FROM UNTHANK TO GLASGOW AND BACK
May 5, 1985
LANARK A Life in 4 Books. By Alasdair Gray. With illustrations by the author. 561 pp. New York: George Braziller. $20.
AFTER reading Alasdair Gray's ''Lanark,'' a first novel published in England in 1981, Anthony Burgess declared Mr. Gray the most important Scottish novelist since Walter Scott. This reviewer is not qualified to dispute that judgment, though Robert Louis Stevenson does come to mind. It is probably safe to say that ''Lanark'' is not very much like any other Scottish novel, but it does have antecedents in literature - in Bunyan, in Blake, in Dante.
''Lanark'' received little attention in America. Mr. Gray has since written another novel, ''1982 Janine,'' and a book of short fiction entitled ''Unlikely Stories, Mostly.'' Now his first novel reappears in a full-dress hard-cover treatment with illustrations by the author. His drawings are spare and black, crowded with emblematic figures, at once precise and panoramic. They are remarkably similar in their effect to his prose.
''Lanark,'' subtitled ''A Life in 4 Books,'' begins with Book Three which is followed by Books One, Two and Four. In a rainy, gray, depopulated city called Unthank, something has gone wrong with the sun; it comes up, but never very far, never shining strongly. An amnesiac young man, who does not remember who he is or how he comes to be in this city, has chosen the name Lanark - which he saw printed under a photograph of a landscape - because he does not remember his own. He spends time in a cinema cafe among aimless young people without jobs or families. Around him, people disappear, sucked into the sky or the ground without warning. Others suffer from strange diseases with names like twitters, mouths and softs. Lanark has contracted dragonhide - a patch of hard, insensate skin on his arm is spreading. A woman he meets has a worse problem: she opens her palm and shows him the speaking mouth that has appeared there.
Except for Mr. Gray's chaste and measured language, this wonderfully gloomy, surprising cityscape and its alienated inhabitants might remind readers of the desolation rows and loveless streets in the songs of the young Bob Dylan. Unthank has the pull of dreams charged with meanings that are felt but can't be spoken. At length, Lanark too disappears from Unthank, climbing into an enormous summoning mouth that appears before him, and the story takes the first of several very sharp turns.
Lanark awakens in ''the institute,'' a huge mental institution or hospital that seems to exist outside time and space. His dragonhide is cured, and he is expected to join a staff of bustling and self-important doctors and cure others. It begins to appear that the various diseases of Unthank are equivalents of psychic and moral ailments - dragonhide is an inability to love - and the reader also apprehends, with something of a sinking heart, that he himself has arrived in what is almost certainly an allegory.
No help for it - but the novel staves off the tedium so common in allegorical stories partly because Mr. Gray's characters and incidents multiply so rapidly. Yet what looks like a proliferation of new faces is actually the same people reappearing. In novels like this, characters often seem to double and triple their parts, like actors in a touring company.
While still at the institute, Lanark saves the woman he will love thereafter from total dragonhood and is permitted to consult an oracle who tells him of the life he can't remember which he led before Unthank. With that the book swerves sharply in another direction. From Book Three, the reader enters Books One and Two, which tell of the birth and growth of Duncan Thaw - Lanark's name in his previous life - in the recognizable and more or less naturalistic Glasgow of the 1940's and 50's. Though it appears to be in the middle of the book, Thaw's story - one of crushed love, crushed talents, sickness and death - is the book's beginning. Unthank is shown to be an afterworld to which Duncan Thaw has been remitted after his suicide. These central sections of ''Lanark'' are a Bildungsroman of almost unrelieved sadness and bleakness, a ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,'' had it not been saved by Joyce's extravagance. Thaw's story is made only just bearable by our knowledge that Lanark - post-Thaw - comes to learn of love and the possibility of completion and adventure.
In Book Four he quits the institute with his beloved to find a city where the sun still shines. But he must first return to an Unthank surrounded by motorways, covered with advertisements, crowded with uprooted people - Glasgow today apparently, as the Unthank at the beginning was the Glasgow of Mr. Gray's youth.
But at this point Mr. Gray's enterprise gets out of hand. His allegory has the structure of a Mobius strip: the naturalistic Glasgow of Books One and Two is as much an allegory of Unthank as Unthank is an allegory of Glasgow. As the novel reaches for larger and larger moral and political pronouncements, the allegory and the allegorized become virtually identical. This unfortunate tendency seems to be inherent in the form. Made-up names are substituted for real ones and realism is lost with no corresponding gains in descriptive power. The longer the book goes on, the more rapidly its magic leaks away.
An epilogue placed well before the end takes the form of a dispute between Lanark and a character - not named Alasdair Gray - who says he is the author of the novel. The two argue about how the story should end and we are given an elaborate lecture on the novel's plagiarisms and antecedents, complete with footnotes. (This sort of self-reflexive set piece will one day seem as corny and as redolent of this period as deathbed scenes of Victorian novels seem now.) ''Lanark'' is not the sophisticated modernist work of art this epilogue seems to suggest, not John Barth's ''Giles Goat-Boy'' or Flann O'Brien's ''At Swim-Two-Birds.'' It is more like the great homemade books, the all-encompassing works that have always been constructed not of mainstream materials but of the author's own peculiar mud and straw: ''Pilgrim's Progress,'' say, or Branch Cabell's ''Jurgen.'' Like Swedenborg's ''Divine Love and Wisdom,'' ''Lanark'' is built on the conceit that the universe has the shape of the human body.
Such homemade structures can be accessible and popular, like the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, or private and obsessive, like a yacht built in a basement. Which is ''Lanark''? It is a question to which a purely literary judgment is not a sufficient answer. The book often seems provincial, both in the narrow angle of its vision and the great size of its ambitions. It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist ''Divine Comedy,'' often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers - for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots - to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.
John Crowley's most recent novel is ''Little, Big.''
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