Lanark: a life in 4 books (2 page)

Such are the complexities of personal history that enfold the simple reading of a book. I haven’t read
Lanark
since that 1981 review (though I have read and reviewed other of Alasdair Gray’s novels and stories – and have since met him on a few occasions) and to re-encounter a closely-read and greatly admired novel twenty-five years on is not necessarily to be encouraged – I abandoned a recent re-reading of
Catch-22
because my growing dismay was seriously tarnishing the memories of my rapt late-adolescent engagement with what I thought was one of the great novels of all time. However, revisiting
Lanark
was both a fascinating and a revealing experience. When I reviewed the book in 1981 it had no reputation; now its immense freight of reputation is impossible to ignore.

What can one say about
Lanark
that hasn’t been said already (most eloquently by Gray himself, in his tailpiece ‘How Lanark Grew’)? Re-reading my review I can see how much I enjoyed the novel, but my appreciation was not unequivocal. I particularly relished the two books about Duncan Thaw in Glasgow but I was less taken with the allegorical counterpoint of the eponymous Lanark in the city of Unthank. I wrote: ‘Thaw’s story – Books One and Two – forms a superb, self-contained realistic novel about a disturbed child’s education and his uneven growth towards manhood.’ But the Unthank sections drew less praise: ‘The bizarremachinery of the world of fable reasserts itself …’; ‘The final scenes of Lanark’s rise to power (he becomes Provost of Unthank)… are amongst the least successful parts of this long and demanding novel …
Lanark
is, in effect, made up of two novels, one traditional and naturalistic, the other a complex allegorical fable.’ My conclusion, though, was genuinely positive: ‘For all its unevenness
Lanark
is a work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches, especially in the two central books of Thaw’s life which, had they been presented on their own, would surely have been hailed as a minor classic of the literature of adolescence.’

I know now why I didn’t respond with wholehearted enthusiasm to the allegorical story of Lanark in the city of Unthank. I was positioning myself, as all writers unconsciously do – and particularly as a writer whose first novel had just been published – using criticism of others to evaluate and proclaim what I myself stood for. I was and am a realistic novelist and I felt strongly then that fable, allegory, surrealism, fantasy, magic realism and the rest were not my literary cup of tea. But I think that in my 1981 review I unconsciously prefigured aspects of my recent, late reading of the book. The structure of
Lanark
– the small naturalistic novel embedded in a large eclectic one – is, it seems to me now, precisely the reason for the book’s enduring success. I realise now that, for Alasdair Gray, the last thing on earth he wanted to achieve in
Lanark
was to write, and be hailed for writing, ‘a minor classic of the literature of adolescence’. As we have since come to know, that was indeed what he had done first – Thaw’s story was written initially and discretely and is a re-imagining of a life close to Gray’s own. But it could never have been enough: every ambition that Gray had for his long-gestating book obliged him to create something larger, more complex, more difficult, more alienating. Gray needed the overarching machinery of allegory and fable to make
Lanark
transcend its origins.

And here we come to the thorny – the thistly – question of
Lanark
’s Scottishness. Gray has said that he wants ‘to be read by an English-speaking tribe which extends to Cape Town in the south, Bengal in the east, California in the west and George Mackay Brown in the north’. This seems to me very just: it should be the form of wishful thinking that every writer, in English should indulge in. Having re-read
Lanark
twenty-five years on I still prefer Thaw’s story to Lanark’s but I recognise now what I didn’t see then: namely that it was
Lanark
’s very awkward bulky scale, its ostentatious manipulations of structure, its extra-parochial pretensions, its allusiveness and its overt and purposeful invitation to exegesis and literary comparison that raise the book to another level. Just as Joyce fitted an ordinary day in Dublin into the armature of the
Odyssey
, so Gray reconfigures the life of Duncan Thaw into a polyphonic
Divina Commedia
of Scotland.

The Joyce comparison is valid on many levels and I think provides 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 none liked the café much. It was common for a customer to put down his coffee cup and say, “The Elite is a hellish place. I don’t know why we come here. The coffee’s bad, the lighting’s bad, the whole dump teems with poofs and wogs and Jews. Let’s start a fashion for going somewhere else.” And someone would answer, “There is nowhere else. Galloway’s Tearoom is too bourgeois, all businessmen and umbrella stands and stuffed stags’ heads. The Shangri-la has a jukebox that half deafens you, and anyway it’s full of hardmen. Armstrong had his face slashed there. There are pubs, of course, but we can’t always be drinking. No, this may be a hellish place but it’s all we have. It’s central, it’s handy for the cinema and at least it’s a change from home.”

The café was often crowded and never completely empty, but on one occasion it nearly emptied. The man in the black raincoat came in from the balcony and saw nobody but the waiter and Sludden, who sat on his usual sofa. The man hung his coat on a hook and ordered a coffee. When he left the counter he saw Sludden watching him with amusement.

Sludden said, “Did you find it, Lanark?”

“Find what? What do you mean?”

“Find what you were looking for on the balcony? Or do you go there to avoid us? I’d like to know. You interest me.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Oh, we all know your name. One of us is usually in the queue when they shout it at the security place. Sit down.” Sludden patted the sofa beside him. Lanark hesitated, then put his cup on the table and sat. Sludden said, “Tell me why you use the balcony.”

“I’m looking for daylight.”

Sludden pursed his mouth as if tasting sourness. “This is hardly a season for
daylight
.”

“You’re wrong. I saw some not long ago and it lasted while I counted over four hundred, and it used to last longer. Do you mind my talking about this?”

“Go on! You couldn’t discuss it with many people, but I’ve thought things out. Now you are trying to think things out and that interests me. Say what you like.”

Lanark was pleased and annoyed. He was lonely enough to feel flattered when people spoke to him but he disliked condescension. He said coldly, “There’s not much to say.”

“But why do you like daylight? We’re well lit by the usual means.”

“I can measure time with it. I’ve counted thirty days since coming here, maybe I’ve missed a few by sleeping or drinking coffee, but when I remember something I can say,’ It happened two days ago,’ or ten, or twenty. This gives my life a feeling of order.”

“And how do you spend your…
days
?”

“I walk and visit libraries and cinemas. When short of money I go to the security place. But most of the time I watch the sky from the balcony.”

“And are you happy?”

“No, but I’m content. There are nastier ways of living.”

Sludden laughed. “No wonder you’ve a morbid obsession with daylight. Instead of visiting ten parties since you came here, laying ten women and getting drunk ten times, you’ve watched thirty days go by. Instead of making life a continual feast you chop it into days and swallow them regularly, like pills.”

Lanark looked sideways at Sludden. “Is your life a continual feast?”

“I enjoy myself. Do you?”

“No. But I’m content.”

“Why are you content with so little?”

“What else can I have?”

Customers had been arriving and the café was nearly full. Sludden was more casual than when the conversation started. He said carelessly, “Moments of vivid excitement are what make life worth living, moments when a man feels exalted and masterful. We can get them from drugs, crime and gambling, but the price is rather high. We can get them from a special interest, like sports, music or religion. Have you a special interest?”

“No.”

“And we get them from work and love. By work I don’t mean shovelling coal or teaching children, I mean work which gives you a conspicuous place in the world. And by love I don’t mean marriage or friendship, I mean independent love which stops when the excitement stops. Perhaps I’ve surprised you by putting work and love in the same category, but both are ways of mastering other people.”

Lanark brooded on this. It seemed logical. He said abruptly,

“What work could I do?”

“Have you visited Galloway’s Tearoom?”

“Yes.”

“Did you speak to anyone there?”