It was another one of those dead men, Anthony Burgess, who recommended Lanark to me. Not me personally, but through his book, Ninety-Nine Novels. Burgess was of course just one of many hundreds of people with whom I held conversations in my head, given the number of his books I read back then, one of my imaginary friends whom I am sure would not have been a friend in real life, but that is another story. Flicking through the pages of 99 now, I see a few books I have read, but Lanark may have been the only one that I read as a result of 99.
“A big and original novel has at last come out of Scotland,” wrote Burgess, so why would I not track it down? Oh Anthomny, you had me at “A”. “… it was time Scotland produced a shaterring work of fiction in the modern idiom”. This led me to read Gray, and James Kelman, and Carl MacDougall and …
In the days before Abebooks and Amazon, it was a highlight of a holiday to Scotland to find a copy of his “Why Scots should rule Scotland”. To the delight of my wife, I am sure, I found other things as well, as you can see below. (At least, she says, if we get separated, I always know that I will find you in the nearest bookshop.)
I am no critic, I don’t have the words. I read him, I enjoyed him, he made me think. I liked his art, and the design of his books. We have a space on a wall where we would hang an original painting, if we owned such a thing. I always thought that an Alasdair Gray would look good there, watching us as we watched TV, as climbed the stairs, as we tottered off to bed …
Fortunately, other people have words …
Frightening and downright filthy: why everyone must read Alasdair Gray
