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Lanark (book)
Encyclopedia
Lanark, subtitled A Life in Four Books, is the first novel of Scottish writer Alasdair Gray
. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist
and dystopia
n fantasy
depictions of his home city of Glasgow
.
Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess
to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". The book, still his best known, has since won the Saltire Society Book of the Year
and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic
. In 2008, The Guardian
heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."
before Book One, and an Epilogue
four chapters before the end of the book). In the Epilogue, the author explains this by saying that "I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another", and that the epilogue itself is "too important" to go at the end (p. 483).
In Book Three, a young man awakes alone in a train carriage. He has no memory of his past and picks his name from a strangely familiar photograph on the wall. He soon arrives in Unthank, a strange Glasgow-like fantasy city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange symbolic diseases. Lanark begins to associate with a group of twenty-somethings to whom he cannot fully relate and whose mores he cannot understand, and soon begins to suffer from Dragonhide, a disease which turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Lanark is eventually swallowed by the earth, and awakes in The Institute, a sort of hospital which cures patients of their diseases but uses the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave.
Books One and Two constitute a realist Bildungsroman
beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("based on myself, he was tougher and more honest"), a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. The book follows Thaw's wartime evacuation, difficult secondary education and his scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art
, where his inability to form relationships with women and his obsessive artistic vision lead to his descent into madness and eventual suicide by drowning.
Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. During various stages of the journey, during which he meets his author, he rapidly ages. He finally finds himself old, sitting in a hilltop cemetery as Unthank breaks down in an apocalypse of fire and flood, and, his time of death having been revealed to him, he ends the book calmly awaiting it.
(Thaw drowns in the sea; Lanark arrives in Unthank with the same belongings, and seashells and sand in his pockets). However, the connection between the two narratives is ambiguous. Gray has said that -
- and writes in the novel itself:
One of the most characteristically postmodern parts of the book is the Epilogue, in which Lanark meets the author in the guise of the character "Nastler". He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care". An Index of Plagiarism
s is printed in the margins of the discussion. For instance, Gray describes much of Lanark as an extended 'Difplag' (diffuse plagiarism) of Charles Kingsley
's The Water Babies
. However, some of the supposed plagiarisms refer to non-existent chapters of the book.
Gray added an appendix to the 2001 edition of the novel in which he included a brief biography and elaborated on some of the influences on and inspirations for the novel. He cited Kafka as a major influence on the atmosphere of the novel. He also referred to his own experiences in the media industry which he states is reflected in Lanark's numerous encounters in labyrinthine buildings with individuals talking in jargon. The Institute he describes as a combination of Wyndham Lewis
's conception of Hell in Malign Fiesta along with three real-life structures: the London Underground
, Stobhill Hospital
in Glasgow and BBC Television Centre
in London. More immediately evident inspiration can be seen in the cathedral and necropolis episodes in Unthank, whose proximity to an urban tangle of roads is mirrored in Glasgow's real-life Townhead
area. Glasgow Cathedral
is yards away from the Necropolis
to the east and the M8 motorway (and aborted Inner Ring Road) to the north and west. Gray said Glasgow Cathedral was the only location he purposefully visited to make notes about during the writing of the novel; all other locations he wrote about from memory. A hellish encounter in a decaying underpass not far from "New Cumbernauld" is redolent of the under-road pedestrian thoroughfares common in the 1960s New Town
design of Cumbernauld
and others.
Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almost 30 years...
. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist
Realism (arts)
Realism in the visual arts and literature refers to the general attempt to depict subjects "in accordance with secular, empirical rules", as they are considered to exist in third person objective reality, without embellishment or interpretation...
and dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n fantasy
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
depictions of his home city of Glasgow
Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands...
.
Its publication in 1981 prompted Anthony Burgess
Anthony Burgess
John Burgess Wilson – who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess – was an English author, poet, playwright, composer, linguist, translator and critic. The dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange is Burgess's most famous novel, though he dismissed it as one of his lesser works...
to call Gray "the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott". The book, still his best known, has since won the Saltire Society Book of the Year
Saltire Awards
The Saltire Society awards the following literary awards:* Scottish Book of the Year* Scottish First Book of the Year* Scottish History Book of the Year* Scottish Research Book of the Year...
and David Niven awards, and has become a cult classic
Cult Classic
Cult Classic is a Blue Öyster Cult studio recording released in 1994, containing remakes of many of the band's previous hits.-Track listing:# " The Reaper" - 5:05# "E.T.I...
. In 2008, The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
heralded Lanark as "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction."
Plot summary
Lanark comprises four books, arranged in the order Three, One, Two, Four (there is also a ProloguePrologue
A prologue is an opening to a story that establishes the setting and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information. The Greek prologos included the modern meaning of prologue, but was of wider significance...
before Book One, and an Epilogue
Epilogue
An epilogue, epilog or afterword is a piece of writing at the end of a work of literature or drama, usually used to bring closure to the work...
four chapters before the end of the book). In the Epilogue, the author explains this by saying that "I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another", and that the epilogue itself is "too important" to go at the end (p. 483).
In Book Three, a young man awakes alone in a train carriage. He has no memory of his past and picks his name from a strangely familiar photograph on the wall. He soon arrives in Unthank, a strange Glasgow-like fantasy city in which there is no daylight and whose disappearing residents suffer from strange symbolic diseases. Lanark begins to associate with a group of twenty-somethings to whom he cannot fully relate and whose mores he cannot understand, and soon begins to suffer from Dragonhide, a disease which turns his skin into scales as an external manifestation of his emotional repression. Lanark is eventually swallowed by the earth, and awakes in The Institute, a sort of hospital which cures patients of their diseases but uses the hopeless cases for power and food. Upon learning this, Lanark is horrified and determines to leave.
Books One and Two constitute a realist Bildungsroman
Bildungsroman
In literary criticism, bildungsroman or coming-of-age story is a literary genre which focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood , and in which character change is thus extremely important...
beginning in pre-War Glasgow, and tell the story of Duncan Thaw ("based on myself, he was tougher and more honest"), a difficult and precocious child born to impecunious and frustrated parents in the East End of Glasgow. The book follows Thaw's wartime evacuation, difficult secondary education and his scholarship to the Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow School of Art
Glasgow School of Art is one of only two independent art schools in Scotland, situated in the Garnethill area of Glasgow.-History:It was founded in 1845 as the Glasgow Government School of Design. In 1853, it changed its name to The Glasgow School of Art. Initially it was located at 12 Ingram...
, where his inability to form relationships with women and his obsessive artistic vision lead to his descent into madness and eventual suicide by drowning.
Book Four sees Lanark begin a bizarre, dreamlike journey back to Unthank, which he finds on the point of total disintegration, wracked by political strife, avarice, paranoia and economic meltdown, all of which he is unable to prevent. During various stages of the journey, during which he meets his author, he rapidly ages. He finally finds himself old, sitting in a hilltop cemetery as Unthank breaks down in an apocalypse of fire and flood, and, his time of death having been revealed to him, he ends the book calmly awaiting it.
Interpretation
Lanark could be viewed as Thaw in a personal HellHell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
(Thaw drowns in the sea; Lanark arrives in Unthank with the same belongings, and seashells and sand in his pockets). However, the connection between the two narratives is ambiguous. Gray has said that -
- "One is a highly exaggerated form of just about the everyday reality of the other" (for example, Thaw's eczemaDermatitis-Etymology:Dermatitis derives from Greek derma "skin" + -itis "inflammation" and genetic disorder.-Terminology:There are several different types of dermatitis. The different kinds usually have in common an allergic reaction to specific allergens. The term may describe eczema, which is also called...
is mirrored by Lanark's skin disease 'dragonhide')
- and writes in the novel itself:
- "The Thaw narrative shows a man dying because he is bad at loving. It is enclosed by [Lanark's] narrative which shows civilization collapsing for the same reason" (page 484)
- (spoken to Lanark) "You are Thaw with the neurotic imagination trimmed off and built into the furniture of the world you occupy" (page 493)
- "The plots of the Thaw and Lanark sections are independent of each other and cemented by typographical contrivances rather than formal necessity. A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones" (page 493).
One of the most characteristically postmodern parts of the book is the Epilogue, in which Lanark meets the author in the guise of the character "Nastler". He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care". An Index of Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...
s is printed in the margins of the discussion. For instance, Gray describes much of Lanark as an extended 'Difplag' (diffuse plagiarism) of Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley
Charles Kingsley was an English priest of the Church of England, university professor, historian and novelist, particularly associated with the West Country and northeast Hampshire.-Life and character:...
's The Water Babies
The Water Babies
The Water Babies may refer to:* The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby, a novel published in 1863* The Water Babies , a 1978 animated film based on the novel* Water Babies , a 1976 album by Miles Davis...
. However, some of the supposed plagiarisms refer to non-existent chapters of the book.
Gray added an appendix to the 2001 edition of the novel in which he included a brief biography and elaborated on some of the influences on and inspirations for the novel. He cited Kafka as a major influence on the atmosphere of the novel. He also referred to his own experiences in the media industry which he states is reflected in Lanark's numerous encounters in labyrinthine buildings with individuals talking in jargon. The Institute he describes as a combination of Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author . He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST...
's conception of Hell in Malign Fiesta along with three real-life structures: the London Underground
London Underground
The London Underground is a rapid transit system serving a large part of Greater London and some parts of Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Essex in England...
, Stobhill Hospital
Stobhill Hospital
Stobhill Hospital is an Ambulatory Care and Diagnostic Hospital, located in the district of Springburn in the north of Glasgow, Scotland. It serves the population of North Glasgow and part of East Dunbartonshire.-History:...
in Glasgow and BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre
BBC Television Centre at White City in West London is the headquarters of BBC Television. Officially opened on 29 June 1960, it remains one of the largest to this day; having featured over the years as backdrop to many BBC programmes, it is one of the most readily recognisable such facilities...
in London. More immediately evident inspiration can be seen in the cathedral and necropolis episodes in Unthank, whose proximity to an urban tangle of roads is mirrored in Glasgow's real-life Townhead
Townhead
-Location:Townhead has no fixed boundaries. In ancient times it was the undeveloped area north of the cathedral and town. If we use this description then it is bordered to the west by the area of Cowcaddens, to the north by Sighthill and the east by Royston and south by Merchant City...
area. Glasgow Cathedral
Glasgow Cathedral
The church commonly known as Glasgow Cathedral is the Church of Scotland High Kirk of Glasgow otherwise known as St. Mungo's Cathedral.The other cathedrals in Glasgow are:* The Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral Church of Saint Andrew...
is yards away from the Necropolis
Glasgow Necropolis
The Glasgow Necropolis is a Victorian cemetery in Glasgow, Scotland. It is on a low but very prominent hill to the east of Glasgow Cathedral . Fifty thousand individuals have been buried here. Typically for the period only a small percentage are named on monuments and not every grave has a stone...
to the east and the M8 motorway (and aborted Inner Ring Road) to the north and west. Gray said Glasgow Cathedral was the only location he purposefully visited to make notes about during the writing of the novel; all other locations he wrote about from memory. A hellish encounter in a decaying underpass not far from "New Cumbernauld" is redolent of the under-road pedestrian thoroughfares common in the 1960s New Town
New Town
New Town may refer to:*New town, a generic name for a planned city development or expansion*In the United Kingdom, any of a specific set of towns created under various Acts of Parliament for population moved out of overcrowded conurbations-Places:...
design of Cumbernauld
Cumbernauld
Cumbernauld is a Scottish new town in North Lanarkshire. It was created in 1956 as a population overspill for Glasgow City. It is the eighth most populous settlement in Scotland and the largest in North Lanarkshire...
and others.
Genesis
Gray began writing the novel as a student in 1954. Book one was written by 1963, but he was unsuccessful in getting it published. The whole work was finished in 1976, and published in 1981 by the small Scottish publisher Canongate Press. The novel was an immediate critical and commercial success.External links
- BBC Scotland: Lanark at 30 Alasdair Gray talking about the inspiration behind Lanark
- Lanark 1982 Unofficial Alasdair Gray site