LANARK
A LIFE IN FOUR BOOKS
by
Alasdair Gray
With an introduction by
William Boyd
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 1: The Elite
CHAPTER 2: Dawn and Lodgings
CHAPTER 3: Manuscript
CHAPTER 4: A Party
CHAPTER 5: Rima
CHAPTER 6: Mouths
CHAPTER 7: The Institute
CHAPTER 8: Doctors
CHAPTER 9: A Dragon
CHAPTER 10: Explosions
CHAPTER 11: Diet and Oracle
PROLOGUE
telling how a nonentity was made, and made oracular by a financial genius discovering his sensual infancy
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 12: The War Begins
CHAPTER 13: A Hostel
CHAPTER 14: Ben Rua
CHAPTER 15: Normal
CHAPTER 16: Underworlds
CHAPTER 17: The Key
CHAPTER 18: Nature
CHAPTER 19: Mrs. Thaw Disappears
CHAPTER 20: Employers
INTERLUDE
to remind us of what we are in danger of forgetting: that Thaw’s story exists within the hull of Lanark’s
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 21: The Tree
CHAPTER 22: Kenneth McAlpin
CHAPTER 23: Meetings
CHAPTER 24: Marjory Laidlaw
CHAPTER 25: Breaking
CHAPTER 26: Chaos
CHAPTER 27: Genesis
CHAPTER 28: Work
CHAPTER 29: The Way Out
CHAPTER 30: Surrender
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 31: Nan
CHAPTER 32: Council Corridors
CHAPTER 33: A Zone
CHAPTER 34: Intersections
CHAPTER 35: Cathedral
CHAPTER 36: Chapterhouse
CHAPTER 37: Alexander Comes
CHAPTER 38: Greater Unthank
CHAPTER 39: Divorce
CHAPTER 40: Provan
EPILOGUE
annotated by Sidney Workman with an index of diffuse and imbedded Plagiarisms
CHAPTER 41: Climax
CHAPTER 42: Catastrophe
CHAPTER 43: Explanation
CHAPTER 44: End
TAILPIECE: How Lanark grew
INTRODUCTION
Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading, but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and so on – all these factors, and others, make the simple experience of reading a book a far more complex and multi-layered affair than might be thought. Moreover, the reading of a memorable book somehow insinuates itself into the tangled skein of personal history that is the reader’s autobiography: the book leaves a mark on that page of your life – leaves a trace – one way or another.
The history of my reading of Lanark is exemplary in this regard – typically complex. Twenty-five years ago I was paid to read Lanark by the Times Literary Supplement (I forget how much I received – £40?) and the review duly appeared in the issue of 27 February 1981, entitled ‘The Theocracies of Unthank’. It was a long review, some two thousand words, leading off the fiction section that week, and it shared its page with a short poem by Paul Muldoon and an advertisement for Heinemann’s spring list (Catherine Cookson, R.K. Narayan and Violet Powell, amongst others).
Looking back now it seems even more interesting that I came to review Lanark – Alasdair Gray’s first novel – a month after my own first novel, A Good Man in Africa, had been published. A Good Man in Africa had been reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement on 30 January that year, somewhat patronisingly (‘engaging’, ‘amusing’), by someone called D.A.N. Jones, in a review that was one-third the length of my review of Lanark. However, I can detect no trace of professional jealousy, bitterness or chippiness in my analysis of Gray’s novel. Indeed, as a tyro novelist myself, I was flattered to be asked to review it at such length (by the then fiction editor of the TLS, Blake Morrison). I still have the diligent notes I made on that first reading – they run to three and a half closely written pages (I have tiny, near-illegible handwriting). Clearly Lanark had already been designated an ‘important’ novel by the TLS (even now it would be virtually unheard-of to grant a full page to a first novel) and it had been decided to give it due prominence.
Why was I asked to review it? I was already an intermittent reviewer of fiction in the TLS but I suspect that the Lanark commission arose because of two factors – my nationality (Scottish – colonial version) and because I knew the city of Glasgow, having spent four years there at university. But Blake Morrison could have had no idea, I think, that I had heard of Lanark long before he gave me the opportunity to read it.
In the early seventies (1971–75, to be precise), when I was studying for my MA degree at the University of Glasgow, there was occasional talk of Lanark amongst my circle of friends. Alasdair Gray was someone known to me by sight (we had mutual friends) and by reputation as a painter and muralist. Doubtless we drank in the same pub – The Pewter Pot in North Woodside Road – from time to time but I don’t remember ever meeting him properly. However, Lanark had something of the whiff of legend about it, even then: it was reputed to be a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day. Rather like equally heralded masterworks-in-progress, such as Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers or Harold Brodkey’s Runaway Soul, Lanark was talked about as an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s Ulysses – such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.
And so, finally, to have Lanark in my hand a few years later was something of a shock: it was indeed long, five hundred and sixty pages, and it bore Gray’s highly distinctive black and white drawings on the cover and inside. My abiding sensation as I began to read was one of intense and excited curiosity.
One final anecdotal digression to do with the tangled skein. It is unusual, as a young novelist/critic, to possess some years of apocryphal familiarity with a novel you are sent to review. Even more unusual, in the case of Lanark, was that I was also familiar with its publisher, Canongate – then a very small, Scottish, independent publisher almost wholly unheard-of outside Edinburgh literary circles. I knew about Canongate because I had met its then owner/publisher, Stephanie Wolfe-Murray.
In the early summer of 1972 (aged twenty) I was living alone in my parents ‘isolated house in the Scottish borders – about three miles from the town of Peebles. I was working as a kitchen porter in the Tontine Hotel in Peebles trying to earn some money to pay for a trip to Munich (where my German girlfriend lived). Not owning a car or a bicycle, I used to hitchhike to and from work. I was quite often given a lift by a young woman who drove a battered Land Rover (she often drove this Land Rover in bare feet, I noticed, a fact that added immeasurably to her unselfconscious, somewhat louche glamour). This was Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, and she lived further up the valley in which my parents’ house was situated. In the course of our conversations during the various lifts she gave me I must have told her – I suppose – about my dreams of becoming a writer. She told me in turn that she had just started up (or was in the process of starting up) a publishing house in Edinburgh, called Canongate. I filed this information away (thinking it might be useful). I have never met or seen Stephanie Wolfe-Murray since that summer of 1972 (I did get to Munich, though, in time for the Olympics and the Black September terrorist disaster) – and I’m wholly convinced she has no memories at all of the Tontine Hotel’s temporary kitchen porter
to whom she was giving occasional lifts that summer – but for me it was a strange moment to see ‘Canongate Publishing’ on the title page of Lanark and realise the unlikely connection – and stranger now to think that Lanark was the book that put Canongate squarely and indelibly on the literary map.
Such are the complexities of personal history that enfold the simple reading of a book. I haven’t read Lanark since that 1981 review (though I have read and reviewed other of Alasdair Gray’s novels and stories – and have since met him on a few occasions) and to re-encounter a closely-read and greatly admired novel twenty-five years on is not necessarily to be encouraged – I abandoned a recent re-reading of Catch-22 because my growing dismay was seriously tarnishing the memories of my rapt late-adolescent engagement with what I thought was one of the great novels of all time. However, revisiting Lanark was both a fascinating and a revealing experience. When I reviewed the book in 1981 it had no reputation; now its immense freight of reputation is impossible to ignore.
What can one say about Lanark that hasn’t been said already (most eloquently by Gray himself, in his tailpiece ‘How Lanark Grew’)? Re-reading my review I can see how much I enjoyed the novel, but my appreciation was not unequivocal. I particularly relished the two books about Duncan Thaw in Glasgow but I was less taken with the allegorical counterpoint of the eponymous Lanark in the city of Unthank. I wrote: ‘Thaw’s story – Books One and Two – forms a superb, self-contained realistic novel about a disturbed child’s education and his uneven growth towards manhood.’ But the Unthank sections drew less praise: ‘The bizarremachinery of the world of fable reasserts itself …’; ‘The final scenes of Lanark’s rise to power (he becomes Provost of Unthank)… are amongst the least successful parts of this long and demanding novel … Lanark is, in effect, made up of two novels, one traditional and naturalistic, the other a complex allegorical fable.’ My conclusion, though, was genuinely positive: ‘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.’
I know now why I didn’t respond with wholehearted enthusiasm to the allegorical story of Lanark in the city of Unthank. I was positioning myself, as all writers unconsciously do – and particularly as a writer whose first novel had just been published – using criticism of others to evaluate and proclaim what I myself stood for. I was and am a realistic novelist and I felt strongly then that fable, allegory, surrealism, fantasy, magic realism and the rest were not my literary cup of tea. But I think that in my 1981 review I unconsciously prefigured aspects of my recent, late reading of the book. The structure of Lanark – the small naturalistic novel embedded in a large eclectic one – is, it seems to me now, precisely the reason for the book’s enduring success. I realise now that, for Alasdair Gray, the last thing on earth he wanted to achieve in Lanark was to write, and be hailed for writing, ‘a minor classic of the literature of adolescence’. As we have since come to know, that was indeed what he had done first – Thaw’s story was written initially and discretely and is a re-imagining of a life close to Gray’s own. But it could never have been enough: every ambition that Gray had for his long-gestating book obliged him to create something larger, more complex, more difficult, more alienating. Gray needed the overarching machinery of allegory and fable to make Lanark transcend its origins.
And here we come to the thorny – the thistly – question of Lanark’s Scottishness. Gray has said that he wants ‘to be read by an English-speaking tribe which extends to Cape Town in the south, Bengal in the east, California in the west and George Mackay Brown in the north’. This seems to me very just: it should be the form of wishful thinking that every writer, in English should indulge in. Having re-read Lanark twenty-five years on I still prefer Thaw’s story to Lanark’s but I recognise now what I didn’t see then: namely that it was Lanark’s very awkward bulky scale, its ostentatious manipulations of structure, its extra-parochial pretensions, its allusiveness and its overt and purposeful invitation to exegesis and literary comparison that raise the book to another level. Just as Joyce fitted an ordinary day in Dublin into the armature of the Odyssey, so Gray reconfigures the life of Duncan Thaw into a polyphonic Divina Commedia of Scotland.
The Joyce comparison is valid on many levels and I think provides an insight into Gray’s approach and methodology as a novelist. However, a passing mention of Joyce’s Ulysses – to explore the tangled skein motif again – provoked me in 1981 into a further comment on Gray’s novel (and a defence of myself as reviewer). A couple of weeks after my review appeared, the Times Literary Supplement published a hostile letter from a reader in New Lanark – coincidentally – one Rose Arnold, who took me angrily to task for identifying the city of ‘Provan’, in the Unthank books, with Edinburgh. She saw Lanark as being entirely about Glasgow and declared that, ‘to deny the interest of the Glaswegian theme is rather like suggesting Ulysses might as well have been set in London’. Answering her letter, I defended my review robustly two weeks later on the letters page, citing Gray himself as the authority for a possible Provan/Edinburgh identification, but, as a Parthian shot, I also pointed out that ‘to read Lanark throughout as a “loving analysis” of Glasgow is seriously to limit and confine the effects and resonances of the novel: rather like reading Ulysses solely for what it can tell you about Dublin’. I think I inadvertently hit a key nail on the head, here. What I was saying to Rose Arnold was that Gray had made sure – and had taken enormous pains in so doing – that we could not read his novel as a Bildungsroman, or thinly disguised memoir, or science fiction, or a Bunyanesque allegory, or a loving analysis of Glasgow. He managed to make Lanark all of these things and more, and that is why it has been read and will continue to be read: reading Lanark will leave its trace on your life.
William Boyd
CHAPTER 1.
The Elite
The Elite Café was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema. A landing two thirds of the way up had a door into the cinema itself, but people going to the Elite climbed farther and came to a large dingy-looking room full of chairs and low coffee tables. The room seemed dingy, not because it was unclean but because of the lighting. A crimson carpet covered the floor, the chairs were upholstered in scarlet, the low ceiling was patterned with whorled pink plaster, but dim green wall lights turned these colours into varieties of brown and made the skins of the customers look greyish and dead. The entrance was in a corner of the room, and the opposite corner held a curved chromium and plastic counter where a bald fat smiling man stood behind the glittering handles of a coffee machine. He wore black trousers, white shirt and black bow tie and was either dumb or unusually reticent. He never spoke; the customers only addressed him to order coffee or cigarettes, and when not serving these he stood so still that the counter seemed an extension of him, like the ring round Saturn. A door by the bar opened onto a narrow outdoor balcony above the cinema entrance. This had room for three crowded-together metal-topped tables with parasols through the middle. Coffee was not drunk here because the sky was often dark with strong wind and frequent rain. The tabletops had little puddles on them, the collapsed cloth of the parasols flapped soddenly against the poles, the seats were dank, yet a man of about twenty-four usually sat here, huddled in a black raincoat with the collar turned up. Sometimes he gazed in a puzzled way at the black sky, sometimes he bit thoughtfully on the knuckle of his thumb. Nobody else used the balcony.
When the Elite was full most languages and dialects could be heard there. The customers were under thirty and sat in cliques of five or six. There were political cliques, religious cliques, artistic cliques, homosexual cliques and criminal cliques. Some cliques talked about athletics, others about motor cars, others about jazz. Some cliques were centred on particular people, the biggest being dominated by Sludden. His clique usually occupied a sofa by the balcony door. An a
djacent clique contained people who had belonged to Sludden’s clique but grown tired of it (as they claimed) or been expelled from it (as Sludden claimed). The cliques disliked each other and none liked the café much. It was common for a customer to put down his coffee cup and say, “The Elite is a hellish place. I don’t know why we come here. The coffee’s bad, the lighting’s bad, the whole dump teems with poofs and wogs and Jews. Let’s start a fashion for going somewhere else.” And someone would answer, “There is nowhere else. Galloway’s Tearoom is too bourgeois, all businessmen and umbrella stands and stuffed stags’ heads. The Shangri-la has a jukebox that half deafens you, and anyway it’s full of hardmen. Armstrong had his face slashed there. There are pubs, of course, but we can’t always be drinking. No, this may be a hellish place but it’s all we have. It’s central, it’s handy for the cinema and at least it’s a change from home.”
The café was often crowded and never completely empty, but on one occasion it nearly emptied. The man in the black raincoat came in from the balcony and saw nobody but the waiter and Sludden, who sat on his usual sofa. The man hung his coat on a hook and ordered a coffee. When he left the counter he saw Sludden watching him with amusement.
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