"Lanark" by Alasdair Gray

 This novel combines a sociological novel exploring the death of a society with an autobiography of the artist. It incorporates aspects of metafiction, for example, in the sequence of the parts (Book 3, Prologue, Book 1, Book 2, Book 4) and in the Epilogue (placed within Book 4) which incorporates the author discussing the plot with the protagonist, footnotes and an 'Index of Plagiarisms' directing the readers attention to the literary sources of the novel. 

I enjoyed books one and two which followed a lad called Thaw through childhood, school and art college to his first commission, a period in which he repeatedly and unsuccessfully attempts to lose his virginity, and at the end of which he suffers a breakdown. 

The frame narrative (books three, which comes before one, and four, which follows two) follows the picaresque adventures of a lad called Lanark, who is presumably Thaw, post breakdown. The narrative starts in a city we later learn is called Unthank into which Lanark has strayed having forgotten his name (this was very like the beginning of Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney). Soon Lanark is swallowed (Book of Jonah?) and falls into an underground world (Alice in Wonderland?) which is run by the sinister Institute. Later he leaves the Institute to travel through an intercalendrical zone back to Lanark where he endeavours to prevent the destruction planned for the city. So, a dystopia, with hints of The Time Machine by H G Wells mixed with You Only Live Twice? In this experimental fiction phase of the book, the author's ever-fertile imagination spawns lots of incidents and loads of characters and somehow fails to present a narrative that gels. Whilst I had been invested in the trials and tribulations of wannabe-artist Thaw, I never really cared what happened to Lanark or his world.

In the end, whilst appreciating the author's erudition (all those sources!) and his skill, I was disappointed. 

But there is humour ("Do you abuse yourself? Certainly, if I've been stupid in public."; Ch 18) and there are wonderful descriptions ("The yellow or purple spots of occasional roadside flowers shrieked like tiny discords in an orchestra where every instrument played over and over again the same two notes."; Ch 18) and the text is saturated with ideas.

Sources

The Index of Plagiarisms in the Epilogue gives an alphabetical list of sources for this novel. They include:

• William Blake
• John Bunyan since Lanark's progress in parts three and four could be regarded as a rather Rabelaisian version of Pilgrim's Progress
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Lewis Carroll
• Joyce Cary's The Horses Mouth (particularly its hero Gulley Johnson who is a "Blake-quoting penniless painter of a mural illustrating the biblical Genesis in a derelict church")
• William Golding (whose protagonist of the book Pincher Martin is either dying or dead)
• James Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Franz Kafka: the Index cites the last chapter of The Trial but parts three and four are very Kafkaesque
• Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies, much of which involves a journey through a sort of purgatory after the hero has drowned himself
• H G Wells: specifically the sublunar civilization in The First Men on the Moon

But I was reminded of other novels too, particularly Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney and the work of William Burroughs.

Selected quotes:

• "the film ... was about people who undressed soon after the beginning and then did everything they could think of in the circumstances." (Ch 1)
• "He knew something about writing, for when wandering the city he had visited public libraries and read enough stories to know there were two kinds. One kind was a sort of written cinema, with plenty of action and hardly any thought. The other kind was about clever unhappy people, often authors themselves, who thought a lot but didn't do very much." (Ch 2)
• "If a writer doesn't enjoy words for their own sake how can the reader enjoy them?" (Ch 4)
• "Metaphor is one of thought's most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing." (Ch 4)
• "genital eagerness sucked thought out of him." (Ch 5)
• "why should we even try to be human if we are going to die? If you die your pain and struggle have been useless!" (Ch 7)
• "A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties. A lot of young folk know this and fight very hard, but after a few years life gets easier for them and they think they've become completely human when they've only stopped trying." (Ch 7)
• "Names are nothing but collars men tie round your neck to drag you where they like." (Ch 9)
• "In modern civilizations those who work in the sunlight are a despised and dwindling minority. ... As for lovemaking and friendship, humanity has always preferred to enjoy these at night." (Ch 9)
• "Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is separation." (Ch 11)
• "She expected splendour. Most of us expect it sometime or other, and growing old is mainly a way of learning to do without." (Prologue)
• "He kept these pictures between pages of Carlyle's French Revolution, a book no one else was likely to open." (Ch 16)
• "A nearly naked blonde smiling as if her body was a joke she wanted to share." (Ch 18)
• "Various plants struggled in the poor soil, fighting with blind deliberation to suffocate or strangle each other." (Ch 18)
• "Hard-backed leggy things with multiple eyes and feelers, all gnawing holes and laying eggs and squirting poisons in the plants and each other." (Ch 18)
• "We are all hate, big balloons of hate." (Ch 18)
• "Men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate." (Ch 18)
• "The skin disease returned and his throat looked as if he had made an incompetent effort to cut it." (Ch 19)
• "People ... think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon." (Ch 20)
• "Everyone carried on their necks a grotesque art object, originally inherited, which they never tired of altering and adding to." (Ch 21)
• "Folk near the river were usually gaunter, half a head shorter and had cheaper clothes than folk in the suburbs." (Ch 22)
• "My mother told her she wasn't fit to sleep with a pig. Which forced me into the unenviable position of declaring she was fit to sleep with a pig." (Ch 23)
• "He was struck by the clarity of the stars. They were not like lights stippling the inside surface of a dome but like galactic chandeliers hung at different levels in the black air." (Ch 23)
• "Great beetles emerged. The city was full of them. They were five feet long and shaped like rowing boats with antennae and had mouths in their stomachs." (Ch 23)
• "Of course she's frigid. So am I. But nobody stays the same forever and even lumps of ice, surely, will melt if they rub together long enough." (Ch 24)
• "All night he was dipping in and out of sleep, but at such a shallow angle he never noticed." (Ch 26)
• "The mountain has laboured and given birth to a small obnoxious rodent." (Ch 36) This is an adaptation of a Latin epigram from Roman poet Horace.
• "Prosperity is made by the bosses struggling with one another for more wealth. If they have to struggle with their workers too, then everybody loses." (Ch 38)
• "Touch tells me you are near me but eyes talk about the space between." (Ch 41)
• "Grampa says there isn't a God. People invented him. They invented motorcars too." (Ch 41)
• "He had lost someone or something, a secret document, a parent, or his self-respect." (Ch 41)

March 2023; 561 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God