Book reviews for Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark

Glasgow will never be the same after Lanark

by Allan Massie, The Scotsman, 1981

Alasdair Gray’s much-heralded and long-anticipated novel, Lanark, is quite simply the most ambitious Scottish work of fiction since Compton Mackenzie's The Four Winds of Love.

Last autumn Anthony Burgess with Earthly Powers attempted to write on a scale rare in the English novel and to tackle grand epic themes usually ignored; Gray is ready to get into the ring with Burgess. That is perhaps the first astonishing thing about Lanark….

One other thing is certain: no one with any claims to be interested in or concerned with the state of our culture can ignore Lanark. Its weaknesses, a tendency to over-elaboration and the failure to animate all but two or three of the huge cast of characters, pale beside its merits. Only that central failing, discussed above, raises serious doubts in my mind of the book's success.

Glasgow phantasmagoria

by Hermione Lee, 1981

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark has all the makings of a cult book. It is staggeringly long, has taken 10 years to write, and comes embellished with elaborate allegorical frontispieces, absurdist road maps and rhyming chapter headings. It begins with Book Three and ends with a page that reads GOODBYE. It has a questing and failing hero who, as ‘Lanark’, must survive, in Books Three and Four, in an imaginary world (the lightless city of Unthank and the Institute and Council which control it) and, as a neurotic art student, Duncan Thaw, in Books One and Two, in the real world of post-war Glasgow, equally inimical to love, art, and freedom….

Those who weary of the didactic insistence, the self-validating meaningfulness, the diminishing returns of fantasy, will find the grim story of Duncan Thaw’s education, sexual failures, misunderstood artwork, madness and death a sombre and persuasive centre. I shall not be wearing a badge which reads UNTHANK IS HERE or LUGWORMS RULE, but I salute Lanark with a mixture of gloom, exhaustion and respect.

The theocracies of unthank

by William Boyd, Times Literary Supplement, 1981

Halfway through this long and remarkable novel two characters contemplate the city of Glasgow. “Glasgow is a magnificent city”, says one. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” The other offers an explanation. “If a city hasn't been used by an artist not even the inhabitants lived there imaginatively. What is Glasgow to most of us? …Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a Music Hall song and a few bad novels.” Not the least of Alasdair Gray’s achievements in Lanark will be to put the city decisively on the literary map as perhaps only Archie Hind’s The Dear Green Place and Alan Sharp’s A Green Tree in Gedde have tried to before. However, it is important to stress that this book is more than a provincial or regional classic. Lanark’s ambitions are large and so are its achievements. Its compass extends far beyond the Clyde valley: indeed it's rare to come across a novel so rooted in a particular city and yet so accessible to those outside it….

For all its unevenness, Lanark is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches, especially in the two central books of Thaw's life, which had they been presented on their own, would surely have been hailed as a minor classic of the literature of adolescence. Gray, not surprisingly, is too canny an artist not to realise this himself. When the young Thaw submits a story for the school magazine, it is rejected by his teacher on the grounds that “Thaw had tried a blend of realism and fantasy which even an adult would have found difficult. Thaw was stunned and resentful”. There is no need for Gray to share his character's emotions.

The cannibal culture

by Eric Korn, 1981

Hell is a city much like…. Complete according to birthplace. For Alasdair Gray, Glasgow is twinned with the sunless phantasmagoric city of Unthank, and the hero of this huge, exacting and intermittently inspired novel is a citizen of both. The persevering reader is richly rewarded with a fine traditional biography, a hyper-real fantasy, a variety of good jokes and bad tricks, and any amount of argumentation “about morality, society or art. This is mainly a device to let a self-educated Scot (to whom the dominie is the highest form of social lift) tell the world what he thinks of it.”…

He does not wholly succeed; nor does Gray, though he is not entirely defeated; on the way to a rather smudged finale there are many excellent jokes. I had sworn not to use the word “dour”, but Gray insists so much on Glaswegiosity it sets me wondering if fantasies of cosmic conspiracy are an especial part of the provincial sensibility. Gray’s fantasy maybe more Clyde and less Bonny than most, but it's a bracing air if you don't inhale.