I really enjoyed reading this, parts of it were brilliant but others were too much for me to handle and left me feeling discombobulated. For me, the best books were 1 & 2, which appear second and third in the chronology, and the less good ones were 3 & 4, which appear first and last. Books 1 & 2 deal with Thaw’s young life in 1950s Glasgow until his eventual death by drowning as a young-ish man and don’t contain any element of fantasy. Books 3 & 4 deal in the dystopian, unspecified future Thaw is reincarnated in as Lanark and contain an absolute riot of mind-bending concepts and rampant creativity. I found the realistic sections spoke to me far more clearly and were deeply moving. The dystopian books about the imagined future felt like a far less lucid version of books like ‘1984’, ‘A Brave New World’ or ‘We’.
This isn’t to say they didn’t contain anything I enjoyed because there were a lot of great concepts. For example, I loved the concept of Thaw being reincarnated with pebbles and seashells in his pocket, his journey from Unthank to the institution, the distortions of time that occur and the journey with Rima through the ‘intercalendrical zone’. I also really enjoyed the section where the author writes himself into the narrative as a kind of demi-God in the ‘Epilogue’. However, I ultimately think the author tried to jam too much into these books. The best example of this is also the ‘Epilogue’, which is footnoted in a way that basically makes it unreadable! When I was reading books 3 & 4, I felt the author was trying to reference everything he had ever read or heard about while simultaneously trying to explain all of human history and how human society functions. It’s incredibly ambitious but the results were a bit underwhelming. What I got was hundreds, if not thousands, of ideas or images loosely stitched together but with very little of a comprehensible overview or schema. Fair enough, you might say, the subject is large and incomprehensible. However, my view is that Books 1 & 2 actually say far more about life and the human experience than 3 & 4 do without explicitly trying to. Books 3 & 4 try to explain everything and ultimately fail, leaving me confused and a bit frustrated. They are creative in the extreme, and contain an overabundance of interesting ideas but these ideas aren’t really resolved into anything clear and understandable. However, the books have the tone of explanation and some of the chapters are even called things like ‘Explanation’. In the end, I was reminded of Huxley and ‘Brave New World’ insofar as the wonderful creativity of the world the author creates descends into pretentious and grandiose attempts to explain the whole of human history and nature, which probably isn't possible and certainly wasn’t successful from my perspective.
I liked the prose and found it easy to read and full of humour, irreverence and sarcasm. The author likes detailed descriptions and sometimes these were too lengthy and not very clear, especially in the dystopian books. Sometimes the dialogue can be a bit stilted but at other points it’s very atmospheric and evocative. It also contains one of the most amusing sex scenes I have ever read! Highlights included, ‘softly, sadly, he revisited the hills and hollows of a familiar landscape, the sides of his limbs brushing sweet abundances with surprisingly hard tips, his endings paddling in the pleats of a wet wound which opened into a boggy cave where little moans bloomed like violets in the blackness’ (p511).
The character of Thaw / Lanark is highly developed but I found almost all the other characters peripheral and unmemorable. The most memorable ones for me were Thaw’s art school friends and his father. The characters from the dystopian sections are scarcely allowed to develop amidst the distortions and deformations of the future. For example, Lanark barely gets to know his son Alexander because time is progressing so rapidly and there’s so much else going on but then he is thrust into an extremely prominent position at the end of the book, presumably to represent the importance of family, but it ends up feeling a bit forced because we barely know anything about him or his relationship with his father. This is in stark contrast to Thaw’s relationship with his own father, which is somewhat sad but well described and develops at a pleasing pace through the narrative. The author occasionally chucks in a character for almost no reason as well, like the oracle who tells Lanark about his past life as Thaw in the institution. This character also gives their life story, which I can’t remember very well and doesn’t have any connection to the rest of the story that I can remember. It seemed a bit superfluous in a book that is already bursting with material! It seems that most female characters throughout all the books, both realistic and fantastic, are depicted as mercenary and intoxicated by men with power, which dates the book a bit.
I would recommend this book partly because I liked Books 1 & 2 so much and partly because the whirlwind of creativity contained in Books 3 & 4 is worth experiencing even if it ended up leaving me a bit confused! I was really surprised to read on wikipedia that Book 1 was rejected by publishers in the 1960s when Gray submitted it on its own. Perhaps Books 1 & 2 contrast with 3 & 4 in a way that makes the quartet better as whole.
