Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.
For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…
Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.
Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.
Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.
Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.
Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.
As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.
'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'
It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.
