Charles Palliser's 3 favorite reads in 2024

This is a gripping page-turner crammed with extraordinary characters and it has some amazing sequences. The bomb blast in an art gallery that kills the mother of the central character, Theo, when he is thirteen is a brilliant and terrifying scene. And in the shock and confusion of that terrible moment, Theo does something that unleashes the series of events that drives forward the narrative. (And that eventually leads to a dizzying twist in the plot when the reader – along with Theo - finds the carpet pulled from under the feet.)

Theo tells his own story and, in spite of the fact that he gradually yields to a number of temptations that might make us judge him harshly, I found him sympathetic and even endearing.

In its coincidences and happenstances the novel is not straightforwardly realistic but hovers on the edge of fable. Yet the concrete rendering of very different areas of human life is brilliantly done. You’d think the author had spent years restoring and selling old furniture except that she must also have wasted her time in the Las Vegas gambling world as well as frequenting wealthy and posh families on the Upper East Side while fitting in an extensive experience of the New York drug-scene.

I found this compulsively readable as a narrative even though, because it’s a sort of retelling of David Copperfied, it was familiar in its outlines. There are plenty of surprises along the way even if you know the earlier novel.

Part of the pleasure is in seeing how the author has transposed the story from Victorian England to Virginia in the recent past. It completely avoids the sentimentality that is in the Dickens original, and yet the account of Demon’s harsh childhood is unflinching.

Born into poverty, of uncertain parentage, and exploited and mistreated by his school, his employers, and his own relatives, Demon grows up, in spite of all that, to be a person of principle. He tells his own story and the style is racy and colloquial and often crude but always brilliantly inventive and his wry sense of humor comes through very strongly.

I read this extraordinary masterpiece when it was first published in 1981 and I read it again every few years.

In the year it came out I was living in Glasgow which is where it is set. Except that in half of the book the city is transformed into a place called Unthank because Gray gives us two separate but linked narratives.

The novel begins with “Book Three” describing the nightmarish horror of a decaying de-industrialised conurbation called Unthank (meaning “evil thought”) which is seen as a sort of purgatorial afterlife or an insane version of a man’s real life. It is a dreamlike world in which people turn into dragons, hands develop mouths, arms turn into claws and start to savage their owners, time becomes elastic, night and day merge into each other, and people suddenly disappear into holes in the ground.

A man called Lanark finds himself suddenly there and struggles against the cruelty and indifference of a brutal society while wrestling with his own difficulties with his sexual impulses and his longing for a satisfying relationship with a woman.

Then we go to “Book One” – because in the novel’s vision of the world, everything is out of order and incomplete and confused - and find ourselves in the real Glasgow in which an artist called Duncan Thaw grows up to become a highly ambitious and idealist painter. The author evokes the ordinary domestic world of middle-class Scottish life in this highly autobiographical account and we gradually realise that this is the life from which the story of Lanark is derived.