Glasgow (43 page)

ALASDAIR GRAY'S
LANARK
, 1984
Anthony Burgess

First published in 1981, Alastair Gray's debut novel
, Lanark,
was immediately recognised as a significant contribution to Scottish literature. Many years in the writing, it combines realism, surrealism and science fiction, introducing a hero called Duncan Thaw, who may or may not be based on the author, and a city called Unthank, which doubtless owes a lot to Glasgow. The most quoted passage in the novel is that in which one of the characters asks: ‘What is Glasgow to most of us? A house, the place we work, a football park or golf course, some pubs and connecting streets. That's all. No, I'm wrong, there's also the cinema and library. And when our imagination needs exercise we use these to visit London, Paris, Rome under the Caesars, the American West at the turn of the century, anywhere but here and now. Imaginatively Glasgow exists as a music-hall song and a few bad novels. That's all we've given to the world outside. It's all we've given to ourselves.' One of
Lanark
's many fans was the English novelist, Anthony Burgess, who cited it in his book
, Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939.

A big and original novel has at last come out of Scotland. Gray is a fantastic writer (and his own fantastic illustrator) who owes something to Kafka but not much. He has created a mythical city called Unthank, a kind of lightless Limbo where people succumb to strange diseases and then are transformed into crabs, leeches, dragons before disappearing without trace. This nonplace has a vague resemblance to contemporary Glasgow. Lanark, one of its citizens, indeed eventually its Provost, suspects that he is a metamorphosis of an earlier life-form, consults the Oracle in a strange place called the Institute and is granted a vision of the life of a young man named Duncan Thaw, growing up in a real Glasgow, preoccupied with the problem of reconciling his artistic ambitions with the maintaining of ordinary human relationships. All this is good traditional naturalism. Thaw dies, and it is not clear whether his death is accidental or suicidal. He finds himself in Unthank, which nightmarishly reproduces aspects of his past life. His
identification with Lanark is vague. Lanark sets out now on a mad journey ‘through the mist and time chaos of the Intercalendrical Zone', visits a city called Provan, where the citizens drink rainbows and are oppressed by security robots. Gray attempts no linguistic innovations, though his footnotes and marginal glosses recall
Finnegans Wake
. Whether his intention is satirical is not clear. It is best to take this novel as the emanation of the fancy of a Celt with a strong visual imagination and great verbal power. Scotland produced, in Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest poet of the century (or so some believe); it was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.

COME AND SEE MA BLUE HOOSE, 1984
Ian Jack

Glasgow is not by any means unique in being a city of contrasts. Like Paris, or for that matter New York or London, rich and poor have always lived within its precincts. Perhaps, though, the two are more obviously demarcated in Glasgow. Taking his lead from George Orwell's novel
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
journalist Ian Jack imagined what a day in the life of a Glaswegian might be in the not-too-distant future
.

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times, and there are two Glasgows. Perhaps the Burrell Collection exemplifies the city at its best; a fine and genuinely popular modern building, set among woods and parkland, which attracted a million visitors within the first ten months of its opening. It cost £20 million to build but entrance is absolutely free. Here the people worship art, or merely gawp at the results of one man's gobbling hunger for rare and precious artefacts. Sir William Burrell made his fortune by the simple expedient of ordering ships cheap during slumps and selling them dear during booms. The profits went into salerooms. A great man for a bargain, Sir William would buy almost anything, from any period, from any culture, if the price was right. Glaswegians are celebrating a belated monument to the city's old wealth and self-confidence.

Glasgow at its worst can be found in the housing estates, the famous ‘peripheral estates' which have changed in twenty years from a solution to a problem to a problem without any solution in sight. Unemployment rates in the estates can rise as high as fifty or sixty per cent. Many of the houses are damp; Glasgow Council received more than 17,000 complaints of dampness last year and spent more than £8 million trying
to dry out its tenants' homes. According to a recent medical report, children who grow up there are more likely to be hospitalised for diseases such as whooping cough and gastroenteritis than children born in the more privileged parts of the city. Heroin-taking increases by the week. Large numbers of people want to get out.

I took a taxi to Possilpark, a pre-war estate built on a hill above the derelict wharves of the Forth and Clyde canal and only a mile or so from the city centre. Here, quite coincidentally, Sir William Burrell owned the boatbuilding yard which laid the foundations of the Burrell fortune in the middle of the last century.

‘Possilpark,' said the driver, ‘that's a helluva place to get into. It's a maze, no joke. They've built all these barriers across the roads to stop the boys pinching cars. Not, mind you, that it stops them.'

We passed abandoned factories and then began to rumble up and down streets full of wild dogs and wild children. Many houses had hardboard nailed over the windows.

‘Christ knows what the folk do in a place like this,' said the driver. ‘I think they must stay in doors and just screw the arse off one another.'

I got out and walked through the children (‘Hey look, there's a funny man in a taxi') and called on Mrs Betty Collins to ask her if Glasgow had improved. ‘Oh aye,' she said, ‘miles better if you don't have to live in this damned place.' The Burrell Collection, the Citizens' Theatre, Scottish Opera; to Mrs Collins they seemed hopeless fripperies, possibly located on Mars. She helps run a local tenants' group. The majority of tenants, she said, were ‘decent people trying to do their best' in the face of formidable problems which people who don't live in a place like Possilpark could never hope to understand. Take the woman who lived across the street. She was a ‘wee bit simple', not quite right in the head poor girl, and frequently taken advantage of. She's been raped once. Then children had broken into her house and painted it blue – with hands not brushes, blue paint daubed on every wall. The woman came home and was delighted. ‘Come and see ma blue hoose,' she'd told Mrs Collins, who didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Housing estates, as a Glasgow councillor remarked, live in a ‘peculiar psychological isolation'. Mrs Collins defined it as frustration bred from lack of hope and solved, temporarily, by alcohol, vandalism, theft and heroin. Kids, she said, were beginning to take junk (heroin spliced with Vim or sugar) at the age of twelve. Dirty needles had given the boy next door three separate doses of hepatitis. You could recognise heroin-users by the fact that they went into pubs and sat there clueless, without a drink. Mrs Collins remembered that as a teenager in the Fifties she'd had a choice of dancehalls, cafés, cinemas. Now there was nothing but
pubs and bookies' shops. Nearly every local factory had closed and gangs of teenagers wandered aimlessly about the streets.

Within ten minutes of leaving Mrs Collins I was sitting in a restaurant and inspecting a menu which advertised not only food but also the manner of its recent capture. Oban-landed monkfish, creel-caught langoustines. All around happy diners talked about interesting personal developments.

‘I hear Andrew's bought a wee weekend place on Loch Fyne.'

‘I hear he's off the drink.'

‘Heard that one before though.'

Here is an interesting change. Glasgow restaurants, unlike their London counterparts, were once filled with whispering customers who deferred both to the waiters and the food; an abnormal treat, eating expensive food, and an experience clearly devised for the luxury races to the south. But now people eat, drink and talk with unabashed enjoyment, as though, indeed, their custom made the owner's profits.

We ordered food. The Wild East Coast Salmon was especially recommended. My friends, none of them rich but all of them doing all right, discussed the peripheral estates. They had heard – heard perhaps too often – about the unemployment, the damp and the heroin. But what was going to be done? ‘I mean, let's face it, the Clyde is never going to build Cunarders again . . . and it's difficult to see how the bears will ever work again.' (‘Bears' is a Glasgow word for yobs or
lumpens
.)

In future, then, the Glaswegian will come in two types. Here is a day's timetable for each:

The Aspirer

7.30 Rise; muesli and orange juice

8.00 Jog.

9.30 Office; work on new software deal.

13.00 Meet Roddy, Fergus and Diarmid in Gertrude's wine bar. Discuss scheme to open print shop in disused railway signal cabin.

15.00 Festival shopping with the wife. Shiver while eating hot croissant and watching imitation of Marcel Marceau.

19.30 To see Scottish Opera's new production of
Rigoletto
, updated to the Gorbals of 1935.

22.30 Supper with lawyer friends at the Café de Paris. Oban-landed monkfish off.

23.50 Home; remember to adjust burglar alarm.

The Non-Aspirer

11.00 Rise; Wonderloaf and PG Tips.

12.00 Dress.

13.00 Watch
Pebble Mill at One
.

15.00 Watch
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
for the fourth time.

18.00 Meet pusher, buy £5 bag.

22.00 Wonder what happened during the past three hours.

24.00 Steal car for purposes of burglary elsewhere, to finance purchase of more £5 bags.

Meanwhile the most considered judgement on the new Glasgow comes from Alasdair Gray. For thirty years Gray painted Glasgow and its people without making a fortune doing so. Then, three years ago, he published his first novel,
Lanark
, which attracted notice and praise from London and even further afield. Many remarked on its length, ambition and anarchic brilliance.

I asked Gray the old question. Had Glasgow improved? He didn't rush to answer.

‘Och, ha, hum, quack-quack,' said Gray, who often turns a mysterious phrase. ‘Well, if you're middle-class, like I am, and if you're middle-aged, like I am, and if you work in a luxury trade, like I do, and if you've had a bit of luck recently, like I have, then yes, Glasgow is a better place.'

JOCK STEIN, 1985
Alex Ferguson

In 1967, Celtic football club, managed by John ‘Jock' Stein (1922–85), became the first British team to win the European Cup, defeating Inter Milan in the final. Stein, who was born in Burnbank, Lanarkshire, left Celtic in 1978 for a brief period as manager of Leeds United, returning north the same year to manage Scotland, where one of his assistants was Alex Ferguson (1941–)
.

Everybody in the game knows that Jock Stein's record as Celtic manager was as triumphant as any ever achieved in the history of club football. The best tribute to his genius is not the winning of nine successive league championships, the countless other trophies he collected or even the historic breakthrough that made Celtic the first British club to lift the European Cup. What sets him apart more than anything else is the fact that the team
who devastated Inter Milan on a magical evening in 1967 consisted of ten players born within a dozen miles of Celtic Park and one outsider, Bobby Lennox, who came from thirty miles away in Ayrshire. Jock won the European Cup with a Glasgow and District Select. At no other time, before or since, has one of the greatest competitions of world football been blitzed by such a concentration of locally produced talent. It was as close to a miracle as management can go. So who could blame me for being excited by the prospect of working with the man who created it?