Lanark: A Life in Four Books
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| Lanark | |
 The frontispiece of book four of the novel, after that of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. |
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| Author | Alasdair Gray |
|---|---|
| Country | Scotland |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Canongate Press |
| Publication date | 1981 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 560 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0903937743 |
Lanark, subtitled A Life in Four Books, was the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, and is still his best known. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist and dystopian fantasy depictions of his home city of Glasgow.
Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". The book has since won the Saltire Society Book of the Year and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic. In 2006, The Guardian heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."[1]
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Lanark comprises four books, arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four ( there is also a Prologue before Book Three, 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 twentysomethings 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 utilises the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave.
Books One and Two constitute a realist Bildungsroman beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("based on myself, 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.
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 variously 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')
- "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. An Index of Plagiarisms (some of which are fictional) is printed in the margins of their discussion. For instance, Gray describes much of Lanark as an extended 'Difplag' (diffuse plagiarism) of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies. He 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".
[edit] Genesis
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.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Lanark 1982 Unofficial Alasdair Gray site
