ISBN: 9781782117148
Date read: 24/06/2023
How strongly I recommend it: 10/10
Support your local bookshop by going to Bookshop.org to buy your copy (instead of THAT online shopping website…)
You won’t even get past the contents page of Lanark before realising that there is something strange about this novel. Announcing itself as ‘A Life in 4 Books,’ the sections of the novel are presented in the following order: Book 3, Prologue, Book 1, Interlude, Book 2, Book 4 and Epilogue.
Book 3 opens the novel with an unsavoury clique in a café descending upon a new arrival, a man who calls himself Lanark. Lanark is a newcomer and a loner, spending his days in libraries or at the cinema and, more strangely, looking for daylight. It is through this last admission, and the group’s reaction to it, that we realise that the world in which these characters find themselves suffers from a supernatural lack of sunlight. Upon the encouragement of the group’s leader, Sludden, Lanark writes a manuscript chronicling his arrival in the city; waking up alone on a train, his pockets filled with seashells and sand, and not even remembering his own name.
This somewhat prepares us for what is to follow: a Kafkaesque nightmare featuring an amnesiac protagonist who episodically drifts from one nightmare scenerio to the next. The storytelling is top notch, with Gray eschewing typical world-building and instead letting us experience the horrors along with Lanark, who is forced to piece together what he can regarding how this world operates, on both the street and governmental level, where no one seems capable of giving a straightforward answer: ‘…I asked if he could tell me the name of the city. He said, “Mr. Lanark, I am a clerk, not a geographer.”’[1]
These kinds of interactions persist, becoming more and more Orwellian as Lanark tries to inquire about the world’s more supernatural elements that the populace of the city seem to accept not just as normal, but as a dull aspect of their daily lives: ‘I asked what time it was. He said “We don’t bother much with time now. The sky is lighter than normal but that sort of light is too chancy to be useful.”’[2] Lanark gets no further when asking someone in a governmental position of power what exactly is going on:
“The calendar…is based on sunlight, but only administrators use it. The majority have forgotten the sun; moreover they have rejected the clock. They do not measure or plan, their lives are regulated by simple appetite varied by the occasional impulse. Not surprisingly nobody is well there. Politically, too, they are corrupt and would collapse without subsidies from healthier continents.”[3]
But then, just when the reader thinks they are starting to settle into this nightmare-fantasy novel, Gray does a seeming 180 degree turn and presents us with Book 1, where Lanark and the bizarre world he inhabits vanishes and we are instead presented with a new protagonist, Duncan Thaw, and the novel follows his childhood growing up in wartime and post WWII Glasgow, becoming both a bildungsroman that closely resembles James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and a thinly-disguised memoir (Gray says that ‘Book 1, the first half of the Thaw section, is very like my life until 17 ½ years, though much more miserable… The second half of the Thaw book is true to friends I made at art school and some of my dealings with the staff, for I filled notebooks while there with details to be used in my Portrait of the Artist as a Young Glaswegian.’[4])
If, upon reading this, you are worried that Lanark and his fantasy setting have disappeared forever, don’t worry. We will be seeing them again. But even here, in this seemingly realist setting, Gray masterfully finds ways to interweave his metanarrative, adding new layers and ways in which the novel’s sections are able to complement one another:
‘He took four nights to finish the new story properly he gave it to Mr. Meikle with many apologies for the delay and Mr. Meikle read it and rejected it, explaining that Thaw had tried a blend of realism and fantasy which even an adult would have found difficult. Thaw was stunned and resentful. Though not satisfied with the story he knew it was the best he had written…’[5]
Gray also captures those solitary moments of childhood rumination and renders them in vivid and beautiful detail, where we are left alone to consider and reflect on our personal desires, and how they form the foundations of our beliefs and virtues that we carry with us into later life:
‘He contained two equal sorts of knowledge: the warm lazy knowledge that above on the mountain a blond girl in a white dress waited for him, shy and eager; and the cooler knowledge that this was unlikely and the good of climbing was the exercise and view from the top. There was no conflict between those knowledges, his mind passed easily from one to the other, but when he stood up to begin the last of the climb the thought of the girl was stronger.’[6]
What makes these Thaw sections (Books 1 and 2) equally as gripping as the Lanark fantasy chapters is in their relatability. We follow Thaw through his early childhood, to his school days, witnessing those small victories and failures in the classroom that we’ve all shared, all the way up to Thaw attending art college as a penniless student, with Thaw struggling to express not only his burgeoning creativity but also his social and sexual desires, as he tries to navigate the world around him and attempt to find his place in it.
With Lanark, Gray has created a book of multitudes. It is a Joycean epic; where Joyce took Homer’s The Odyssey and moulded it around one day in Dublin, Gray takes Dante’s The Divine Comedy and fits it into a life spent in Glasgow. It is a rich allegory, in the same vein as Bunyan, filtered through Kafka, where Gray’s primary target of criticism is the systems that surround and trap us from birth in modern society, and creates a world where these systems are made more obviously and tangibly hellish; dystopian employment offices, labyrinthine medical institutions and a city that seems to be as sick as its inhabitants. It is a bildungsroman and a memoir that wrestles with the universal themes of childhood, family and discovering your place in the cultural, institutional and ideological systems that surround us in our everyday lives.
On top of all of this, Lanark is just a good piece of science fiction fantasy, with world building and characters so rich that it can stand toe-to-toe with the best in that field. I think one of the best ways to sum up my experience with reading Lanark is to liken it to that rarest of moments in one’s life when a piece of art comes along that takes all of your sensibilities and interests, rolls them up into one, beautiful package and executes them better than anything you have encountered previously. It is my hope that by reading it you will experience this too. A truly unique and essential book.
[1] Alasdair Gray, Lanark, (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2016), p. 22
[2] Ibid, p. 18
[3] Ibid, p. 78
[4] Ibid, pp 568-569
[5] Ibid, p. 155
[6] Ibid, p. 141