gray's anatomy
a review
(1,350 words)

Published in hoolet magazine, autumn 2001

When I first read Lanark, some six years ago, I had been experimenting for some time with my own epic-inspired literary visions. Drawing on multiple cultures, I have always dealt with Glasgow on several, interlocking levels and sometimes, when I walk through the city, I move through a number of different cities, each one, possessing its own reference points, its own, unique cartography. In many ways, I am Gray’s protagonist, Lanark/Duncan Thaw, and their journey(s) are my journeys. With its parallel, dystopian worlds of Glasgow and Unthank and the deliberately non-linear trajectory of its narrative (the novel begins at Book 3), Lanark reminds me of the work of Carroll, Tolkien, Lovecraft and seems driven by some of the frenetic, obsessional, quantum concerns of Borges or Levi. As one reads it, one perceives glimpses of the uncertain realities which pullulate beneath the shimmering, classical surfaces of Greek Thomson. And like the tenements themselves, this split-screen novel contains and transforms the massive, sluggish canon of ‘Western Naturalism’ (with all the attendant emotional punches and the literary world-view which that term implies). This balancing of harmonic dissonances, at a time when, in publishing terms, my writing seemed to be going nowhere, felt like a Da Vinci injection which inspired me to dig even deeper into the seam of my own consciousness. The oxbow, symphonic structure, with its multiple themes and divertissements, is redolent of a somewhat playful, yet epic, diegesis. And it is this subtle structural music of Lanark which sits inside one’s head for years after one has read it and which possibly will sit there for the rest of one’s life. It is as though the Mad Hatter has stepped through the looking glass and emerged into Glasgow, and thence into our minds, bringing with him, a large chunk of Unthank. Once, s/he was called Homer, then later, she was known as Scheherazade, Joyce, Beckett and now s/he goes by the name of Helper Gray. Different heads, same hat.

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What I most admire about ‘Lanark’ is Gray’s refusal to patronise the reader. As children, the quantum state was the natural one; we moved constantly between worlds. As adults, too; it’s just that now we don’t realise it. Somewhere along the line, we have forfeited our awareness. So, the love story can become the fabulist subterranean journey through different versions of Hell which can transmogrify into the quintessential dark, tenemental saga. And why not? Canongate’s attractive, new, boxed edition of Lanark is welcome, indeed; I hope this novel never goes out of print; it is a constantly renewing blast of the imagination against the growing, dreadful, hegemonic trend in fiction to emulate the kennel narratives of Hollywood. This attitude stems partly from the dangerous, Unthankian monopoly which is developing in publishing; very soon, the entire world publishing industry will be owned by a handful of powerful people, based mainly in the USA and Germany. Three or four giant corporations will make books for all of us. Lanark was published 20 years ago, after many rejections, by a then unknown writer. I do not believe such a book would be published today.

The book is a Frankenstein’s golem of a thing, with all the Luciferic darkness which that implies. The 1950’s Riddrie Michelangelo, vault-painting in the church, illustrates this dynamic and also the essentially theological nature of the book. In Lanark, ultimately, redemption resides in mortality. With its digressions, its multiple points of view, its strange demi-urges and prophets, its prolific footnotes which begat other footnotes, and finally, in its end-piece, private Armageddon, ‘Lanark’ resembles the Bible. And like the Testaments, the more you read them, the more you read into them, until, at length, each letter, every semi-colon, becomes iconic. Gray doesn’t just draw pictures all over, inside and around, his books (and when he signs those books, he often adds to those Bosch-like illustrations), he is a total artist of text-and-image as one entity, a revelatory prophet of Alba, a thumping rocker and shaker. A gloriously mad preacher of darkness and light. A Glasgow Green Zoroaster. In his almost Kabbalistic unification of a dualistic text, Gray is the author of a new, ancient, anatomy, one which is being read and pored over, now, today, by Homer.

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According to Bernstein, Lanark as hypertext, as ergodic fiction, is related ontologically with works such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Cortazar’s Raguela, Federman’s Take It or Leave It and Sorrentino’s Mullligan’s Stew. Gray’s work resonates with ‘the harmonics of the unactualised’. Gray himself says: “I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another.” Paradoxically, the breaking up of narratives, the leaking of text between domains, the disconnection of different lexias by means of links draws the reader towards some kind of metalevel coherence which is akin to that which one can attain through the medium of music. Gray is positing a new thought medium with a different syntax. There is a strange arc from this book, backwards into black-and-white celluloid, to the work of Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein (though perhaps this not so odd; Glasgow and Russia share the phlegmatic resignation of swaying crosses; and then, as Barthes points out, Eisenstein was deeply influenced by Japanese Kabuki theatre with its exaggerated modes of expression and its deliberate eschewing of naturalism and of the superficial pretence of reality upon which so much Western fiction and drama rests). It is no accident that Gray’s concrete prose has links with oral (performance) modes.

Unlike, say, Ulysses, Finniegan’s Wake or The Tin Drum, this novel is easy to read; one does not require five demitasse cups of bladder-busting Turkish coffee simply to be able to concentrate on the sentence structure. Lanark is not a dehumanised, postmodern, linguistic game. Gray writes with deep humanity and humour (the politician, Sludden, is dangerous, comedic and pathetic), his characters are emotional, flesh-and-blood entities and some of his most moving passages (for me) concern the illness and the death of Thaw’s mother and the love which grows between Lanark and Rima. Indeed, as Janice Galloway has pointed out, his women characters are strong, and one of the major threads running through Lanark is that of ‘woman, as the principle’. There is a yearning for comprehension which drives the narrative, and this lack of omniscience between the sexes adds to the essential humanity of the book. Mary Shelley’s monster has acquired a mortal soul, possibly even a Great Soul.

In Lanark, the Emperor has new clothes. They are his skin, his internal organs, his skeleton, his vision, his voice(s). Gray’s anatomy, no less, which is replicated through us all. The natural frequency of this book is such that it has the power to transfigure. It is an alchemical treatise.

In some ways, ‘Lanark’ is a towering conceit, a Babel which gathers its raison d’etre from its imaginative fearlessness in displaying the synthetic nature of fiction. In the West, we still worship the gods of the Middle East. One expects, at any moment, the god-reader to demolish the artifice, but Gray’s writing is so effectively subversive that the reader ends up realising (unlike Yahweh, but like the characters in the novel) that she is just another demi-urge beneath a swaying, changing sky. And that, surely, is an exposition of the human condition at its most basic, in the intensity of its frailty. In the future, I believe this will be the legacy of ‘Lanark’ and of Gray’s work, generally. In the Scottish context, this juggling of narratives was almost entirely new. It had the effect of linking Scottish fiction with other contemporary literary streams; the Latin American, the experimental North American, the Irish, the Middle Eastern; as well as with its own, epic past(s) and with our lives as lived in the late 20th/early21st centuries. Perhaps most importantly of all, it inspires readers – and thus, writers, who are all firstly readers – to reach beyond the tired, grey corpses of themselves and to subvert the medium. Through subversion, as Peter Kropotkin might have said if, like Homer, he had read Lanark, comes redemption. The future, in literary terms, remains open.

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