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  • Lanark: A Life in Four Books See large image

    Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classic) (Paperback) By (author) Alasdair Gray, Introduction by William Boyd

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    Short Description for LanarkSet in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, this book tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw, while offering a modern vision of hell. Its playful narrative techniques intend to convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying.
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    Lanark3

    Mark Thwaite

    Alasdair Gray's first novel Lanark (first published in 1981) immediately established him as one of the most important Scottish voices of his generation and this work as one of the key British novels of the last half-century. Gray's other work is, arguably, more slight than this his opus but the playful, wry, intimate, friendly ease of his other novels is also on show here. Perversely, we start our reading with Book 3 -- the hero of this and the last book in the quartet, the eponymous Lanark, lives in a bizarre and fantastical future in a grey, dreary city called Unthank. He doesn't remember how he got there nor who he really is. He hangs around a local cafe with some other young people whose values and mores he can't quite figure. All around people are disappearing. Then he contracts dragonhide and disappears too. He wakes in an institute and is told the sad but instructional tale of Duncan Thaw (the boy he used to be, the boy, in a sense, Alasdair Gray used to be). It is Duncan's story that is the heart, and by far the best part, of Lanark -- and what a poignant, heart-breaking tale it is! From a boy who can never accept or offer or understand love, who cannot connect, to an artist who cannot accept that he cannot have the final word -- both in his own life and in his art -- Duncan's tale is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story.


    Lanark is a work of huge imagination and wonderful range; it is about all of our selves, how we make them and make them up; it is about place and what that means for identity and it is about love -- how we can learn to love our selves, or fail to, how we need to love, both ourselves and others, to create communities in which we can create art that will promote a continuing project of place in which we can love each other better.

    by Mark Thwaite

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