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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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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!
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.
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