Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer [Hardcover]

Alasdair Gray (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1993

The lives of two doctors become hopelessly entangled with a woman who was created by one of them, in a freewheeling novel set in nineteenth-century Glasgow and the Mediterranean. 15,000 first printing.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Winner of the 1992 Whitbread Prize, Scottish writer Gray's ( Something Leather ) black comedy uses a science-fiction-like premise to satirize Victorian morals. Ostensibly the memoirs of late-19th-century Glasgow physician Archibald McCandless, the narrative follows the bizarre life of oversexed, volatile Bella Baxter, an emancipated woman and a female Frankenstein. Bella is not her real name; as Victorian Blessington, she drowned herself to escape her abusive husband, but a surgeon removed the brain from the fetus she was carrying and placed it in her skull, resucitating her. The revived Bella has the mental age of a child. Engaged to marry McCandless, she chloroforms him and runs off with a shady lawyer who takes her on a whirlwind adventure, hopping from Alexandria to Odessa to a Parisian brothel. As her brain matures, Bella develops a social conscience, but her rescheduled nuptials to Archie are cut short when she is recognized as Victoria by her lawful husband, Gen. Sir Aubrey Blessington. In an epilogue dated 1914, cranky idealist Victoria McCandless, M.D., a suffragette, Fabian socialist, pacifist and advocate of birthing stools, pokes holes in her late husband Archie's narrative. Illustrated with Gray's suitably macabre drawings, this work of inspired lunacy effectively skewers class snobbery, British imperialism, prudishness and the tenets of received wisdom. Author tour.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 317 pages
• Publisher: Harcourt; First Edition edition (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151730768
• ISBN-13: 978-0151730766
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,102,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, October 22, 2002

By 

Blaid (Staten Island, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Poor Things (British Literature) (Paperback)

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.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Eccentric alternate history/fantasy, January 26, 2003

By 

Glen Engel Cox (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer (Hardcover)

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of his best, June 21, 2009

By 

Walter Stockwell (Suisse) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Poor Things (British Literature) (Paperback)

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.