Book reviews for Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things

Bringing the dead back to life

by Stephen Amidon, Financial Times, 1992

Alasdair Gray’s fourth novel is constructed so cunningly that it contains excerpts from mock reviews on the dust jacket, one of them favourable, the other dismissive. The former praises it as an amusing piece of “light fiction,” the latter slams it for belonging to the overworked genre of Victorian pastiche. The reader (and, alas, reviewer) are thereby forewarned - this is not a work that will yield itself easily to a final analysis….

Is it that men cannot think of a liberated woman without seeing her as being some sort of monster? Or is it rather that truly socialist ideals are destined, like the older Bella, to deny their origins, to degenerate into crankery and insignificance?

Pastiche lovers and literary maze-walkers will enjoy puzzling over the answer. The rest will find poor things to be like McCandless’s mysterious bride: something put together very well but kept alive by artificial means.

Riches beyond compare

by Gavin Wallace, The Scotsman

Alasdair Gray does not write novels. He creates extraordinary cultural artefacts in which prose fiction is but one dimension of the projection of one of the most successfully multifaceted imaginations Scotland has produced. Each of his works has proved unique in its own way, succeeding in constructing its own frames of reference, and Poor Things is no exception. It will surprise those who believed that the dubious and patchy Something Leather betrayed the reheating of a talent already gone cold.

Can a man “make” a feminist? It is the final riddle of a mesmerising mind game in which not even the heroine, and certainly not the author, can be trusted. Only Gray’s readers can provide the answer - and they are lucky, lucky things indeed.

Bella figura

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, 1992

Godwin Baxter, commonly known as God, has hands so weirdly shaped that he is barred from hospital work despite being a brilliant surgeon, capable of grafting the hindquarters of a white rabbit onto the forepart of a black one and of transplanting the brain of an unborn infant into the cranium of a mature woman. Bella’s is the product of his most heroic operation. Archibald McCandless is his stooge, her husband and the narrator of their mock gothic story….

There are some serious things going on undercover of all these verbal hijinks. Bella’s is a cautionary tale, about sex and sexual fantasy, about education and its abuse. Two missionaries, one a Christian fundamentalist, the other a Malthusian cynic, volunteer to open our heroine’s eyes to their rival “truths”; She finds them equally appalling. Blessington adores her because “she has the soul of an innocent child within the form of a Circassian houri” - and that is before Godwin performs his transplant operation. It doesn't take a Frankenstein to imagine a monstrous woman. Gray ensures that the world through which Bella passes is teeming with unascribed references and significant jokes. Where does she sit to write her letter home from Odessa? On the steps, of course.

The Guardian fiction prize

by Philip Hensher, The Guardian, 1992

Alasdair Gray is an idiosyncratic, ingenious and entertaining writer. For over ten years, he has been praised by critics and recommended by one ordinary reader to another, without ever really seeming to enter into the mainstream of British fiction. In the opinion of the judges of the Guardian prize, Poor Things was not only one of the most accomplished books of the year, but one of the most individual….

The list of writers Gray has been compared to is almost comic in its variety - Dunbar, Rabelais, James Joyce, Smollett and George Douglas Brown. But Gray is utterly his own man, and any reader should be able to take immense and deepening delight from Poor Things It is as irresistible as cream cake, and as nourishing as lentils; and no prize that we can confer on it could possibly increase its many and various many merits.

Jekyll and Hyde with added sex

by Kate Chisholm, 1992

Alasdair Gray, who started out as an artist has made a name for himself as a portrayer of the grotesque and the fantastic, of the dark forces that lie beneath the even air of nice folk….

When McCandless confesses that he has “raved in the language of novels I knew to be trash, and only read to relax my brain before sleeping”, one can only agree with him: these are the ravings of second-rate characters in a second-rate novel.

Cruel and tender fight

by Maggie Gee, The Observer, 1992

Alasdair Gray is a true original, a twentieth century William Blake who designs and illustrates his own strange fictions. Poor Things, with its generous scattering of bold engravings and its hard covers embossed with silver thistles, makes one wonder why other book designers don't try harder. Gray is a Scott and, from the point of view of the English literary establishment, an outsider, which may explain why his books have not yet received the prizes they deserve. Perhaps with Poor Things his luck will change….

In this playful but profoundly serious novel, the alchemic effects of love and invention are the only sure consolation for us, ‘poor things’, helpless in the flow of historical fact