Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [2]
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