![]() Something Leather is straight-up lechery. Lanark is not particularly dirty, but Gray’s superb second novel, 1982, Janine, is unambiguous filth, chronically the compulsive, unruly fantasies of a middle-aged man called Jock. Moreover, I was a feminist, and Gray was a sometime pornographer whose female characters barely scrape two dimensions. ![]() Gray displayed his politics with disarming plainness – he believed in Scottish independence and socialism I was a milksop unionist and social democrat. It is the kind of book that could look like proof of madness if it had never been published, a 600-page epic with elaborate illustrations (by Gray) and idiosyncratic typesetting, interlacing realist sections set in Glasgow with satirical fantasy set in a parallel city called Unthank, written in four books and starting with book three. (It arrived, like me, in 1981.) But Lanark is so entirely surprising that any first encounter with it is an encounter with the new. Obviously it was not: Alasdair Gray’s novel had been in the world for 23 years by then. When I read Lanark, it felt as if it was my discovery. ![]()
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