Us weirdos

An illustration of Faust by Gray, who also illustrated Lanark

It's come up in the past that I've been reading a lot of weird books since I moved to New York. The latest addition to my running series of weird novels was Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books, which I actually finished a few weeks ago.

Gray's book is divided up into four smaller interior 'books,' as well as a prologue, interlude, and epilogue. The first two books comprise a fairly conventional bildungsroman (or, more accurately, a künstlerroman) about an artistic, emotionally constipated young man growing up in Glasgow during the 50s and 60s. The third and fourth books address an amnesiac who wakes up in an allegorical dystopian version of Glasgow called Unthank. It becomes clear that these two figures are the same man, and that the division between them is the result of a personal cataclysm that occurs at the end of the second book.

As though the divided-plot thing wasn't weird enough ("Perhaps the author believed that one large book would make a bigger splash than two smaller ones," Gray quips), the above segments appear in the following order: Book 3-> Prologue -> Book 1 -> Interlude -> Book 2 -> Book 4 part 1 -> Epilogue -> Book 4 part 2.

And on top of that, the epilogue features an appearance by Gray himself, in the guise of a 'conjuror' who argues (unsuccessfully) with his own protagonist about the upcoming conclusion of the novel. The debate takes place amidst a clutter of headers, footnotes and indices. Reading the last quarter of Lanark is akin to being smacked in the face with a syllabus from a college course on postmodern literature.

As you might expect, Lanark offers many an avenue for reading and interpretation. It's a book about Glasgow (and how it's depressing). It's a book about the Scottish national identity (and how it's also depressing). It's a book about the UN and the international community at large (and how it's useless). It's a book about the interplay between government, industry, and academia (and how they're each trying to subvert and control the others).

I chose to read Lanark as a book about being a weird, awkward creative type who doesn't really understand the way other individuals, or society as a whole, work. At the book's conclusion, this flawed, not-always-likeable figure manages to find something approaching peace. After a lengthy jeremiad of a book loaded with messy pretensions and off-the-wall devices, the ending comes off as comforting...at least for us weirdos.