Customer Reviews

Lanark (Harvest Book)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dos Passos - USA; Joyce - Ulysses; Perec - Life A Users Manual...each work a sprawling, eccentric and often critical study of the lives, loves, hopes and fears of the people in their country of origin and Gray's work attempts to do the same for Scotland.

Published in 1981, he had spent the previous fifteen years working on this sprawling onamasticon which encompasses several literary genres - from Short Story to Novel - and which could be described as being fantasy, science-fiction, autobiography, literary criticism and social realism: but don't let that put you off! This work also manages to be compellingly readable and deeply engaging.

Set in a decaying Glasgow (Scotland) at some unspecified time in the future, the book opens on Part Three, where Lanark - the 'hero' - is dragged through a hole in a cemetery wall into a mysterious netherworld - The Institute - where people turn into dragons and nothing is quite what it seems: he rescues a woman from the process of becoming a dragon; he is injured and put into a hospital... he falls into a deep sleep, where he dreams or possibly remembers Parts One and Two.

These sections are among the most poignant and beautiful passages of writing about adolescence, describing our hero's relationship with his father and his progress through the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1950s and early 60's, writing comparable with Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist' in its aposite use of language and image.

Part Four returns us to the hospital, where Lanark has woken up and we continue his quest to leave The Institute and return to Glasgow with his new-found love.

It wouldn't be fair to give away more than this, but Gray builds the plot by the skillful use of structure (hence the apparently 'wrong-ordering' of the parts), character, often using characters from Scottish history in modern guise, and such post-modern devices as layout, collapsing narratives (at one point, Lanark meets Gray himself) and plagiarisms, all of which are copiously referenced and documented, though the author himself denies the 'post-modern' label. "I don't know what postmodern is," he said in a recent interview "But people always call my books postmodern."

Post-modern or not, Alasdair Gray's Lanark is a work of fiction which will appeal to Scotophiles, Ex-pat. Scots, Fantasy Fans, Science-Fiction buffs and anybody who enjoys the brilliance of eccentric experimental writing.

This book blew my mind. Complex, challenging, but with a whole lot to say about the pain of growing up. It taught me a lot about modern Scotland (lifestyle, attitude), and I figure Gray's fragmented fantasy style must have been a big influence on younger better known Scottish writers (to me anyway) like Iain Banks, A. L. Kennedy and Andrew Crumey who are similar to Gray in some respects. I guess you could call it postmodernism but to me it's simply beautiful writing, told from the heart. This book's not for everyone, but it's a modern classic and an unforgettable journey of the imagination.

Twenty-five years in the making, Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" immediately announced itself as perhaps the 20th century's most significant piece of Scottish fiction. Published in 1980, it was the first novel to invest Glasgow -- an industrial city associated more with gritty urban realism than romance -- with a rich, mysterious literary language.

Gray's narrative structure, a mixture of baroque architectural complexity and self-referential devices, has led a number of critics to suggest an affinity with postmodernism. There is truth in this, but more compelling are the essentially tragic stories that lie at the heart of the book. Duncan Thaw, a young, alienated Glasgow artist trying desperately to find love is juxtaposed with Lanark, a less neurotic "version" of Thaw who inhabits the strange, unstable realm of Unthank. It is Gray's painterly eye for detail and his unfailing accuracy in rendering delicate emotional states that make the novel so touching and compelling.

This book is a lot easier to read than you might think. Folks have compared it to Joyce's Ulysses mostly because of its complicated structure (the parts are numbered Four, Prologue, One, Two, Three, Epilogue, and the last few chapters) and detailing of a single city (Scotland's Glasgow) but the similarities really stop there, though I imagine if you dig fairly deep you can find lots of others. It's a great novel though, definitely the work of someone working from a highly personal visual, everything screams the voice of the author, from the forthright illustrations to the style of the prose in the book. Basically it's the story of Lanark a young man who lives in the strange city of Unthank. After some weird adventures there (and I mean strange . . . if you don't believe me just go read part four and tell me that it's not deeply weird) he winds up hearing the story of the person he apparently used to be . . . a Scottish lad/man named Duncan Thaw. Thaw's parts are almost like an entirely separate novel and take up a good portion of it, his youth is interesting and even though he's not the most likeable character, neither is really anyone else and there's a certain nobility to his unwavering desire to just live life as he sees fit without caring what anyone thinks. The adventures go back to Unthank then and the book gets a little slow in some parts and becomes more surreal and episodic, it's hard to figure out just what's going on in some parts. But Gray has a definite knack for description and a way of conveying complicated tangled and hard to understand emotions (mostly negative ones, it's not a very cheerful novel) in ways that lesser authors would cry for. Some of the characters are distant and cold, and Lanark isn't easy to deal with most of the time, especially toward the end when he becomes a bit ineffectual. But the Epilogue is one of the funniest sections in the book (it's got a list of all the things he plagarized to write the novel listed on the side) and I think a solid influence on the end of Grant Morrison's run on the comic book Animal Man (anyone with me on that?). In fact, I think most Scottish writers that started after this book was published were influenced in some way by it, I can read famed Scot Iain Banks in this book as well, it's a novel that has a foot firmly in the old Scotland while not being so obscure that non-Scots can't read and enjoy it. Well worth your time if you can find it or track it down, if you get past the trappings of "postmodernism" and just read it to enjoy the story, you'll find that there's a rollicking good novel in there, one that you won't be sorry you read.

The prose is amazing and implores the reader to savor each line in fear the novel may actually end. The important aspect is Gray's ability to take very heady socialological themes and actually make a story of it rather than create the common sci-fi disutopia. If you enjoy 'strange' books written with an unique voice you'll do well to read "Lanark". Buy it quick, enjoy it now, before the professors discover him and cannonize him into a post-modern guru.

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

Libro con muchos méritos, lleno de detalles. Una interesante forma de ver la vida, las relaciones, el arte y a Dios. Pasajes surrealistas excelentemente narrados lo ubican como un libro de Ciencia-Ficción. Pero es indudablemente una visión crítica de la vida,desde el punto de vista de un artista.

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.

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 . . .

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.