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Lanark: A Life in 4 Books

by Alasdair Gray, William Boyd (Introduction)

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 1,777 ratings · 154 reviews

From its first publication in 1981, Lanark was hailed as a masterpiece and it has come to be widely regarded as the most remarkable and influential Scottish novel of the second half of the twentieth century. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide-ranging concerns, its playful narrative conveys at its core a profound message, both personal and political, about humanki...more

Paperback, 573 pages

Published May 31st 2007 by Canongate Books (Canongate Classics) (first published 1981)

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Feb 06, 2011 Mariel rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: hopeless dragons

Recommended to Mariel by: it is people!

I read Alasdair's part hopelessly biographical, part darkest fantasy Lanark in the spring of 2007. I could not read it again. In those days I'd identified the character(s) Lanark/Thaw to the person I was in love with (especially the artist parts). (I bet I'm the only person who is gonna say that about THIS book.) Those feelings changed (boy did they ever) and I'd not be able to bear being reminded of those feelings (as they probably should have always been) in their new light. I feel kinda crazy...more I read Alasdair's part hopelessly biographical, part darkest fantasy Lanark in the spring of 2007. I could not read it again. In those days I'd identified the character(s) Lanark/Thaw to the person I was in love with (especially the artist parts). (I bet I'm the only person who is gonna say that about THIS book.) Those feelings changed (boy did they ever) and I'd not be able to bear being reminded of those feelings (as they probably should have always been) in their new light. I feel kinda crazy sometimes. This is a crazy book, though, so at least I didn't wander into some cookie-cutter sane land.

Man, maybe it was the judgemental quality that Lanark had towards Rima. I read to understand (I don't understand anything) the yearning something or other, the thing that makes someone tick. And this book didn't give anything back for me now. It was that damned judgemental feeling. (I remember and cringe how the men wanted only a pretty face ["the gaggle of sexuality" so faceless!] yet had the gall to whine when the rest of the package didn't stay just the image. You. get. what. you. put. in. Yeah, it's a fantasy when tht was the basis all along. [Not to mention eating of the soylent green. Creepy. Understandable. Like judging someone for drinking piss in the desert.]) Right or wrong, I'm the one doing the reading all by my lonesome, and eventually, no matter how good the writer is, it's gonna become like a memory altered by one's own perspective. If it is good enough to feel like an experience, anyway. (An experience Lanark most definitely is.) Right or wrong, I'm suffocated by an overdose of that... that shouldn't they want something more? frustration, and those feelings override any objectivity for the intended point. I'm too caught up in the experiencing part and there are other factors like what was the point of MY reading it? Don't want it to end this way, and I don't care at all for class satires, and I'm really fucking depressed now and did I need to be any more depressed than I already was?

I'm especially fucked up now on the human connections thing. Why'd I have to relate to this of all books?

I'm in the minority, too. The Lanark parts were my favorites (the skin/dragonish stuff was Dennis Potteresque). (less)

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Mar 24, 2011 William rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: scotland, fiction, 20-ce

This novel is a mix of dystopia with fantasy elements and bildungsroman. We start in the future where we come across a dysfunctional group of pseudo-cognoscenti hanging out in a local cinema-cum-coffee shop called The Elite. In this section of the book, Lanark, our hero, lives a rather purposeless life in Unthank (parallel universe Glasgow), cavorts with these layabouts there before being sucked underground by a giant pair of lips. There he enters a vast Orwellian compound known as The Institute...more

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Jun 13, 2007 Sharon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

One of my favorite books of all time. One of my most prized possessions is a beautiful collector's edition of this book I received as a gift. Although it is an amalgamation of many things--weird sci-fi dystopia/apocalypse, coming-of-age artist portrait, and political and class satire among them--it is one of the most wholly original works I have read, and it is deeply affecting. I adore this book.

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Sep 20, 2010 Asa rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books, experimental, annoying_main_character

Started out interesting, and I was looking forward to finding out more of the strange world and how people ended up and got out of there, but the main character seriously annoyed and even more so when I got to his "real" life. A more narcissistic, misogynistic and antisocial character I've seldom met, and I found it hard to keep reading about him. It got a bit more interesting in the last part, but the world-building never really worked for me. Interesting but flawed.

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Dec 03, 2011 Isabel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Duncan Thaw, an artist living in Glasgow, and the man who arrives in the city of Unthank by train at the beginning of the book and takes the name Lanark, are one and the same person. Lanark isn’t quite as useless as Thaw, but it's hard to like a book with such an unlikeable protagonist, even though the book covers interesting political and social issues. I only really started to enjoy it in the final quarter, when time becomes unreliable (even outside the Intercalendrical Zones), and Lanark meet...more

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Jul 12, 2010 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010, scottish

Crazy, frustrating, intensely boring in parts and brilliant in others, Lanark is Gray's stab at the Divine Comedy. Divided into four non-consecutive books, two of which take place in the Glaswegian hell of Unthank, the other two in Glasgow, we follow the life of Duncan Thaw (or Lanark, as he is called in Unthank) through his youth, death, and afterlife. I loved the dragons in book 3--an eczema-like disease leads to people becoming full-blown dragons. This felt like a perfect image for the emotio...more

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Oct 02, 2010 Tim rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, novel, science, literary, scotland, scottish, glasgow, illustrated, dunedin, public, library

Lanark is divided into four books; the outer, fantastic, two tell the story of Lanark, a man who awakes to find himself in a decaying world ruled by the feuding Institute and Council, in which increasing numbers of people are either disappearing altogether or suffering from strange maladies such as having their skin converted into tough, reptilian � dragonhide� , and time passes at unpredictable and varying rates. Lanark rises, mainly by accident, to a high position in this society, but finds th...more

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May 03, 2013 lyell bark rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

the thaw section made me kind of uncomfortable because i was more or less that guy in college but with books instead of arts. ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Warwick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, scotland, glasgow

I wanted very much to love this book, which was probably my first mistake. I had heard a lot of extremely complimentary things about how it was the most unusual, eccentric and meaningful novel various people had read for ages, and I probably came to it with rather exaggerated hopes. Anyway, it's good, but it's also flawed, as to be fair the author himself admits in a rather interesting confessional Epilogue.

The first thing you notice when you open it up and check out the Contents page is that i...more I wanted very much to love this book, which was probably my first mistake. I had heard a lot of extremely complimentary things about how it was the most unusual, eccentric and meaningful novel various people had read for ages, and I probably came to it with rather exaggerated hopes. Anyway, it's good, but it's also flawed, as to be fair the author himself admits in a rather interesting confessional Epilogue.

The first thing you notice when you open it up and check out the Contents page is that it is structured in a weird way. First comes Book 3, then the Introduction, then Books 1 and 2, and finally Book 4. The Epilogue I mentioned comes a few chapters before the end of the book, because it's ‘far too important to leave to the end’ (paraphrasing from memory). So straight away you know you're dealing with a writer who's kind of pretentious, and the only question really is if it's justified by artistic effect or if it's just a gimmick. On balance it just about worked for me, but it was a close call.

There are two stories in Lanark, which are related in obscure ways to one another. Books 1 and 2 tell the story of Duncan Thaw, an asthmatic, intellectual child growing up in Glasgow and finding his feet as an artist. Books 3 and 4 concern a man called Lanark who finds himself in the strange other-worldly city of Unthank, a place with no sunlight where people mutate into dragons or are devoured by mouths in the ground. Unthank is very much a hellish vision of Glasgow, and there is more than a hint that Lanark himself is really Duncan Thaw trapped in his own personal hell: Thaw's narrative ends as he walks out into the sea, and Lanark arrives in Unthank with seashells and sand in his pockets.

Of course, you put this together only gradually, since you start by reading Book 3 and only get to Thaw later on. One of the problems with the book is the growing suspicion that Gray just had a couple of mediocre novellas and tried to put them together with some stylistic fireworks to make one Big Novel. But despite my occassional feelings of irritation, in actual fact some of my favourite moments in the book were some of the most contrived, like the section where Lanark meets the author, Alastair Gray himself, who explains exactly what future is about to be written for him. It's very neatly handled. But while the Lanark story provides lots of weird and fascinating encounters, the Duncan Thaw narrative inevitably just seems a bit humdrum and dreary in comparison. I must have read a hundred books about asthmatic, intellectual children growing up, having no success with girls, and trying to make themselves into artists. This one is no different - it's largely modelled on Portrait of the Artist, only without the happy ending. I found myself having no sympathy with either Thaw or Lanark and I was frustrated by their inability to form decent relationships with people around them. How's this for the worst-written sex scene I've come across for many months:

Softly, sadly, he revisited the hills and hollows of a familiar landscape, the sides of his limbs touching sweet abundances with surprisingly hard tips, his endings paddling in the pleats of a wet wound which opened into a boggy cave where little moans bloomed like violets in the blackness. There were dank odours and even a whiff of dung.

Everywhere there is this detachment, this cold, observational quality to the writing which was integral to the characters, but which ultimately stopped me really engaging with the novel. It's a shame, because Book 3 (with which the novel opens) is a brilliant start, and sadly the rest of the work never quite lives up to the exuberance and originality of those first few chapters. I feel like some people may enjoy this more than I did, so if people are thinking of checking it out I'd tell them to go for it, and I'd love to hear any of your experiences with it. But it didn't quite come together for me.(less)

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Oct 29, 2012 Andrew S Taylor rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Every bit as strange and wonderful as I was hoping. If you'll forgive the crass comparison, this novel resembles a mash-up of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Dante's Inferno. Or, perhaps a new wave science-fiction epic by Flann O'Brien. Or maybe a novelized lost-masterpiece by Dennis Potter. Actually, it doesn't quite resemble any of those things, but if you would enjoy reading any of the above, you must pick this novel up immediately.

The plot? It's about a young starving artist in Gla...more

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Apr 01, 2011 Joselito Honestly and Brilliantly rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an Up Yours Novel.

Maybe I invented this semanteme. But that was how it felt as I finished reading it--Alasdair Gray grinning, giving me the finger.

I was amused, angry too, but smiling. It was not a joke, Gray spent years and years writing this. I suspect that at first he didn't know where he was going. He just wrote, grew old, wrote some more, and grew older. Finally he realized he must stop somewhere. He already had almost four books, all unpublished. So how to end? He clenched his fis...more

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Dec 24, 2010 Monthly Book Group rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So what did the Group make of “Lanark”? The discussion revealed a large number of contradictory views, and there was no real movement towards consensus. So a confusing – if not confused – discussion, perhaps rather like the book. Or was the problem that in Scotland we were too close to the book, and less inclined to grandiloquent judgements such as Anthony Burgess’ a “shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom” that Scotland “needed” by “the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott”?..........more

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Aug 23, 2007 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book while living in Aberdeen, Scotland and attending the University there. I took a Modern Scottish Lit class and the professor recommended this book over all others. Its really hard to give a review, its a mammoth of a science fiction novel. I have only read a couple science fiction novels in my day and this one was spectacular. You have to be in for the long haul. Its also one that someday I will have to read again, there are so many things to figure out with this book.

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Sep 07, 2010 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

About half is a fairly traditional bildungsroman of an artistic young Scotsman, not unlike the author, growing up in Glasgow in the 40s and 50s; that is in turn enmeshed in a surrealist, almost sci-fi allegory in which our hero has somehow died and undergone a metempsychosis, and finally there is an interlude where the central character meets the author, who talks about all the different ways he could end the book (and provides an appendix of sorts in marginal notes, a Gemara-like commentary, in...more

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Feb 24, 2013 Prowisorio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Een leven in vier boeken, zo luidt de ondertitel, maar Lanark is meer dan dat. Ten eerste bestaat het niet alleen uit die vier boeken, maar bevat het ook een proloog, een intermezzo, een werkelijk geniale epiloog ��n een 'tail piece'. Ten tweede zou je met net zoveel recht van spreken kunnen zeggen dat het een leven voor ��n na de dood in vier boeken is. Of misschien wel een dood voor de dood, een hel na de hel?

Lanark is een verrassend boek en niet alleen omdat het begint met boek drie, gevolg...more Een leven in vier boeken, zo luidt de ondertitel, maar Lanark is meer dan dat. Ten eerste bestaat het niet alleen uit die vier boeken, maar bevat het ook een proloog, een intermezzo, een werkelijk geniale epiloog ��n een 'tail piece'. Ten tweede zou je met net zoveel recht van spreken kunnen zeggen dat het een leven voor ��n na de dood in vier boeken is. Of misschien wel een dood voor de dood, een hel na de hel?

Lanark is een verrassend boek en niet alleen omdat het begint met boek drie, gevolgd door de proloog, waarna boek een en twee volgen en uiteindelijk boek vier. Boek vier wordt vier hoofdstukken voor het einde onderbroken door (of voor) de epiloog. Nu hoort een epiloog zich normaal gesproken aan het eind van een boek te bevinden, maar in dit geval zou dat niet passend zijn, omdat [the epilogue] is too important to go there. Though not essential to the plot it provides some comic distraction at a moment when the narrative sorely needs it. Ik kan hier niet veel meer over de epiloog vertellen, want dan zou ik teveel verraden, maar ��n ding wil ik er nog wel over kwijt.
Tijdens het lezen heb ik me een aantal keren enigszins ge��rgerd aan personages die 'uitbarsten' in - op mij als belerend overkomende - maatschappijkritische of artistieke bijna-verhandelingen. Ik vond dat jammer en totaal overbodig. Voetnoot 6 in de epiloog maakte dat echter helemaal goed. Nee, niet zomaar goed, het maakte niet alleen de epiloog, maar het hele boek geniaal.

Is er geen enkel kritiekpuntje? Nee of misschien toch deze:
"[...] it's difficult. Metaphor is one of thought's most essential tools. It illuminates what would otherwise be totally obscure. But the illumination is sometimes so bright that it dazzles instead of revealing."

Er zit niets anders op dan dit boek niet op te bergen als 'gelezen', maar weer tussen de nog te lezen boeken terug te leggen. Ik verheug me er nu al op om het dan in een andere volgorde te lezen. Beginnen met de prachtige, realistische bildungsboeken een en twee over Duncan Thaw opgroeiend in Riddrie, Glasgow, voorafgegaan door de proloog en daarna de dystopische boeken drie en vier waarin Lanark wordt gevolgd op zijn zoektocht naar liefde en de zon. Wat een heerlijk vooruitzicht!(less)

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Jun 21, 2012 Andreea rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, scotland

Around 200 pages mark: Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo long - and unbearably boring. I only have about 200 pages left so I'll soldier through and finish it although I'm unimpressed and will probably not pick up another Gray for some time.

Later: Rarely do I give up on a book if I've already already managed to read its first 490 pages and have only around 60 pages left because after trudging through so many pages it feels pointless not to make a final effort and spend half an hour actually finishing th...more Around 200 pages mark: Sooooooooooooooooooooooooo long - and unbearably boring. I only have about 200 pages left so I'll soldier through and finish it although I'm unimpressed and will probably not pick up another Gray for some time.

Later: Rarely do I give up on a book if I've already already managed to read its first 490 pages and have only around 60 pages left because after trudging through so many pages it feels pointless not to make a final effort and spend half an hour actually finishing the thing.

But rarely does a book offer me such a good excuse to stop reading it with just 60 pages left to go.

The city of the Glasgow is the best and only real character beside Gray himself in this book - and in all honesty it is the only reason why I kept reading. I don't think that Gray (and it is Gray speaking clearly through Thaw / Lanark, his self identification / self insertion is one of the reasons why the book is painful to read) is right when he says that a city needs to be used by an artist in order for the inhabitants to live in it imaginatively - or to imagine themselves living in it. I've lived most of my life in an unimagined / unused small town which in which I imagined myself living all my life without feeling the need for other people or artists' stories to inhabit it. And then two years ago I moved away from that small town to Glasgow. I don't even feel like Gray / Lanark / Thaw inhabit Glasgow imaginatively, they're so self-obsessed and so obsessed with how much better they are than everybody else and how ~unique~ their artistic vision / fate is, they try to make Glasgow inhabit them rather than the other way around. This means you only get occasional glimpses of the real city which is disappointing.

But not really the reason why I'm giving up on this book now.

That reason is the pompous in which Gray compares himself and his book with everybody from Homer to the Bible to Dante to Herman Melville right after he (the author) tells Lanark (which is a thinly disguised version of the author) that,

'Everything you have experienced and are experiencing, from your first glimpse of the Elite cafe to the metal of that spoon in your fingers, the taste of the soup in your mouth, is made of one thing. [...] Print. Some worlds are made of atoms but yours is made of tiny marks marching in neat lines, like armies of insects across pages and pages and pages of white paper. Isay these lines are marching, but that is a metaphor. They are perfectly still. They are lifeless. How can they reproduce the movement and the noises of the battle of Borodino, the white whale ramming the ship, the fallen angels on the flaming lake?'

'By being read,' said Lanark impatiently.
'Exactly. Your survival as a character and mine as an author depend on us seducing a living soul into our printed world and trapping it here long enough for us to steal the imaginative energy which gives us life. To cast a spell over this stranger I am doing abominable things. I am prostituting my most sacred memories into the commonest possible words and sentence.' etc etc etc more pretentious drivel etc etc

Wellllll, since writing this book is so much bother, I think I'll just snap it shut, dispel you into non-existence and spare myself the annoyance of having to read another 60 pages of what you affectionately call ~arse-wipe~. (less)

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Jan 03, 2011 Charles Greer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book as a teen -- its spine flashed at me from the stacks at Pacific Grove's public library. Rereading in general has been a pleasure of late, and this one I'm sure glad to have come back to, because it just was probably too close to understand back then -- there's morose detached Glasgow somewhere deep in my bones.

The freshness though of Gray's artistic vision, and the clever folding of narrative, typography, bookishness and self-reference make this less pretentious than it seems at...more

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Mar 01, 2009 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, richard-s, books

Really should re-read this. Glorious sprawling mess of a book. Love it.

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Feb 10, 2011 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

Some novels are like the Cheshire Cat, the only thing left of them is their smile. Can't remember much about this big, crazy book but I do remember it was big, and crazy, and about Glasgow, and not-Glasgow, which was called Unthank. I thought it was brilliant, but I can't tell you why now. Everything has faded except that sometimes i look up and there's its smile in the air.

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Jan 16, 2013 Joanne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary

It is 'A Life in 4 Books', and it begins with Book 3. So right from the start I'm confused. The main character, Lanark, arrives in the city of Unthank by train. He is the only person on the train, and he has no memory of how he got there, or of his life before the train. He is greeted at the station and it appears that there is a process, that everybody arrives at the city as he has done. The city has a post-apocalyptic feel to it;

"The city did not seem a thriving place. Groups of adolescents or...more It is 'A Life in 4 Books', and it begins with Book 3. So right from the start I'm confused. The main character, Lanark, arrives in the city of Unthank by train. He is the only person on the train, and he has no memory of how he got there, or of his life before the train. He is greeted at the station and it appears that there is a process, that everybody arrives at the city as he has done. The city has a post-apocalyptic feel to it;

"The city did not seem a thriving place. Groups of adolescents or old men stood in occasional close mouths, but many closes were empty and unlit. The only shops not boarded up were small stores selling newspapers, sweets, cigarettes and contraceptives. After a while we came to a large square with tramcars clanging around it. The street lamps only lit the lowest storeys of the surrounding buildings but these looked very big and ornamental, and people sheltered between pillars on their facades. Some soot black statues were arranged round a central pillar whose top I couldn't see in the black sky. In spite of the wet a man stood on a high part of the pillar's pedestal and spoke to an angry crowd. We passed through the edge of the crowd and I saw the speaker was an anxiously smiling man with a clergyman's collar and bruised brow. His words were drowned by jeering."

Lanark finds a room to rent, and he is given regular money to live on. He meets people at a local cafe but they couldn't really be called friends. The atmosphere is grim and hopeless. People disappear without reason. There is a strange disease, dragonhide, which Lanark contracts. Its symptom is hard, black skin which spreads over the body, leaving the sufferer numb. His landlady, Mrs Fleck, says that the only cure is hard work. Idleness and hopelessness hasten its advance.

Lanark finds his way to the Institute, a hospital where he can be treated. While there he finds out about his life before his arrival in Unthank. This is the realist portion of the book. His name was Duncan Thaw, a working class boy in Glasgow who has a real talent for art. Through a bit of luck and the kindness of others he gets into art school. But Duncan is the kind of person who is never satisfied, and never accepts responsibility for his own actions.

Once out of the Institute and back in Unthank Lanark is much more proactive, he wants to change things and make things better. But somehow he never manages it. His life is always subject to the whims of other people and he is carried this way and that without ever seeming to get a grip on the situation. Just when he thinks he has understood something the whole political landscape changes and he is adrift again. He is always alone and there is no-one he can trust.

I think this book is about a great industrial city losing its industries, life without useful work, being at the mercy of planners and politicians and corporations. The nuclear threat hangs over this book (it was published in 1981), there are poisons in the air and on the land, and always the sense of doom.

Despite the fact that I'm not sure I fully understood this book, I did for the most part enjoy it. The language was easy to understand, where I struggled was with the ideas and I had the feeling that there were references and allusions which went over my head. I would definitely read more by Alasdair Gray. I felt that his book took me to places I wouldn't ordinarily have gone, and let me think about things I wouldn't ordinarily think about.(less)

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Dec 15, 2007 Melanie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: cynics, angry young men and women, anyone who enjoys a compelling epic

Shelves: 2007

Lanark is a story (or two) told in the wrong (but really quite right) order, a dystopian take on all the things that so readily lend themselves to the dystopian treatment: capitalism, power, love, etc. There are funny bits, fantastical bits, postmodern bits, and depressing bits, and Alasdair Gray is beyond smooth at weaving them all together.

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Sep 23, 2010 David rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Literatis

Recommended to David by: Personal Find

Shelves: british-literature, experimental-fiction

Highly experimental....Scottish (go figure that one)...thin on plot...brilliant on weird....good on character. If you can live with a threadbare plot and love brilliant writing then I would highly recommend this book.

Amazon.com:
A modern vision of hell, Lanark is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both pe...more

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Jan 20, 2012 Fatma rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book took me by surprise in every way. It was recommended to me by a patriotic Scotsman, so I was a bit skeptical, thinking that maybe his pride might be altering his judgment on the actual quality of the book. Also, science fiction and fantasy are not two of my favorite genres.

Despite all of this, the book blew me away. It's set in a wonderfully dystopic version of Glasgow, Scotland. The protagonist I suppose reflects the author's own upbringing and - to a limited extent - some of his exp...more

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Aug 13, 2012 Jonfaith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Alasdair Gray notes in the Epilogue section, strangely on p. 493 of his 560 page novel: " A possible explanation is that the author thinks a heavy book will make a bigger splash than two light ones. This note, well the entire section, appears to reconcile the disparate narratives which occupy the novel. Seldom have I ever encountered such polarizing sections; the Thaw scenes I absolutely loved and the Lanark/Unthank episodes were perfectly dreadful. The latter was likely intentional, portraits o...more

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Mar 24, 2009 Todd rated it 4 of 5 stars

Lanark is really two stories: the story of the title character’s fumbling attempts to find love and enjoy life in a Kafkaesque future Glasgow; and the mid-twentieth-century coming-of-age story of a boy, Thaw, who is similarly alienated from society and the female sex, and is driven mad by a yearning for these things. These two tales have only the most tenuous of connections.

The apocalyptic future fantasy of Lanark is, in its first half (Book 3), simply brilliant. Its first chapters inhabit a sli...more Lanark is really two stories: the story of the title character’s fumbling attempts to find love and enjoy life in a Kafkaesque future Glasgow; and the mid-twentieth-century coming-of-age story of a boy, Thaw, who is similarly alienated from society and the female sex, and is driven mad by a yearning for these things. These two tales have only the most tenuous of connections.

The apocalyptic future fantasy of Lanark is, in its first half (Book 3), simply brilliant. Its first chapters inhabit a slightly off-kilter reality, which is deliciously surprising in its quirks. This strangeness is amplified as the book progresses, culminating in a superbly imagined sojourn in ‘The Institute’, a human-governed hell. The book is flecked with witty and wounding observations on the workings of modern society. There are moments of wonder, laugh-out-loud black comedy, and thought-provoking philosophy. And the grand allegory within which they’re embedded is startling in its conception.

Lanark's middle section (Books 1 and 2) is a fine, realist portrait of adolescence that would on its own, as the author of the preface to this edition notes, ‘surely have been hailed as a minor classic’. We follow the boy Thaw’s lonely education and family life, and his miserable attempts at winning love. Throughout, the author deftly evokes the landscapes and social topography of Glasgow. He also displays a wonderful grasp of the logic of children. These moments of childhood whimsy enliven an otherwise bleak tale. In his adulthood, Thaw’s story becomes darker. He grows arrogant, self-absorbed, throws away a golden chance of stability, and descends into madness. The social and sexual frustrations which provoke his fall are frankly and uncomfortably portrayed. We feel empathy for Thaw but also anger at his behaviour toward those trying to help him. Gray seems to have an authentic insight into madness. The final throes of Book 2 are not an easy read.

In Book 4, the author loses his way. We return to the science fiction world of Lanark, but Gray seems to be writing for the sake of filling out a pre-decided structure. The book is an unfocused ramble in which Lanark bounces between characters we’ve mostly already met, on flimsy pretexts not redeemed by wit. Lanark, unconvincingly, starts to abandon his desires, and his utter discombobulation at his world’s political system is pushed beyond credibility. We get the sense that Earth’s political structure is only so confusing because Gray has not fully conceived it. The atmosphere of a vast, complex, and unseen machinery of government is defeated as Gray lapses into contrivance, bombast and pretentiousness. The speech that fills the book's penultimate chapter, a thoroughly unenlightening, indeed boring, recapitulation of human history, marks a profoundly disappointing end to a story that, for its first hundred pages, had me tingling with excitement in expectation of a masterpiece.

Lanark is, thus, an uneven experience: an opening novella to match Huxley and Orwell; a fine, realist coming-of-age novel that is perhaps too truthful to be unequivocally enjoyable; and an unworthy last quarter. I nevertheless strongly recommend it. The first book is unignorable; the second two will be appreciated by many.(less)

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Mar 18, 2013 Marek rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: bookclub

Wow! this book has a bit of everything and our book club discussion meandered around the interwoven themes of power, hell, time, isolation, growing-up, creativity, a book within a book.

We debated if 'reality' books 1 and 2 , without knowledge of books 3 and 4, would stand up on their own, and most thought they would. The father and son relationship being particularly well written, and the growing pains of an artist. But we also thought that there were many veiled cross-over references between th...more

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Feb 15, 2012 Frank rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-books-you-must-read

Not sure what to say about it - quite a strange book. I really felt like it should have been broken up into two separate novels (books 1&2 and books 3&4). Books 1 and 2 were from what I could tell, pretty much autobiographical while 3 and 4 were more of a dystopian story in the vein of 1984 or Brave New World attempting to "expose the ills that threaten modern society." The way Gray presented the novel was also a little disconcerting: starting with book 3 and then 1, 2, and 4. I actually...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Mabomanji rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"No matter how you hate the book i'm writing, you can't escape it until i let you go."

This is the impression i got while reading the book. Despite all the reproaches i may have about this book it's still an impressive book with so many ideas coming from everywhere, a lot of psychology, politics, science-fiction. All of this mixed into a pot pourri which i have troubles reading. Well i can't stand the main characters, though they're terribly humans with their exaggerated defaults that lead to all...more "No matter how you hate the book i'm writing, you can't escape it until i let you go."

This is the impression i got while reading the book. Despite all the reproaches i may have about this book it's still an impressive book with so many ideas coming from everywhere, a lot of psychology, politics, science-fiction. All of this mixed into a pot pourri which i have troubles reading. Well i can't stand the main characters, though they're terribly humans with their exaggerated defaults that lead to all the events happening to them.

The way the book is separated into chapters that are not in the right order is already strange : we start on book 3 then 1 and 2 then finally 4, and the epilogue is right in the middle of the 4th book, full of notes from the author about all the books that inspired him and all the things he took from those books.

Really weird to have suffered so much to read that book but still found many interesting subjects in it as well. First issue : i don't like the way it is written, it's not flowing for me. Every time i started reading again it was like opening a totally new book and i had to get used to its style yet again. Maybe this is caused by the way it was translated i don't know.
Second issue : i've already said it earlier but i really can't stand the main character, i just wanted to slap him all along, and yet it's always interesting to be inside the head of someone with troubles.
Third issue : lots of pages of nothingness. I have trouble with that ambient unease especially if that's the only thing i have to read for hundreds of pages. To see the character go from here to there, go back, live his uneventful life, having little wonders about his troubles communicating with other people, it's ok but really tiring.

What's left are all the questionings, how his psychological problems influenced his life, the criticisms of political and economical models. Enough to maintain a little shred of interest especially since the book drifts from drama to science fiction. Because of that we never know what to expect when turning a page.
It's still too abstract to really inflame me.(less)

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Oct 27, 2012 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm still digesting this wonderful book. In my edition William Boyd's introduction compares it to Joyce. In terms of style, it doesn't get near him but as a work of imagination, a way of exploring mundane and fantastic themes its right up my street. Certainly some some similarities with Iain Banks (and occasionally awkward prose) but thats no bad thing.

My most unfavourite sentence ever is 'I have little hesitation in hailing it as a a masterpiece' But if a masterpiece is a book that stays in yo...more

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Feb 25, 2011 A rated it 4 of 5 stars

Bizarre, epic and perplexing, this is one of those books that leave you certain there are multiple layers of meaning to be discovered within it. From its deliberately perverse format, which is comprised of four books arranged out of sequence, to its structure of a story within a story (within a story?), to the tongue-in-cheek appearance of the author as a character within the novel, everything about Lanark seems designed to leave the reader confused.

However, despite the difficulty of figuring ou...more

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About Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray trained as a painter at the local Glasgow school of art. He was 47 when he published his first novel, Lanark (1981), which combines all sorts of genres, from sci-fi to autobiography and literary criticism, into a fantastic account of the city of Unthank - a thinly disguised Glasgow.
Gray shows an interest in sex which borders on the unhealthy, as indicated by the title of his 1990 nov...more

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Quotes from Lanark

“You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes.” — 6 people liked it

“Who did the council fight?"
"It split in two and fought itself."
"That's suicide!"
"No, ordinary behaviour. The efficient half eats the less efficient half and grows stronger. War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation."
"I refuse to believe men kill each other just to make their enemies rich."
"How can men recognize their real enemies when their family, schools and work teach them to struggle with each other and to believe law and decency come from the teachers?"
"My son won't be taught that," said Lanark firmly.
"You have a son?"
"Not yet.” — 4 people liked it

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Lanark: A Life in 4 Books

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