Lanark: A Life in 4 Books [Paperback]

 

 

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Maybe more time is needed for literary audience, both Scottish and worldwide, to recognize this book as a new page in history of fiction literature. After Joyce's Ulysses there happened a kind of a great explosion that opened a way for numerous unimaginable ideas to push through from a vague, sometimes disordered author's mind to the reader's. After Ulysses, it seemed as if all the boundaries in literature have been trod over. Suddenly, everybody was ALLOWED to play with the language and style, to play with readers' good taste, to play with Freud, with Kafka, to jump over classics of literature. It was quite hard to be special in a case when everything possible is allowed. But, when everything is allowed, it doesn't automatically mean that everything is already used or even tried. Being special in a world with no boundaries can be achieved by overcoming the boundaries within us and not outside us. And that is certainly what Gray managed to do in his Lanark. He - or, should I say Lanark/Duncan Thaw - is not really impressed by a society that is allowed to do everything. Because he himself is not able to do everything. So the boundaries must lie within him. Because of the belief that these boundaries are still something set by society, Thaw wants to flee out of it, to be self-sufficient and independent and, moreover, alone in the world. But where to find those gates that would lead him to such kind of a world? As a real, or at least realistic being, as Thaw, he finds the only way of that transcedention in death, so he commits suicide. As Lanark - ressurected, imaginary, surrealistic Thaw - he enters big mouth. In a way, he is trying to find the gates of his own heaven, because everyone believes, or at least would like to believe, that there is a world where they could be completely satisfied. For Lanark/Thaw, it is a world without other people, so he is in a constant search of some kind of such gates. In a search of such heaven, he only finds out that he's been living in hell all the time - both in his real and surreal life. As in O'Brien's The Third Policeman - hell is all around. And not because it is in society, but because it is inside a person: in Thaw, Lanark, Gray, us. Hell is there because we can see that being without others is as impossible as being with them. And this is a boundary that could hardly be overcome.
Gray at least reached it and tried to define it. Lanark is, as far as I can say, the only book that could stand side by side to Ulysses. In a way, it is a response to it. Ulysses is a book with, in global, quite an optimistic, positive spirit. Its light-heartedness can be found in an answer to the question about the word that all the people in the world know. Less as a Christian soul, but more as a pure, sincere human being, Joyce answers: LOVE. And since then love seemed to be the only hope. But Gray can't be satisfied by that. By his opinion, LOVE could be the word all the people in the world know, but he fears that most of them can't do better than just to say it. Lanark is thatways in a search of some kind of a new hope. But the world he lives in seems to be too fluid, too slippery to find any firm point that one could rely on. Even when one would just give himself to the fate because everything is written, Lanark comes to the conjuror, to the creator of the whole world he lives in just to find out that even the creator's mind is not defined completely. Finally, Lanark finds his own rest and satisfaction in giving himself completely - not to fate, but to the people. In the moment of his death he finds out that accomodating and compromising can bring at least a bit more satisfaction than being completely individual. Like Molly Bloom, in his bed, in his last moments, he says YES to everything that should come.

As much as being that global, this book also works on a local basis, being one of the rare and possibly the first books to expose all the secrets and wrongs of Scottish society. It is Gray's intimate contemplation on a somewhat sad existence in/of an industrial city such as Glasgow, where everything seems to be rid of heart and soul. While revealing it, Gray at the same time still gives something to that society to be adorned with. And that is certainly this precious book. A masterpiece that only needs to be recognized as such.

Reading Lanark is like reading an alternately baffling and lucid nightmare, the prose taking you places you probably don't want to go, but places that you're morbidly curious about anyway. Suicide, self-obsession, frustration and the inescapable horrors of capitalism: these are the cheery themes that Gray investigates, using his characteristically jet-black irony to tell us that maybe laughter is the only answer. A typical scenario: Lanark, the protagonist (he doesn't deserve to be called a hero) has a job with the DSS in a dying future city. Asking why he shouldn't tell the residents straight out of their fate (unavoidable catastrophe) he is informed of the government's strategy of compassion: "It is important to kill hope SLOWLY." Tracing the life of an artist obsessed with attaining perfection in creation, and an antithetical character who is bounced around unkindly by Fortune, the novel posits many philosophical conundrums. Is Thaw Nastler; are the two narratives creating one another rather like MC Escher's 'Hands drawing each other'; do we in real life do as Lanark does and try to find an way out of the Borgesian labyrinth the world presents? And is it self-created and perpetual, returning eternally? Certainly the narrative of Lanark is circular. Enough. Five stars. But only because there aren't more than five. Brilliant. Dark. Weird. Read it.

This book is a lot easier to read than you might think. Folks have compared it to Joyce's Ulysses mostly because of its complicated structure (the parts are numbered Four, Prologue, One, Two, Three, Epilogue, and the last few chapters) and detailing of a single city (Scotland's Glasgow) but the similarities really stop there, though I imagine if you dig fairly deep you can find lots of others. It's a great novel though, definitely the work of someone working from a highly personal visual, everything screams the voice of the author, from the forthright illustrations to the style of the prose in the book. Basically it's the story of Lanark a young man who lives in the strange city of Unthank. After some weird adventures there (and I mean strange . . . if you don't believe me just go read part four and tell me that it's not deeply weird) he winds up hearing the story of the person he apparently used to be . . . a Scottish lad/man named Duncan Thaw. Thaw's parts are almost like an entirely separate novel and take up a good portion of it, his youth is interesting and even though he's not the most likeable character, neither is really anyone else and there's a certain nobility to his unwavering desire to just live life as he sees fit without caring what anyone thinks. The adventures go back to Unthank then and the book gets a little slow in some parts and becomes more surreal and episodic, it's hard to figure out just what's going on in some parts. But Gray has a definite knack for description and a way of conveying complicated tangled and hard to understand emotions (mostly negative ones, it's not a very cheerful novel) in ways that lesser authors would cry for. Some of the characters are distant and cold, and Lanark isn't easy to deal with most of the time, especially toward the end when he becomes a bit ineffectual. But the Epilogue is one of the funniest sections in the book (it's got a list of all the things he plagarized to write the novel listed on the side) and I think a solid influence on the end of Grant Morrison's run on the comic book Animal Man (anyone with me on that?). In fact, I think most Scottish writers that started after this book was published were influenced in some way by it, I can read famed Scot Iain Banks in this book as well, it's a novel that has a foot firmly in the old Scotland while not being so obscure that non-Scots can't read and enjoy it. Well worth your time if you can find it or track it down, if you get past the trappings of "postmodernism" and just read it to enjoy the story, you'll find that there's a rollicking good novel in there, one that you won't be sorry you read.

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2.0 out of 5 stars Alasdair Gray is a great writer - of short stories
As a writer of prose Alasdair Gray cannot be faulted. The problems begin when he attempts to form that prose into a book. Read more

Published on Oct 29 2000 by Sam Green

2.0 out of 5 stars overrated and pretentious
Overall, this book was an ordeal.

It's structure is broken up into 4 books, and the first 3 are mildly enjoyable naratives, but the fourth, which purports to tie everything... Read more

Published on July 27 2000 by S. Clark

5.0 out of 5 stars The Interstellar Genius of Gray
Lanark - what can I say? This epic is poignant, fantastical and throughly perverse in its twists, turns and general ideology. Read more

Published on April 26 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Scotland Made Strange
Twenty-five years in the making, Alasdair Gray's "Lanark" immediately announced itself as perhaps the 20th century's most significant piece of Scottish fiction... Read more

Published on April 13 2000 by Robert Hamlyn

5.0 out of 5 stars Not for everyone, but a modern classic.
This book blew my mind. Complex, challenging, but with a whole lot to say about the pain of growing up. Read more

Published on Aug 16 1999

4.0 out of 5 stars An ambitious novel that works very well.
The prose is amazing and implores the reader to savor each line in fear the novel may actually end. The important aspect is Gray's ability to take very heady socialological... Read more

Published on Nov 9 1998 by ejc6@hotmail.com

5.0 out of 5 stars Uno de los mejores libros que he leído en los últimos años.
Libro con muchos méritos, lleno de detalles. Una interesante forma de ver la vida, las relaciones, el arte y a Dios. Read more

Published on Mar 5 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars The nearest thing to the Great Scottish Novel.
Dos Passos - USA; Joyce - Ulysses; Perec - Life A Users Manual...each work a sprawling, eccentric and often critical study of the lives, loves, hopes and fears of the people in... Read more

Published on Oct 24 1997

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