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Lanark comprises four books, arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four (there is also a Prologue before Book One, and an Epilogue four chapters before the end of the book). In the Epilogue, the author explains this by saying that “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another”, and that the epilogue itself is “too important” to go at the end (p. 483).
In Book Three, a young man awakes alone in a train carriage. He has no memory of his past and picks his name from a strangely familiar photograph on the wall. He soon arrives in Unthank, a strange Glasgow-like fantasy city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange symbolic diseases. Lanark begins to associate with a group of twenty-somethings to whom he cannot fully relate and whose mores he cannot understand, and soon begins to suffer from Dragonhide, a disease which turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Lanark is eventually swallowed by the earth, and awakes in The Institute, a sort of hospital which cures patients of their diseases but uses the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave.
Books One and Two constitute a realist beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw, (“based on myself (A.Gray), he was tougher and more honest”,) a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. The book follows Thaw’s wartime evacuation, difficult secondary education and his scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art, where his inability to form relationships with women and his obsessive artistic vision lead to his descent into madness and eventual suicide by drowning.
Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. During various stages of the journey, during which he meets his author, he rapidly ages. He finally finds himself old, sitting in a hilltop cemetery as Unthank breaks down in an apocalypse of fire and flood, and, his time of death having been revealed to him, he ends the book calmly awaiting it.
Beginnings:
Gray began writing the novel as a student in 1954. Book one was written by 1963, but he was unsuccessful in getting it published. The whole work was finished in 1976, and published in 1981 by the small Scottish publisher Canongate Press. The novel was an immediate critical and commercial success.Author’ website
Unofficial Alasdair Gray websiteHistory:
Alasdair Gray (born 28 December 1934) is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years. It is now regarded as a classic, and was described by The Guardian as “one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction.” His novel Poor Things (1992) won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He is a Scottish nationalist and a republican.Gray was born in Riddrie, east Glasgow. His father had been wounded in the First World War and worked at the time in a factory, while his mother worked in a shop. During the Second World War, Gray was evacuated to Perthshire and then Lanarkshire, experiences which he drew on in his later fiction. The family lived on a council estate, and Gray received his education from a combination of state education, public libraries, and public service broadcasting: “the kind of education British governments now consider useless, especially for British working class children”, as he later commented. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957, and taught there from 1958 to 1962. It was as a student that he first began what would become the novel Lanark.
After his graduation, Gray worked as a scene and portrait painter, as well as an independent artist and writer. His first plays were broadcast on radio and television in 1968. Between 1972 and 1974, he participated in a writing group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, where he met James Kelman, Liz Lochhead, and Tom Leonard. From 1977 to 1979, he was Writer in Residence at Glasgow University. In 2001, he became, with Tom Leonard and James Kelman, joint Professor of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities.
Gray illustrates his books himself, and has produced many murals as well as paintings. One of his longest-lasting murals can be seen in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in the West End of Glasgow.
In 2001, he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association for the post of Rector of the University of Glasgow, but was eventually narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill.
Novels
Lanark (1981)
Janine (1984)
The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985)
Something Leather (1990)
McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990)
Poor Things (1992)
A History Maker (1994)
Mavis Belfrage (1996)
Old Men In Love (2007)
Short stories
Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983)
Lean Tales (1985) (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens)
Ten Tales Tall & True (1993)
Mavis Belfrage (1996)
The Ends of Our Tethers (2003)
Poetry
Old Negatives (1989)
Sixteen Occasional Poems (2000)
Non-fiction
Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992; revised 1997)
The Book of Prefaces (ed.) (2000)
How We Should Rule Ourselves (2005)
An Interpretation of Lanark:Lanark could be viewed as Thaw in a personal Hell (Thaw drowns in the sea; Lanark arrives in Unthank with the same belongings, and seashells and sand in his pockets). However, the connection between the two narratives is ambiguous. Gray has said that -
“One is a highly exaggerated form of just about the everyday reality of the other” (for example, Thaw’s eczema is mirrored by Lanark’s skin disease ‘dragonhide’) – and writes in the novel itself:
“The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason” (page 484)
(spoken to Lanark) “You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy” (page 493)
“The plots of the Thaw and Lanark sections are independent of each other and cemented by typographical contrivances rather than formal necessity. A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones” (page 493).
One of the most characteristically postmodern parts of the book is the Epilogue, in which Lanark meets the author in the guise of the character “Nastler”. He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying “The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don’t care”. An Index of Plagiarisms is printed in the margins of the discussion. For instance, Gray describes much of Lanark as an extended ‘Difplag’ (diffuse plagiarism) of Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies. However, some of the supposed plagiarisms refer to non-existent chapters of the book.
Gray added an appendix to the 2001 edition of the novel in which he included a brief biography and elaborated on some of the influences on and inspirations for the novel. He cited Kafka as a major influence on the atmosphere of the novel. He also referred to his own experiences in the media industry which he states is reflected in Lanark’s numerous encounters in labyrinthine buildings with individuals talking in jargon. The Institute he describes as a combination of Wyndham Lewis’s conception of Hell in Malign Fiesta along with three real-life structures: the London Underground, Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow and BBC Television Centre in London. More immediately evident inspiration can be seen in the cathedral and necropolis episodes in Unthank, whose proximity to an urban tangle of roads is mirrored in Glasgow’s real-life Townhead area. Glasgow Cathedral is yards away from the Necropolis to the east and the M8 motorway (and aborted Inner Ring Road) to the north and west. A hellish encounter in a decaying underpass not far from “New Cumbernauld” is redolent of the under-road pedestrian thoroughfares common in the 1960s New Town design of Cumbernauld and others.
