Lanark_ a life in 4 books - Alasdair Gray [293]
‘This extraordinary masterpiece … is profoundly perceptive about the ways in which our society is destroying itself. Yet it manages to be funny and is written in a beautifully lucid prose.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Wonderful, expansive prose … a novel that is as rewarding to return to as it is vast in ambition: a modern classic in the true sense of the word.’ Big Issue in Scotland
‘The most remarkable first novel I’ve read for years … It’s unfair that any man, even from Dennistoun, should be so gifted … [Lanark] is allegorical, factual, political, cannibal (and very much so) … this is a book which will be remembered.’ Evening Times
First published in Great Britain in 1981
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2008
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1969, 1981
Tailpiece copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2001
Introduction copyright © William Boyd, 2007
Portions of this work originally appeared in Scottish International Review, Glasgow University Magazine and Words Magazine
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 374 9
www.meetatthegate.com
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