Lucas reviewed Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canons) by Alasdair Gray
Man, what a fun, odd book.
5 stars
It's inventive, sprawling, packed with insights big and small, capable of some direct attacks on the ways of the world while still sentimental and touching. Lanark is not unlike other novels I've liked, for sure, but hard to place: not as highfalutin or poetic as Solenoid, not as dreary and alienating/ed as Kafka, funny and self-mocking like A Staggering Work of Heartbreaking Genius but genuinely political, and less psychologizing or trauma-centred than one might expect of something sometimes raw and (obviously) autobiographical.
(The introduction, by William Boyd, is so empty and vapid as to seem a joke. It must be.)
