Book reviews for Alasdair Gray’s novel 1982 Janine

Glasgow rag-day

by Anthony Burgess, Sunday Observer, 1984

Mr Graham Greene had the kindness recently to describe me as an avid if undiscriminating reader. He was referring to a light-hearted publication of mine, in which I commend a near-century of modern novels to the notice of posterity.

It seems I chose the wrong ones, except perhaps for two by Mr. Green. Practically all of my choices have been condemned by various of my fellow-critics, but one remains unmolested, perhaps because my fellow critics have not read it. This is Lanark, by Alasdair Gray, a Glasgow man who has brought to post-MacDiarmid / Linklater / Bridie Scottish literature an experimental verve in which surrealistic fantasy co-habits with dour naturalism….

On the strength of Lanark I proclaimed Alasdair Gray the first major Scottish novelist since Walter Scott (with apologies to Compton Mackenzie and Eric Linklater, and to Mr. Greene, laughing sardonically in Antibes). 1982 Janine exhibits the same large talent, deployed to a somewhat juvenile end.

Scots Gray

by William Boyd, 1984

Alasdair Gray is a phenomenon. Until recently he eked out a precarious living as an artist (portraits and murals) in Glasgow, where he was born and educated. Then in 1981 he published Lanark, a vast rambling sprawl of a book which married the social realism of a Glasgow bildungsroman with the fantasy world of a sci-fi Scotland. In addition, the novel was illustrated by the author and spiced with all manner of modernist tricksiness - a prologue in the middle of the book, an index of plagiarisms and out-of-sequence chapters….

Normally deeply resistant to this sort of textual trickery, I find I can accept it quite easily with Gray. Why this should be so is hard to explain. It may have something to do with the character of the man himself - engagingly eccentric and deeply serious - for there is no sense of arch pretension or post-neo-postist fraud about him at all. His fictions seem easily to inhabit all possible literary worlds, potent hybrids in a class of their own.

Sex and the dying Scotsman

by Isobel Murray, The Scotsman, 1984

Jock McLeish is an all-Scottish hero. He is a self-confessed alcoholic, though he says, “My problem is sex, not alcohol”. He is the installations supervisor of the Scottish Region of National Securities Ltd, a firm specialising in security installations for banks, nuclear bases and the like, and good at his job. For 25 years he has lived and travelled virtually alone, supported and entertained by a powerful set of interests representing safety and pleasure: “my sexual daydreams and loneliness and drinking and work for National Security have propped each other up.”…

Jock knows himself well enough by the end not to complain; he has been loved. There was Alan – “That man was my friend and I have turned into this man” - and Denny the loving, and Helen – “I used to be surrounded by love. I floated upon it without seeing it and rejected it again and again”. Jock’s 1982 vision was earlier articulated by Auden: “We must love one another or die”.

The artist exposes the zealot

by Jane McLoughlin, 1984

There have been two books, two “works of literary merit”, published this month. One is 1982 Janine by the Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray, and the other, with its cover photograph of the campest group of Red Indians anyone ever did see, is The Place of the Dead Roads by William S Burroughs. They are quite different from each other, these two books and their writers, except for one apparently insignificant thing: automatically and without a second thought, they offer no place whatsoever in their scheme of things to women….

These books should warn women that it is no good preaching to the converted. Things may improve, a sop to equality here, another positive action there, as Mrs Woodhouse might reward a dog that sat when told.

But ghettos traditionally do not improve the quality of life; they may spread, but they have to be broken out of. What Alasdair Gray and Burroughs underline as far as women are concerned is the old Berkeleyan problem that you can't actually prove a stone exists except when you kick it.

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Book reviews for Alasdair Gray’s novel Something Leather