Lanark

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.… show more.

A stupendous intelligent novel that is about the stupidity of humans...and a zillion other things.
It is absolutely impossible to summarise it, it simply has to be experienced.

The most “please don’t do it” I have felt in response to a story is as Gray’s protagonist Thaw empties his pockets and throws his life documents and identifying possessions from a moving train on his way to his moment of madness. This will transpose or transform or, I suppose we must, translate Thaw into Lanark.

Critics have noted the many madcap imaginative moments in Gray’s large (in every sense) debut novel. The sequencing of the parts alone (Part 3, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 4) is enough to signal we are in no realist story of a boy… show more.

This book was published in 1981, one of the years I was living in Scotland, and spending much of my time in Glasgow, although it was decades later I learned about the book. Lanark has been called “the greatest novel of the century,” “a seminal work of Scottish literature,” and “an extraordinary masterpiece.” It’s a wildly creative, dystopian vision of Scottish society that nevertheless turns a hopeful eye to the future.

Lanark is one of those books that you can read at different points in your life and find something completely new. There are two intertwined narratives: a coming of age tale about a young artist growing up in Glasgow; and a genre-bending depiction of a lifetime in the fictional city of Unthank. These two stories pull you across time and space, taking in Reichian psychology, social commentary, and gnostic illuminism along the way. It’s bewildering in its scope, but drags you steadily in. I studied History of Art at Glasgow University (and briefly met Gray in the city), but even… show more.