gray’s fiction to me again and again. When I need more sentences or ideas I steal them from other writers, usually twisting them to blend with my own.’ I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentences. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing the most abominable things. ‘Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough to steal the imaginative energy that gives us life. It is in this Epilogue, an extraordinary moment in which the protagonist speaks to the writer himself, that Gray lays out his art: We start with Book 3, then the Prologue, Book 1, the Interlude, Book 2, and finally Book 4 ends the story but is interrupted by the Epilogue. The ordering of the novel is as bloody-minded as the author himself. His great departure was to stir the pot of this form in Lanark’s pages gritty realism gives way to fantasy and science fiction.
Like the great modernists before him, most particularly James Joyce, Gray set out in this book to tell the story of a life, and perhaps of a nation, or the entire history of literature, from infancy to death, and surreally, back again. I was soon devouring the 800-page tome that is his most celebrated novel: Lanark. I first came across Alasdair Gray’s writing when I was given Poor Things. The novels always manage to be entirely original whilst simultaneously ventriloquizing writers and artists from throughout history in a baroque collective conversation between all texts that have been and that will ever be. The picture he paints of the human soul is at once terrifying and inspirational, endearing and repugnant. Eroticism, sexual impulse, pornography, and sadomasochism are key to his unflinching vision. His appeal? Surely the extent to which he lays his own soul bare which is both compelling in its ruthless honesty, and moving in its humor and humanity.
Glasgow Alasdair Gray Reading Between the Lines: on Lust, Lanark and a Life in Letters by Natasha Hoare Long Read InterviewĪlasdair Gray is the best novelist you’ve never read.
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