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an insight into Gray’s approach and methodology as a novelist. However, a passing mention of Joyce’s Ulysses – to explore the tangled skein motif again – provoked me in 1981 into a further comment on Gray’s novel (and a defence of myself as reviewer). A couple of weeks after my review appeared, the Times Literary Supplement published a hostile letter from a reader in New Lanark – coincidentally – one Rose Arnold, who took me angrily to task for identifying the city of ‘Provan’, in the Unthank books, with Edinburgh. She saw Lanark as being entirely about Glasgow and declared that, ‘to deny the interest of the Glaswegian theme is rather like suggesting Ulysses might as well have been set in London’. Answering her letter, I defended my review robustly two weeks later on the letters page, citing Gray himself as the authority for a possible Provan/Edinburgh identification, but, as a Parthian shot, I also pointed out that ‘to read Lanark throughout as a “loving analysis” of Glasgow is seriously to limit and confine the effects and resonances of the novel: rather like reading Ulysses solely for what it can tell you about Dublin’. I think I inadvertently hit a key nail on the head, here. What I was saying to Rose Arnold was that Gray had made sure – and had taken enormous pains in so doing – that we could not read his novel as a Bildungsroman, or thinly disguised memoir, or science fiction, or a Bunyanesque allegory, or a loving analysis of Glasgow. He managed to make Lanark all of these things and more, and that is why it has been read and will continue to be read: reading Lanark will leave its trace on your life.

William Boyd

CHAPTER 1.

The Elite

The Elite Café was entered by a staircase from the foyer of a cinema. A landing two thirds of the way up had a door into the cinema itself, but people going to the Elite climbed farther and came to a large dingy-looking room full of chairs and low coffee tables. The room seemed dingy, not because it was unclean but because of the lighting. A crimson carpet covered the floor, the chairs were upholstered in scarlet, the low ceiling was patterned with whorled pink plaster, but dim green wall lights turned these colours into varieties of brown and made the skins of the customers look greyish and dead. The entrance was in a corner of the room, and the opposite corner held a curved chromium and plastic counter where a bald fat smiling man stood behind the glittering handles of a coffee machine. He wore black trousers, white shirt and black bow tie and was either dumb or unusually reticent. He never spoke; the customers only addressed him to order coffee or cigarettes, and when not serving these he stood so still that the counter seemed an extension of him, like the ring round Saturn. A door by the bar opened onto a narrow outdoor balcony above the cinema entrance. This had room for three crowded-together metal-topped tables with parasols through the middle. Coffee was not drunk here because the sky was often dark with strong wind and frequent rain. The tabletops had little puddles on them, the collapsed cloth of the parasols flapped soddenly against the poles, the seats were dank, yet a man of about twenty-four usually sat here, huddled in a black raincoat with the collar turned up. Sometimes he gazed in a puzzled way at the black sky, sometimes he bit thoughtfully on the knuckle of his thumb. Nobody else used the balcony.

When the Elite was full most languages and dialects could be heard there. The customers were under thirty and sat in cliques of five or six. There were political cliques, religious cliques, artistic cliques, homosexual cliques and criminal cliques. Some cliques talked about athletics, others about motor cars, others about jazz. Some cliques were centred on particular people, the biggest being dominated by Sludden. His clique usually occupied a sofa by the balcony door. An adjacent clique contained people who had belonged to Sludden’s clique but grown tired of it (as they claimed) or been expelled from it (as Sludden claimed). The cliques disliked each other and