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The Fall of Kelvin Walker
 
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The Fall of Kelvin Walker (Paperback)

by Alasdair Gray (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (29 Aug 1991)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0140121609
  • ISBN-13: 978-0140121605
  • Product Dimensions: 19.8 x 12.8 x 1.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 493,150 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in these categories:

    #23 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > G > Gray, Alasdair
    #26 in  Books > Fiction > Cult Authors > Gray, Alasdair

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Product Description

Product Description

Kelvin Walker is in London to make his fortune. He plans to start at the top and through his absurd ambition a megalomania surfaces that is unrelieved by his insensitive and ruthless attempts at friendship and romance. Yet is he all bad?

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Faith and Power and Fun and a cursed kind of Scottishness, 6 Jan 2007
By Chris M. Dooks "bovinelife" (Glasgow) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
I've lived in Scotland for 15 years now as an exiled Englishman and only in the last few years have I really gotten into polymath Alasdair Gray's work. It's a kind of anthropology reading him. He's brilliantly idiosyncratic but I feel like I am being educated and wildly entertained at the same time.

This is a book about faith and it makes me really want to know about Gray's own faith.

This book seems to be a very accessible way into Gray's world view. I didn't realise he was so damn prolific! I got into him seriously, as a friend has one of his murals in her Glasgow flat and I began to tour Glasgow to find other examples of Gray in action as a painter of murals. Then I went onto beginning reading him. I couldn't get into Lanark, but I am trying! After I enjoyed "Unlikely Stories Mostly" I found a copy of Kelvin Walker in Byres road Cancer research shop for £1.00 and read it in two sittings, something I've not done with any book as I am a slow reader. It was just a riot of psychology, what underpins a certain kind of confidence of a rebellious wide-eyed visitor to London from "Glaik" (- which I encourage the reader to look up the origin of that place name) and his very filmic adventures in a kind of presbetyrian Dick Whittington romp. It also has possibly the first example in literature of "car-crash television" which, if real, would make it onto "the 100 most embarrassing moments in television." - There's a great, brisk narrative arc in the book. Gray wastes nothing. He is satarist and actually, he can write romantic warmth when he wants to in this novel. His central character - although amazingly gifted (by his own admission) is emotionally stunted and you find out why as we go on. And then the car crash...

I like this book because it makes you believe - even fleetingly - that the protagonist can beat the system, that faith is a form of food and energy, no matter what kind of faith that is. But there is a darker tone at play, that points at the "dour" kind of "miserable Christianty" that people speak about in Scotland. That you can never really succeed because there's no humility in success and we better not forget our place as dour Scots.

It's a great shame the reprints of this book do not have Gray's design all over them as he is a fantastic graphic designer - my little battered Penguin is very beautifully put together.

It's a bit of a prophecy of trial-by-television, of devolution in Scotland (Gray has written much on this subject in essays), of arrogance, chancers, con merchants - but more importantly, what motivates and underpins their actions.
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