Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [292]
Q Lanark was published three years later. Why did it take so long?
? Canongate arranged a joint publication with Lippincott, an old well-established firm in the USA; but before the book was printed Lippincott got swallowed up by Harper & Row, another old well-established USA firm. This caused delay. Then American editors proof-read the book, decided my punctuation was inconsistent. I told them that I used punctuation marks to regulate the speed with which readers took in the text – some passages were to be read faster than others, so had fewer commas. There was more delay while I restored my text to its original state. However, the delays gave me time to complete the illustrative title pages and jacket designs.
Q Were you relieved when Lanark was finally off your hands?
A Yes. For a while before I held a copy I imagined it like a large paper brick of 600 pages, well bound, a thousand of them to be spread through Britain. I felt that each copy was my true body with my soul inside, and that the animal my friends called Alasdair Gray was a no-longer essential form of after-birth. I enjoyed that sensation. It was a safe feeling.
Q So you the time spent upon Lanark over so many years was time well spent?
A Not entirely. Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live. I’m amazed to recall the diaries I wrote when a student, often putting the words into the third person as a half-way stage to making them fictional prose. I’m sure healthy panthers and ducks enjoy better lives, but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer. There are worse as well as better folk in the world, so I don’t hate myself.
‘Astonishing, satisfying and exciting … marvellously truthful, exact, funny, intelligent, warmly human and a veritable mine of acute observation … a quite extraordinary achievement.’ Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘Probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century … it marked the beginning of a new era in Scottish writing.’ James Campbell, Observer
‘Fuses sci-fi, quasi-autobiography, and an apocalyptic vision into one of the wittiest, darkest, most readable books of the last 50 years.’ The Week
‘Moving and comic … Gray’s vision incorporates meanings and yearnings that are universal human drives – the need for love, for work one does not scorn or hate, for a sense of community … Lanark is an original.’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘Fluent, imaginative, part vision, part realism, even in its organisation it declares itself to be written by the author’s rules and no one else’s … the writing is easy and elegant and never uninteresting.’ Guardian
‘Compelling, a game of hide and seek where one never knows what will happen next … direct, stylish, crisp … a great adventure.’ Naomi Mitchison, Spectator
‘Gray is a master at rummaging in the dustbins of the mind … Important and compelling.’ Daily Telegraph
‘The most remarkable new novel I have read this year, and in many ways the most remarkable book of any kind … the mature work, long in gestation, of an artist-writer of unique gifts in both modes, here most powerfully brought together.’ Herald
‘Probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century … it marked the beginning of a new era in Scottish writing.’ Observer
‘Lanark is one of the seminal works of Scottish literature, a book credited with kick-starting Scotland’s literary renaissance of the past two decades.’ Sunday Times
‘I read Lanark, mesmerised, in a few massive all-night sittings … subtle and complex, like an alarm clock going off, a wake-up call to another place, a place that was all around me, which I was part of, but that now seemed unfamiliar and exciting.’ Scotsman
‘At times exuberant, at times despairing, always vivid … Curious and informed,