And then you have the bad taste to put yourself in it. But your book claims you are a man, the one perfect man of whom we are imperfect copies. If you headed a squabbling committee of Greek departmental chiefs I would sympathize. If you were a busy dung beetle pushing the sun above the skyline, if you had the head of a hawk or the horns and legs of a goat I would understand and sympathize. I’m astonished by your way of leading fertility into disaster, then repairing the disaster with more fertility. I don’t even resent the ice ages, even if they did make my ancestors carnivorous. Thaw groaned aloud and said, “I don’t enjoy hounding you like this, but I refuse to gloss the facts. It was comical to think he achieved that by telling folk to love and not hurt each other. The more he worked the more the furious figure of God kept popping in and having to be removed: God driving out Adam and Eve for learning to tell right from wrong, God preferring meat to vegetables and making the first planter hate the first herdsman, God wiping the slate of the world clean with water and leaving only enough numbers to start multiplying again, God fouling up language to prevent the united nations reaching him at Babel, God telling a people to invade, exterminate and enslave for him, then letting other people do the same back. Disaster followed disaster to the horizon until Thaw wanted to block it with the hill and gibbet where God, sick to death of his own violent nature, tried to let divine mercy into the world by getting hung as the criminal he was. 1982, Janine also has the best blurb I think I’ve ever read-you can watch Gray read it in this 1993 STV documentary about Gray (around 15:34). 1982, Janine is conceptually, formally, and typographically challenging, a kind of answer to Finnegans Wake, and like Joyce’s big weird fun hard novel, Gray’s sophomore jaunt is a jam I return to again and again without the hope of truly ever finishing. Gray’s art of course adorns his follow-up to Lanark, 1984’s 1982, Janine, a challenging novel of debauchery. Gray was trained as a muralist, and if I ever make it to Glasgow I plan to see his murals. Lanark included original artwork by Gray, a trend that would continue over the course of his career as a novelist. Part dystopian fantasy, part realist autofiction, part Kafkaesque anti-quest, and part Künstlerroman, Lanark deconstructs the traditional novel, braiding multiple narratives into a complex, sharp, satirical epic. Gray’s first novel, 1981’s Lanark, is one of the strangest and most memorable novels I’ve ever read. The Scottish novelist and artist Alasdair Gray died today, one day after his 85th birthday.

Alistair grey lanark