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Amazon.co.uk Review
Perversely we start our reading with Book 3--the hero of this and the last book in the quartet, the eponymous Lanark, lives in a bizarre and fantastical future in a grey, dreary city called Unthank. He doesn't remember how he got there nor who he really is. He hangs around a local cafe with some other young people whose values and mores he can't quite figure. All around people are disappearing. Then he contracts dragonhide... and disappears too. He wakes in an institute and is told the sad but instructional tale of Duncan Thaw (the boy he used to be, the boy, in a sense, Alasdair Gray used to be).
Duncan, unknowingly speaking of the epic of which he is the centre, who we meet as a child and watch grow into an artist , says "I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake." And it is Duncan's story that is the heart of Lanark--and what a poignant, heart-breaking tale it is. From a boy who can never accept or offer or understand love, who cannot connect, to an artist who cannot accept that he cannot have the final word--both in his own life and in his art--Duncan's tale is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story.
Lanark is a work of huge imagination and wonderful range; it is about all of our selves, how we make them and make them up; it is about place and what that means for identity and it is about love--how we can learn to love our selves, or fail to, how we need to love, both ourselves and others, to create communities in which we can create art that will promote a continuing project of place in which we can love each other better. Lanark is peerless. --Mark Thwaite
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A brilliant book,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lanark: Life in Four Books: A Life in 4 Books (Canongate Classics) (Paperback)
I was recommended LANARK by a friend and was absolutely bowled over by it - and completely ashamed that I'd never heard of Gray before now. It's very difficult to describe what the book is about - it has two parallel stories, one of a young idealistic artist in Glasgow trying to develop his art in thankless surroundings; the other of a loner in Unthank, a version of Hell (or Glasgow) trying to save his city (Unthank - or Glasgow) from the depredations of industrial capitalism and the onslaught of big business. The book is elegiac, wise, beautifully written, very clever, hilarious in points, self-parodying and full of wonderful satire. It is also full of engaging charaters, and has a great storyline. Impossible here to depict how the halves intertwine, or the sheer energy of Gray's fiction. He took 25 years to write this book - it was worth it. One of the classics of the 20th century. Buy it, read it, give it to your friends!
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
My favourite book of all time.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lanark (Canongate Classics) (Hardcover)
I first read this book in the late 1980's, and have kept coming back to it ever since. I've read it in its entirety three times now, and shall no doubt read it again. It is absolutely superb - engaging, challenging, bizarre, beautifully written. It lends the lie to the notion that experimental fiction has to be 'difficult'. Somehow Gray manages to take on just about every important philosophical theme without ever losing sight of the fact that it is the characters, with all their human frailties, that ultimately engage us.For its sheer ambition and imagination, as well as distinctiveness of voice, this book deserves its place in the canon of great experimental literature - alongside Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Beckett and the other greats.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A superlative book, now superbly packaged.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lanark (Canongate Classics) (Hardcover)
To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first publication of Alasdair Gray's "Lanark", Canongate have re-issued it in a lavishly-printed four-volume hardcover edition, complete with splendid reproductions of Gray murals and paintings on the covers of each volume. Given that Gray famously intended the component books of "Lanark" to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another, there's a case for saying that this edition is really the first to reflect the shape Gray wanted the book to have. With any Alasdair Gray book, the visuals are as much a part of the package as the words, and both deserve the best possible presentation so this edition of "Lanark" has a fair claim to being essential for anyone interested in Gray's writing. This edition also includes Gray's own wry account of the making and reception of "Lanark".
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