Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [0]
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