Two Month Review Season 23: “Lanark” by Alasdair Gray

Before we get into the selection for next season, I want to remind everyone to vote in our poll for the Best TMR Class. The hypothetical is that you have to sign up for one of these courses being offered based on the books included.

“Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”

Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda; The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov; Radiant Terminus by Antoine Volodine; Four by Four by Sara Mesa; and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño

“Dismal Lady Stuff”

Fox by Dubravka Ugresic; Monsterhuman by Kjersti Skomsvold; Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann; Three by Ann Quin; and Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino

“Laying Brick”

The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán; Tomas Jonsson, Bestseller by Gudbergur Bergsson; Ada, or Ardor by Vladimir Nabokov; J R by William Gaddis; and Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park

Vote now!!! Results will be announced on June 13th during the first episode of the new season!

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Speaking of the new season, we’re going to dive face first into a book that is a considered one of the great masterpieces of the past fifty years, Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray.

If you’re not familiar with Gray because of this book—which Iain Banks called “the best Scottish literature this century”—you might know him as the author of Poor Things, which was adapted to the screen by Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Emma Stone, and which is now available to stream. (I’m certain we’ll talk about this movie on the podcast. We all have opinions.)

We reissued Poor Things at Dalkey when I was there, and that sent me into a year-long Gray bender as I devoured 1981 Janine, Something Leather, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, and, obviously, Lanark. Which, at the time, I claimed was one of my ten favorite books. We’ll see how that holds up!

The Canongate jacket copy reads: “Lanark, a modern vision of hell set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination, its playful narrative conveys a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind’s inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying.”

That’s . . . not a lot to go on. Here’s a bit more from a 1985 New York Times review by John Crowley:

‘Lanark, subtitled ”A Life in 4 Books,” begins with Book Three which is followed by Books One, Two and Four. In a rainy, gray, depopulated city called Unthank, something has gone wrong with the sun; it comes up, but never very far, never shining strongly. An amnesiac young man, who does not remember who he is or how he comes to be in this city, has chosen the name Lanark—which he saw printed under a photograph of a landscape—because he does not remember his own. He spends time in a cinema cafe among aimless young people without jobs or families. Around him, people disappear, sucked into the sky or the ground without warning. Others suffer from strange diseases with names like twitters, mouths and softs. Lanark has contracted dragonhide—a patch of hard, insensate skin on his arm is spreading. A woman he meets has a worse problem: she opens her palm and shows him the speaking mouth that has appeared there.

Crowley—whose wrote the introduction to the never-published Dalkey Archive Essentials edition of Poor Things (tune in for details)—goes on to describe more of the plot, but ends with this perfectly TMR-inflected paragraph:

Such homemade structures can be accessible and popular, like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, or private and obsessive, like a yacht built in a basement. Which is Lanark? It is a question to which a purely literary judgment is not a sufficient answer. The book often seems provincial, both in the narrow angle of its vision and the great size of its ambitions. It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy, often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers—for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots—to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.

Photograph: Murdo Macleod

In terms of Gray himself, here’s what he had to say about the origins of the book in a piece fro The Guardian back in 2007:

And I was still fascinated by adventure stories in more magical worlds like those discovered by Alice, and Gulliver, and HG Wells’s Mr Cavor, who discovered a complex kingdom inside the moon. And I had recently read all I could find of Kafka in the Muirs’ translation, with their introduction saying that K’s struggle with the bureaucracy of The Castle and The Trial was a modern post-Christian Pilgrim’s Progress with no clearly defined pathway or goal. My life, too, seemed like that, and was happening in a city that felt as big and mysterious as Kafka’s Prague. I began imagining a stranger arriving in a Kafkaesque Glasgow that was a modern Hell. Years before, I had enjoyed Kingsley’s The Water Babies, in which a small, miserable Victorian chimneysweep is drowned and resurrected in a supernatural world that also parodies Victorian Britain in a way (as I found later) suggested by the last book of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. The notion of Lanark and Thaw’s stories being parts of the same book came from The English Epic and its Background by EMW Tillyard, published in 1954, discovered in Denniston public library. It astonishes me to think there was a time when the non-fiction shelves of libraries in working-class Glasgow districts had recently published books of advanced criticism!

A nice trip through a dreary Glasgowian version of hell is the perfect bit of summer reading! So let’s do this! As per usual, the dates below are for the live YouTube broadcast of TMR, with the podcast version dropping on Apple Podcasts and Spotify the next day.

June 13: 1-71 (through Chapter 8)

June 20: 71-129 (through Chapter 12)

June 27: 130-189 (through Chapter 18)

July 4: NO EPISODE

July 11: 190-267 (through Chapter 23)

July 18: 268-334 (through Chapter 28)

July 25; 335-397 (through Chapter 34)

August 1: 398-454 (through Chapter 38)

August 8: 455-518 (through Chapter 41)

August 15: 519-End

Buy your copy today and read along! See you in a couple weeks!