Lanark: a life in 4 books

LANARK

A LIFE IN FOUR BOOKS

by
Alasdair Gray

With an introduction by
William Boyd

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Readers develop unique histories with the books they read. It may not be immediately apparent at the time of reading, but the person you were when you read the book, the place you were where you read the book, your state of mind while you read it, your personal situation (happy, frustrated, depressed, bored) and so on – all these factors, and others, make the simple experience of reading a book a far more complex and multi-layered affair than might be thought. Moreover, the reading of a memorable book somehow insinuates itself into the tangled skein of personal history that is the reader’s autobiography: the book leaves a mark on that page of
your
life – leaves a trace – one way or another.

The history of my reading of
Lanark
is exemplary in this regard – typically complex. Twenty-five years ago I was paid to read
Lanark
by the
Times Literary Supplement
(I forget how much I received – £40?) and the review duly appeared in the issue of 27 February 1981, entitled ‘The Theocracies of Unthank’. It was a long review, some two thousand words, leading off the fiction section that week, and it shared its page with a short poem by Paul Muldoon and an advertisement for Heinemann’s spring list (Catherine Cookson, R.K. Narayan and Violet Powell, amongst others).

Looking back now it seems even more interesting that I came to review
Lanark
– Alasdair Gray’s first novel – a month after my own first novel,
A Good Man in Africa
, had been published.
A Good Man in Africa
had been reviewed in the
Times Literary
Supplement
on 30 January that year, somewhat patronisingly (‘engaging’, ‘amusing’), by someone called D.A.N. Jones, in a review that was one-third the length of my review of
Lanark
. However, I can detect no trace of professional jealousy, bitterness or chippiness in my analysis of Gray’s novel. Indeed, as a tyro novelist myself, I was flattered to be asked to review it at such length (by the then fiction editor of the
TLS
, Blake Morrison). I still have the diligent notes I made on that first reading – they run to three and a half closely written pages (I have tiny, near-illegible handwriting). Clearly
Lanark
had already been designated an ‘important’ novel by the
TLS
(even now it would be virtually unheard-of to grant a full page to a first novel) and it had been decided to give it due prominence.

Why was I asked to review it? I was already an intermittent reviewer of fiction in the
TLS
but I suspect that the
Lanark
commission arose because of two factors – my nationality (Scottish – colonial version) and because I knew the city of Glasgow, having spent four years there at university. But Blake Morrison could have had no idea, I think, that I had heard of
Lanark
long before he gave me the opportunity to read it.

In the early seventies (1971–75, to be precise), when I was studying for my MA degree at the University of Glasgow, there was occasional talk of
Lanark
amongst my circle of friends. Alasdair Gray was someone known to me by sight (we had mutual friends) and by reputation as a painter and muralist. Doubtless we drank in the same pub – The Pewter Pot in North Woodside Road – from time to time but I don’t remember ever meeting him properly. However,
Lanark
had something of the whiff of legend about it, even then: it was reputed to be a vast novel, decades in the writing, still to see the light of day. Rather like equally heralded masterworks-in-progress, such as Truman Capote’s
Answered Prayers
or Harold Brodkey’s
Runaway Soul, Lanark
was talked about as an impossibly gargantuan, time-consuming labour of love, a thousand pages long, Glasgow’s
Ulysses
– such were the myths swirling about the book at the time, as far as I can recall.

And so, finally, to have
Lanark
in my hand a few years later was something of a shock: it was indeed long, five hundred and sixty pages, and it bore Gray’s highly distinctive black and white drawings on the cover and inside. My abiding sensation as I began to read was one of intense and excited curiosity.

One final anecdotal digression to do with the tangled skein. It is unusual, as a young novelist/critic, to possess some years of apocryphal familiarity with a novel you are sent to review. Even more unusual, in the case of
Lanark
, was that I was also familiar with its publisher, Canongate – then a very small, Scottish, independent publisher almost wholly unheard-of outside Edinburgh literary circles. I knew about Canongate because I had met its then owner/publisher, Stephanie Wolfe-Murray.

In the early summer of 1972 (aged twenty) I was living alone in my parents ‘isolated house in the Scottish borders – about three miles from the town of Peebles. I was working as a kitchen porter in the Tontine Hotel in Peebles trying to earn some money to pay for a trip to Munich (where my German girlfriend lived). Not owning a car or a bicycle, I used to hitchhike to and from work. I was quite often given a lift by a young woman who drove a battered Land Rover (she often drove this Land Rover in bare feet, I noticed, a fact that added immeasurably to her unselfconscious, somewhat
louche
glamour). This was Stephanie Wolfe-Murray, and she lived further up the valley in which my parents’ house was situated. In the course of our conversations during the various lifts she gave me I must have told her – I suppose – about my dreams of becoming a writer. She told me in turn that she had just started up (or was in the process of starting up) a publishing house in Edinburgh, called Canongate. I filed this information away (thinking it might be useful). I have never met or seen Stephanie Wolfe-Murray since that summer of 1972 (I did get to Munich, though, in time for the Olympics and the Black September terrorist disaster) – and I’m wholly convinced she has no memories at all of the Tontine Hotel’s temporary kitchen porter to whom she was giving occasional lifts that summer – but for me it was a strange moment to see ‘Canongate Publishing’ on the title page of
Lanark
and realise the unlikely connection – and stranger now to think that
Lanark
was the book that put Canongate squarely and indelibly on the literary map.