A Book One was completed in its present form before my son was born. My wife and I were living on Social Security money then so I sent the completed part to Spenser Curtis Brown s literary agency because I felt the book good enough to stand alone, though I would have preferred to complete it in the big way I had planned. But Mr Curtis Brown rejected it so I did complete it as planned. By the mid-1970s I had completed book Three and linked it to Book One with my Oracles Prologue. I had a good agent who liked my work by that time, Frances Head, a London lady. She showed it to three London publishers, who tried to persuade me to split the Thaw and Lanark narratives in two and make separate books of them. They said it would be dangerously expensive for them to risk publishing so big a first book by an unknown novelist. But my first marriage had collapsed in an amicable way, I had no need of money and was greedy for fame instead, so I refused them.
Books Two and Four were written side by side – I moved from completing a chapter in one to a chapter in the other with an increasing sense of running downhill. In 1975 and ’76 I was carrying manuscripts around and working on them in all kinds of places. I remember waking up on the livingroom floor of my friend Angela Mullane’s house after a party where I had fallen asleep for a usual Scottish reason, and resuming work there and then because it was a quiet morning and none of the other bodies on the floor were awake. I couldn’t do that now. I was then a young fellow of forty or thereabouts.
At the end of July 1976 the whole book was completed, typed and posted to Quartet Ltd, the only London publisher Frances Head had been able to interest in it. She, alas, had died of lung cancer. Quartet books turned it down for the usual reason – it was too long for them to risk the high cost of printing. I sulked for half a year then posted it to Canongate, the only Scottish publishing firm I knew. Five or six months passed before I got an enthusiastic letter from Charles Wilde, the Canongate reader, saying the Scottish Arts Council would probably subsidise printing costs. Chapters had appeared in Scottish International, a short-lived but widely read literary magazine eight or nine years earlier, so north Britain was more ready for it than the south. I finally signed a contract with Canongate on the 20th of March 1978.
Q Lanark was published three years later. Why did it take so long?
? Canongate arranged a joint publication with Lippincott, an old well-established firm in the USA; but before the book was printed Lippincott got swallowed up by Harper & Row, another old well-established USA firm. This caused delay. Then American editors proof-read the book, decided my punctuation was inconsistent. I told them that I used punctuation marks to regulate the speed with which readers took in the text – some passages were to be read faster than others, so had fewer commas. There was more delay while I restored my text to its original state. However, the delays gave me time to complete the illustrative title pages and jacket designs.
Q Were you relieved when Lanark was finally off your hands?
A Yes. For a while before I held a copy I imagined it like a large paper brick of 600 pages, well bound, a thousand of them to be spread through Britain. I felt that each copy was my true body with my soul inside, and that the animal my friends called Alasdair Gray was a no-longer essential form of after-birth. I enjoyed that sensation. It was a safe feeling.
Q So you the time spent upon Lanark over so many years was time well spent?
A Not entirely. Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live. I’m amazed to recall the diaries I wrote when a student, often putting the words into the third person as a half-way stage to making them fictional prose. I’m sure healthy panthers and ducks enjoy better lives, but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer. There are worse as well as better folk in the world, so I don’t hate myself.
‘Astonishing, satisfying and exciting … marvellously truthful, exact, funny, intelligent, warmly human and a veritable mine of acute observation … a quite extraordinary achievement.’ Allan Massie, Scotsman
‘Probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century … it marked the beginning of a new era in Scottish writing.’ James Campbell, Observer
‘Fuses sci-fi, quasi-autobiography, and an apocalyptic vision into one of the wittiest, darkest, most readable books of the last 50 years.’ The Week
‘Moving and comic … Gray’s vision incorporates meanings and yearnings that are universal human drives – the need for love, for work one does not scorn or hate, for a sense of community … Lanark is an original.’ San Francisco Chronicle
‘Fluent, imaginative, part vision, part realism, even in its organisation it declares itself to be written by the author’s rules and no one else’s … the writing is easy and elegant and never uninteresting.’ Guardian
‘Compelling, a game of hide and seek where one never knows what will happen next … direct, stylish, crisp … a great adventure.’ Naomi Mitchison, Spectator
‘Gray is a master at rummaging in the dustbins of the mind … Important and compelling.’ Daily Telegraph
‘The most remarkable new novel I have read this year, and in many ways the most remarkable book of any kind … the mature work, long in gestation, of an artist-writer of unique gifts in both modes, here most powerfully brought together.’ Herald
‘Probably the greatest Scottish novel of the century … it marked the beginning of a new era in Scottish writing.’ Observer
‘Lanark is one of the seminal works of Scottish literature, a book credited with kick-starting Scotland’s literary renaissance of the past two decades.’ Sunday Times
‘I read Lanark, mesmerised, in a few massive all-night sittings … subtle and complex, like an alarm clock going off, a wake-up call to another place, a place that was all around me, which I was part of, but that now seemed unfamiliar and exciting.’ Scotsman
‘At times exuberant, at times despairing, always vivid … Curious and informed, angry and rational … not afraid of fun or of confessing its vanities or of having Big Ideas.’ Sunday Times
‘This extraordinary masterpiece … is profoundly perceptive about the ways in which our society is destroying itself. Yet it manages to be funny and is written in a beautifully lucid prose.’ Times Literary Supplement
‘Wonderful, expansive prose … a novel that is as rewarding to return to as it is vast in ambition: a modern classic in the true sense of the word.’ Big Issue in Scotland
‘The most remarkable first novel I’ve read for years … It’s unfair that any man, even from Dennistoun, should be so gifted … [Lanark] is allegorical, factual, political, cannibal (and very much so) … this is a book which will be remembered.’ Evening Times
First published in Great Britain in 1981
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2008
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Alasdair Gray, 1969, 1981
Tailpiece copyright © Alasdair Gray, 2001
Introduction copyright © William Boyd, 2007
Portions of this work originally appeared in Scottish International Review, Glasgow University Magazine and Words Magazine
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 374 9
www.meetatthegate.com
Table of Contents
Introduction
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 1: The Elite
CHAPTER 2: Dawn and Lodgings
CHAPTER 3: Manuscript
CHAPTER 4: A Party
CHAPTER 5: Rima
CHAPTER 6: Mouths
CHAPTER 7: The Institute
CHAPTER 8: Doctors
CHAPTER 9: A Dragon
CHAPTER 10: Explosions
CHAPTER 11: Diet and Oracle
PROLOGUE telling how a nonentity was made, and made oracular by a financial genius discovering his sensual infancy
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 12: The War Begins
CHAPTER 13: A Hostel
CHAPTER 14: Ben Rua
CHAPTER 15: Normal
CHAPTER 16: Underworlds
CHAPTER 17: The Key
CHAPTER 18: Nature
CHAPTER 19: Mrs. Thaw Disappears
CHAPTER 20: Employers
INTERLUDE to remind us of what we are in danger of forgetting: that Thaw’s story exists within the hull of Lanark’s
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 21: The Tree
CHAPTER 22: Kenneth McAlpin
CHAPTER 23: Meetings
CHAPTER 24: Marjory Laidlaw
CHAPTER 25: Breaking
CHAPTER 26: Chaos
CHAPTER 27: Genesis
CHAPTER 28: Work
CHAPTER 29: The Way Out
CHAPTER 30: Surrender
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 31: Nan
CHAPTER 32: Council Corridors
CHAPTER 33: A Zone
CHAPTER 34: Intersections
CHAPTER 35: Cathedral
CHAPTER 36: Chapterhouse
CHAPTER 37: Alexander Comes
CHAPTER 38: Greater Unthank
CHAPTER 39: Divorce
CHAPTER 40: Provan
EPILOGUE annotated by Sidney Workman with an index of diffuse and imbedded Plagiarisms
CHAPTER 41: Climax
CHAPTER 42: Catastrophe
CHAPTER 43: Explanation
CHAPTER 44: End
TAILPIECE: How Lanark grew
Lanark Page 67