Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

full marks for creativity, 24 Jul 2006
I think the synopsis and the previous review have said most of what needs to be said. I shall just add my vote for this book. A humorous and creative sci fi yarn about the future. Very unusual, but a quality read, which was refreshing, and opens new horizons for literature and raises many issues about violence, sex, work, the roles of women and men, the role of the media, sporting/military psychology, sexual freedom and historical interpretation. Telling historical judgements are made. An intelligent author who seems to be able to rise above conventionality.

Limbs are hacked off and people make love., 07 Mar 2001
Gray grabs hold of the Scottish Literary Tradition and with Science Fiction in the other hand he squashes them together. This works very well, surprisingly, and the novel still has a broad range of issues and emotions that you would expect from such a fine author. Sometimes, the novel is annoyingly clever.

It is set in a future where wars are tribal and are leagued and bound by rules, although still bloodthirsty and violent. A glance in the veterans club is proof of that. There is little hope for Wat Dryhope, the novel's anti-hero, as he tries his best to stop the senseless killing. No one listens to him and those that do misinterpretate him. Even the armless, legless, eyeless veterans oppose his peaceful stance.

But this book is more than just a diatribe about war. The Public Eye, which is everywhereTV, is nasty and cruel, and promotes bloodthirsty battles for their pulling power. However, declining audience numbers call for drastic measures, and they call for even more blood, for even bloodthirstier battles than the one Wat was the unwitting hero of. All in the name of family entertainment. On Wat's peace mission he meets his father, sleeps with his sister and falls foul of a sinister bitter plot to cause global disaster and give birth to a televised dark age.

In this novel limbs are chopped off and people make love. Televised wars meet the Ettrick shephard, an unlikely combination it is true. Gray is a great writer and like his many other books this is very good.

Alasdair Gray's first novel Lanark (first published in 1981) immediately established him as one of the most important Scottish voices of his generation and this astounding work as one of the key British novels of the last century. Magnificent in its reach and unequalled in the adulation of its critical response, Lanark is a massive book.

Perversely we start our reading with Book 3--the hero of this and the last book in the quartet, the eponymous Lanark, lives in a bizarre and fantastical future in a grey, dreary city called Unthank. He doesn't remember how he got there nor who he really is. He hangs around a local cafe with some other young people whose values and mores he can't quite figure. All around people are disappearing. Then he contracts dragonhide... and disappears too. He wakes in an institute and is told the sad but instructional tale of Duncan Thaw (the boy he used to be, the boy, in a sense, Alasdair Gray used to be).

Duncan, unknowingly speaking of the epic of which he is the centre, who we meet as a child and watch grow into an artist , says "I want to write a modern Divine Comedy with illustrations in the style of William Blake." And it is Duncan's story that is the heart of Lanark--and what a poignant, heart-breaking tale it is. From a boy who can never accept or offer or understand love, who cannot connect, to an artist who cannot accept that he cannot have the final word--both in his own life and in his art--Duncan's tale is a beautifully crafted coming-of-age story.

Lanark is a work of huge imagination and wonderful range; it is about all of our selves, how we make them and make them up; it is about place and what that means for identity and it is about love--how we can learn to love our selves, or fail to, how we need to love, both ourselves and others, to create communities in which we can create art that will promote a continuing project of place in which we can love each other better. Lanark is peerless. --Mark Thwaite

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

full marks for creativity, 24 Jul 2006
I think the synopsis and the previous review have said most of what needs to be said. I shall just add my vote for this book. A humorous and creative sci fi yarn about the future. Very unusual, but a quality read, which was refreshing, and opens new horizons for literature and raises many issues about violence, sex, work, the roles of women and men, the role of the media, sporting/military psychology, sexual freedom and historical interpretation. Telling historical judgements are made. An intelligent author who seems to be able to rise above conventionality.

Limbs are hacked off and people make love., 07 Mar 2001
Gray grabs hold of the Scottish Literary Tradition and with Science Fiction in the other hand he squashes them together. This works very well, surprisingly, and the novel still has a broad range of issues and emotions that you would expect from such a fine author. Sometimes, the novel is annoyingly clever.

It is set in a future where wars are tribal and are leagued and bound by rules, although still bloodthirsty and violent. A glance in the veterans club is proof of that. There is little hope for Wat Dryhope, the novel's anti-hero, as he tries his best to stop the senseless killing. No one listens to him and those that do misinterpretate him. Even the armless, legless, eyeless veterans oppose his peaceful stance.

But this book is more than just a diatribe about war. The Public Eye, which is everywhereTV, is nasty and cruel, and promotes bloodthirsty battles for their pulling power. However, declining audience numbers call for drastic measures, and they call for even more blood, for even bloodthirstier battles than the one Wat was the unwitting hero of. All in the name of family entertainment. On Wat's peace mission he meets his father, sleeps with his sister and falls foul of a sinister bitter plot to cause global disaster and give birth to a televised dark age.

In this novel limbs are chopped off and people make love. Televised wars meet the Ettrick shephard, an unlikely combination it is true. Gray is a great writer and like his many other books this is very good.

a trip through your own mind, 11 Oct 2008
i can't say that i completely understood it all, and at times i was bored, but when i was captivated it was astonishing. in some parts it felt like a history of the world in a few short words. no mean feat by the author. four stars awarded only because of my own intellectual limitations. i am hoping a future read will elevate the rating. the lush boxed-set packaging makes it a treat to own.

Ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!, 22 Sep 2008
I had heard Lanark described as a Glaswegian cult classic but I didn't quite know what to expect. There are two narrative threads. Books 1 and 2 are written in a fairly conventional and naturalistic style and tell the story of Duncan Thaw as he moves through a pretty unhappy childhood into an equally unhappy adolescence. His burning ambition is to paint and he takes on the mammoth task of a church mural. He receives no payment for this and in the end it is rejected by the church hierarchy. Thereafter he sinks into depression and breakdown.

Books 3 and 4 describe the strange dystopic parallel world of Unthank and the adventures of Lanark. This is a surreal place - a mixture of sci-fi, Kafka and horror comics. Here the normal rules of reality have broken down. Although the book could be read as two separate narratives it soon becomes clear that Unthank is an allegorical Glasgow and Lanark is another version of Thaw. There are other parallels - for instance the eczema that Thaw suffers from and the dragon skins of the inhabitants of Unthank. It is a
The story of Duncan Thaw was excellent - touching without being sentimental, a beautiful evocation of childhood and adolescence. Not being a fan of science fiction I was less enthralled by the Unthank sections - although I appreciated the vigorous language and the massive flow of ideas.

You can play at "Spot the Influences" - Kafka, Joyce, Orwell etc. In fact Gray, in one of many comic touches, includes a list of "embedded Plagiarisms" which stretches over fifteen pages! Lanark is very much a political book - in the Institute of Unthank the patients are used as food for the staff (an allegory for capitalism in action?). The plot also involves pollution, environmental degradation and over-population.

It is not easy to sum up Lanark in a few words. It is ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!


the dustjacket of Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' padded out with amateurish drivel, 28 Jul 2007
I haven't read this for 25 years, and over those 25 years I've repeatedly come across praise for this 'novel'; maybe I need to revisit it, maybe I missed something, but as memory serves I have to break with the consensus. I was left with the impression that this was someone with no real talent for writing, and no discipline or perseverance who had got the idea from school that 'modernist' writing eschews narrative and so had concocted a loose excuse, based on a reading of the dust-jacket of Thomas Mann's ' the Magic Mountain' ( which, I frankly have to admit, is all I would recommend reading of that book), to hang together some schoolboy musings based on apparently very little life experience, and to try and find some import in that limited experience. A con, a contrivance, a patchwork of unfinished ideas like the appaling Martin Amis' appalling London Fields, but much worse and much longer. So who are all the people who find this such a masterpiece? Are they people who've never read another book? Scots who delude themselves that they have a James Joyce on their hands because some publishers' promo says so (try Todd McEwen's McX, albeit by an American)? Guardianista reviewer types who can't be bothered reading it but have been told that it's great and modernist so just repeat the blurb they've been given? Either the Emperor has no clothes or I missed something, but the thought of revisiting this rather than trying a different 500+ pages by someone else has little appeal. Read the dust-jacket of the Magic Mountain instead. It's shorter.

A Twentieth Century Colossus, 19 Sep 2005
This is one of the great Scottish novels of the twentieth century. Why? Because of its breadth, scope and vision. It is at one and the same time a hymn celebrating Glasgow and a grim tale of science fiction. The two threads of the story are deftly woven together to make an unforgettable whole. I read it originally whilst "in exile" in England and it brought Glasgow immediately to mind.
The author is one of those Renaisssance men who occasionally appears to light up our dull, everyday lives. He writes superbly, paints well - and probably makes a mean coffee too!

A brilliant book, 17 May 2004
I was recommended LANARK by a friend and was absolutely bowled over by it - and completely ashamed that I'd never heard of Gray before now.

It's very difficult to describe what the book is about - it has two parallel stories, one of a young idealistic artist in Glasgow trying to develop his art in thankless surroundings; the other of a loner in Unthank, a version of Hell (or Glasgow) trying to save his city (Unthank - or Glasgow) from the depredations of industrial capitalism and the onslaught of big business.

The book is elegiac, wise, beautifully written, very clever, hilarious in points, self-parodying and full of wonderful satire. It is also full of engaging charaters, and has a great storyline. Impossible here to depict how the halves intertwine, or the sheer energy of Gray's fiction.

He took 25 years to write this book - it was worth it. One of the classics of the 20th century. Buy it, read it, give it to your friends!

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

full marks for creativity, 24 Jul 2006
I think the synopsis and the previous review have said most of what needs to be said. I shall just add my vote for this book. A humorous and creative sci fi yarn about the future. Very unusual, but a quality read, which was refreshing, and opens new horizons for literature and raises many issues about violence, sex, work, the roles of women and men, the role of the media, sporting/military psychology, sexual freedom and historical interpretation. Telling historical judgements are made. An intelligent author who seems to be able to rise above conventionality.

Limbs are hacked off and people make love., 07 Mar 2001
Gray grabs hold of the Scottish Literary Tradition and with Science Fiction in the other hand he squashes them together. This works very well, surprisingly, and the novel still has a broad range of issues and emotions that you would expect from such a fine author. Sometimes, the novel is annoyingly clever.

It is set in a future where wars are tribal and are leagued and bound by rules, although still bloodthirsty and violent. A glance in the veterans club is proof of that. There is little hope for Wat Dryhope, the novel's anti-hero, as he tries his best to stop the senseless killing. No one listens to him and those that do misinterpretate him. Even the armless, legless, eyeless veterans oppose his peaceful stance.

But this book is more than just a diatribe about war. The Public Eye, which is everywhereTV, is nasty and cruel, and promotes bloodthirsty battles for their pulling power. However, declining audience numbers call for drastic measures, and they call for even more blood, for even bloodthirstier battles than the one Wat was the unwitting hero of. All in the name of family entertainment. On Wat's peace mission he meets his father, sleeps with his sister and falls foul of a sinister bitter plot to cause global disaster and give birth to a televised dark age.

In this novel limbs are chopped off and people make love. Televised wars meet the Ettrick shephard, an unlikely combination it is true. Gray is a great writer and like his many other books this is very good.

a trip through your own mind, 11 Oct 2008
i can't say that i completely understood it all, and at times i was bored, but when i was captivated it was astonishing. in some parts it felt like a history of the world in a few short words. no mean feat by the author. four stars awarded only because of my own intellectual limitations. i am hoping a future read will elevate the rating. the lush boxed-set packaging makes it a treat to own.

Ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!, 22 Sep 2008
I had heard Lanark described as a Glaswegian cult classic but I didn't quite know what to expect. There are two narrative threads. Books 1 and 2 are written in a fairly conventional and naturalistic style and tell the story of Duncan Thaw as he moves through a pretty unhappy childhood into an equally unhappy adolescence. His burning ambition is to paint and he takes on the mammoth task of a church mural. He receives no payment for this and in the end it is rejected by the church hierarchy. Thereafter he sinks into depression and breakdown.

Books 3 and 4 describe the strange dystopic parallel world of Unthank and the adventures of Lanark. This is a surreal place - a mixture of sci-fi, Kafka and horror comics. Here the normal rules of reality have broken down. Although the book could be read as two separate narratives it soon becomes clear that Unthank is an allegorical Glasgow and Lanark is another version of Thaw. There are other parallels - for instance the eczema that Thaw suffers from and the dragon skins of the inhabitants of Unthank. It is a
The story of Duncan Thaw was excellent - touching without being sentimental, a beautiful evocation of childhood and adolescence. Not being a fan of science fiction I was less enthralled by the Unthank sections - although I appreciated the vigorous language and the massive flow of ideas.

You can play at "Spot the Influences" - Kafka, Joyce, Orwell etc. In fact Gray, in one of many comic touches, includes a list of "embedded Plagiarisms" which stretches over fifteen pages! Lanark is very much a political book - in the Institute of Unthank the patients are used as food for the staff (an allegory for capitalism in action?). The plot also involves pollution, environmental degradation and over-population.

It is not easy to sum up Lanark in a few words. It is ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!


the dustjacket of Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' padded out with amateurish drivel, 28 Jul 2007
I haven't read this for 25 years, and over those 25 years I've repeatedly come across praise for this 'novel'; maybe I need to revisit it, maybe I missed something, but as memory serves I have to break with the consensus. I was left with the impression that this was someone with no real talent for writing, and no discipline or perseverance who had got the idea from school that 'modernist' writing eschews narrative and so had concocted a loose excuse, based on a reading of the dust-jacket of Thomas Mann's ' the Magic Mountain' ( which, I frankly have to admit, is all I would recommend reading of that book), to hang together some schoolboy musings based on apparently very little life experience, and to try and find some import in that limited experience. A con, a contrivance, a patchwork of unfinished ideas like the appaling Martin Amis' appalling London Fields, but much worse and much longer. So who are all the people who find this such a masterpiece? Are they people who've never read another book? Scots who delude themselves that they have a James Joyce on their hands because some publishers' promo says so (try Todd McEwen's McX, albeit by an American)? Guardianista reviewer types who can't be bothered reading it but have been told that it's great and modernist so just repeat the blurb they've been given? Either the Emperor has no clothes or I missed something, but the thought of revisiting this rather than trying a different 500+ pages by someone else has little appeal. Read the dust-jacket of the Magic Mountain instead. It's shorter.

A Twentieth Century Colossus, 19 Sep 2005
This is one of the great Scottish novels of the twentieth century. Why? Because of its breadth, scope and vision. It is at one and the same time a hymn celebrating Glasgow and a grim tale of science fiction. The two threads of the story are deftly woven together to make an unforgettable whole. I read it originally whilst "in exile" in England and it brought Glasgow immediately to mind.
The author is one of those Renaisssance men who occasionally appears to light up our dull, everyday lives. He writes superbly, paints well - and probably makes a mean coffee too!

A brilliant book, 17 May 2004
I was recommended LANARK by a friend and was absolutely bowled over by it - and completely ashamed that I'd never heard of Gray before now.

It's very difficult to describe what the book is about - it has two parallel stories, one of a young idealistic artist in Glasgow trying to develop his art in thankless surroundings; the other of a loner in Unthank, a version of Hell (or Glasgow) trying to save his city (Unthank - or Glasgow) from the depredations of industrial capitalism and the onslaught of big business.

The book is elegiac, wise, beautifully written, very clever, hilarious in points, self-parodying and full of wonderful satire. It is also full of engaging charaters, and has a great storyline. Impossible here to depict how the halves intertwine, or the sheer energy of Gray's fiction.

He took 25 years to write this book - it was worth it. One of the classics of the 20th century. Buy it, read it, give it to your friends!

AN OCCASIONAL DEFENSE of Mr Gray, 10 Mar 2005
Unaccustomed as I am to the review process, the preceding comments gave me cause to write a response regarding the latest offering from the pen of Alasdair Gray.

Although not an 'aficionado', I have a number of Gray's eclectic prose and poetry on my shelf and it is true the stories presented in this collection are far removed from their predecessors. This is not to say that the short stories in 'The Ends of Our Tethers' are inferior to those found in 'Unlikely Stories, Mostly' or 'Ten Tales Tall & True' they are just different, in a similar way that 'Our Man in Havana' is different to 'Brighton Rock'.

In my opinion it is wrong to 'grade' writers according to their contemporaries, just as it would be wrong not to go to an Auerbach exhibition because all his paintings were similar and not as diverse as those of Lucian Freud.

'The Ends of Our Tethers' is full of Gray's usual meat and potatoes - political and cultural commentary all spooned over with a tasty, reduced, gravy of humorous libidinous proclivities. True, it lacks the fleshed out narrative tales that are scattered in his previous writing and some stories are almost footnotes, jottings even marginalia, but they are worthy of scrutiny nonetheless, and not just by 'aficionados'.

Disappointing set book material, 03 Dec 2007
At times brilliant, at times maddening in its self-indulgent opacity, this felt too much like an exercise in literary virtuosity, likely to be more satisfying for the author and his literary peers, than a book for the general reader stoically soldiering on, trying to make sense of it.

The author acknowledges his debt to Kafka; I suspect there is not a little of Aldous Huxley in there as well. In turn, I am sure he has inspired the likes of David Mitchell. I read an article on A.L. Kennedy where she nominated this book as this one of her most influential reads.
I can see it as one of those books which would appear as prescribed reading on literature courses; fine, if that's your thing.

Not one I can see myself revisiting any time soon.

A truly immense book, 06 Sep 2007
My words can't even start to convey the enormity of this magnificent novel, one of the landmarks in twentieth century fiction. Just please read it and you'll then understand why Alasdair Gray has a growing legion of fans.



Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

One of the Great C20th Scottish novels..., 11 Mar 2007
...up there with Sunset Song, in my humble opinion (and I should say that the latter, read when I was 14, was the novel for me which made fiction seemt he greatest thing in the world). Far better than Lanark - tighter, more humane, funnier and more serious. A wonder.

Oh, What a Night!, 08 Mar 2004
This inventive novel takes place over one difficult night in the life of Jock McLeish, security systems engineer: a night which brings him to the brink of suicide. It is an evocative mosaic, mingling the sadistic fantasies that fail to distract Jock from the bitter memories of his own life - poor decisions, casual cruelties, ill-judged liaisons - and his musings on the failings of his beloved Scotland. Eventually, a kind of resolution is reached.

It is all done in Gray's fluent and adventurous style. Fans of his other works should not hesitate; newcomers to his dark, Gothic fictions could happily(?) start here.

Scotland, bleak and sad, 05 Oct 1999
Gray's great second book is much better than the famous Lanark; though quite similar in some of its themes it is tighter, funnier and works more effectively. It concerns an aging security operative, desperately lonely and alcoholic, who is reviewing his life in a small Scottish hotel room. Without spoiling the book for anyone (I hope), he "finds himself" when, despairing at all the missed chances in his life he tries to kill himself and enters a dialogue with God. As an atheist this surprises him! A beautiful vignette of what it is to be Scottish, politically and sexually repressed. Replete with pretend literary notes like Lanark (one of several references to Flann O'Brien which Gray acknowledges), this is by far the better book. Sad though.

In a Spin, 13 Oct 2007
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.

Quality writing, exceptional visual presentation, 14 May 2000
As usual with Gray, the design is superlative.

Fascinating and intelligent text, 08 May 2000
Fascinating, intelligent and entertaining. These are just some of the conclusions that I have come to in the year since I first read Poor Things. Is Baxter a man or a creation himself?Why does he have such bizarre eating habits? Similarly, is Bella quite the woman she believes herself to be? What happened to her daughter? Why can she not write using vowels? How does she learn to relate to the world around her? This is a very clever re-write of Shelly's Frankenstein, itself a text that is very concerned with issues of language and how we aquire it.That, however, is not all it is. It's also a really good romp around such key areas of examination such as class divide,feminist issues and Empire in the Victorian world of the Industrial Revolution .You be the detective sifting through the authors 'found' collection of journals and letters ( a classic Victorian writing device). Enjoy the artwork and take time afterwards to ponder what you have read. How can you ignore a novel in which the main female character (Bella) turns a noted philanderer into a Bible-bashing lunatic as a result of her insatiable nymphomania? I'm still thinking about what I've read and that doesn't happen often with me. A modern classic!

Yuck!, 28 Apr 2000
Highly pretentious! A ridiculously stupid main character set within an even stupider plot! This novel takes itself too seriously from cover to cover (and, indeed, even the cover illustration is ludicrous). Its would-be originality is overshadowed by the fact that the plot and the meaning are in their hundreth reincarnation. Its sinister carefreeness and disturbing images all attempt and fail what Huxley so elegantly communicated to us the good part of a century ago. Save your time -- it is a big book!

full marks for creativity, 24 Jul 2006
I think the synopsis and the previous review have said most of what needs to be said. I shall just add my vote for this book. A humorous and creative sci fi yarn about the future. Very unusual, but a quality read, which was refreshing, and opens new horizons for literature and raises many issues about violence, sex, work, the roles of women and men, the role of the media, sporting/military psychology, sexual freedom and historical interpretation. Telling historical judgements are made. An intelligent author who seems to be able to rise above conventionality.

Limbs are hacked off and people make love., 07 Mar 2001
Gray grabs hold of the Scottish Literary Tradition and with Science Fiction in the other hand he squashes them together. This works very well, surprisingly, and the novel still has a broad range of issues and emotions that you would expect from such a fine author. Sometimes, the novel is annoyingly clever.

It is set in a future where wars are tribal and are leagued and bound by rules, although still bloodthirsty and violent. A glance in the veterans club is proof of that. There is little hope for Wat Dryhope, the novel's anti-hero, as he tries his best to stop the senseless killing. No one listens to him and those that do misinterpretate him. Even the armless, legless, eyeless veterans oppose his peaceful stance.

But this book is more than just a diatribe about war. The Public Eye, which is everywhereTV, is nasty and cruel, and promotes bloodthirsty battles for their pulling power. However, declining audience numbers call for drastic measures, and they call for even more blood, for even bloodthirstier battles than the one Wat was the unwitting hero of. All in the name of family entertainment. On Wat's peace mission he meets his father, sleeps with his sister and falls foul of a sinister bitter plot to cause global disaster and give birth to a televised dark age.

In this novel limbs are chopped off and people make love. Televised wars meet the Ettrick shephard, an unlikely combination it is true. Gray is a great writer and like his many other books this is very good.

a trip through your own mind, 11 Oct 2008
i can't say that i completely understood it all, and at times i was bored, but when i was captivated it was astonishing. in some parts it felt like a history of the world in a few short words. no mean feat by the author. four stars awarded only because of my own intellectual limitations. i am hoping a future read will elevate the rating. the lush boxed-set packaging makes it a treat to own.

Ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!, 22 Sep 2008
I had heard Lanark described as a Glaswegian cult classic but I didn't quite know what to expect. There are two narrative threads. Books 1 and 2 are written in a fairly conventional and naturalistic style and tell the story of Duncan Thaw as he moves through a pretty unhappy childhood into an equally unhappy adolescence. His burning ambition is to paint and he takes on the mammoth task of a church mural. He receives no payment for this and in the end it is rejected by the church hierarchy. Thereafter he sinks into depression and breakdown.

Books 3 and 4 describe the strange dystopic parallel world of Unthank and the adventures of Lanark. This is a surreal place - a mixture of sci-fi, Kafka and horror comics. Here the normal rules of reality have broken down. Although the book could be read as two separate narratives it soon becomes clear that Unthank is an allegorical Glasgow and Lanark is another version of Thaw. There are other parallels - for instance the eczema that Thaw suffers from and the dragon skins of the inhabitants of Unthank. It is a
The story of Duncan Thaw was excellent - touching without being sentimental, a beautiful evocation of childhood and adolescence. Not being a fan of science fiction I was less enthralled by the Unthank sections - although I appreciated the vigorous language and the massive flow of ideas.

You can play at "Spot the Influences" - Kafka, Joyce, Orwell etc. In fact Gray, in one of many comic touches, includes a list of "embedded Plagiarisms" which stretches over fifteen pages! Lanark is very much a political book - in the Institute of Unthank the patients are used as food for the staff (an allegory for capitalism in action?). The plot also involves pollution, environmental degradation and over-population.

It is not easy to sum up Lanark in a few words. It is ambitious, quirky, funny and challenging. Quite an achievement!


the dustjacket of Thomas Mann's 'Magic Mountain' padded out with amateurish drivel, 28 Jul 2007
I haven't read this for 25 years, and over those 25 years I've repeatedly come across praise for this 'novel'; maybe I need to revisit it, maybe I missed something, but as memory serves I have to break with the consensus. I was left with the impression that this was someone with no real talent for writing, and no discipline or perseverance who had got the idea from school that 'modernist' writing eschews narrative and so had concocted a loose excuse, based on a reading of the dust-jacket of Thomas Mann's ' the Magic Mountain' ( which, I frankly have to admit, is all I would recommend reading of that book), to hang together some schoolboy musings based on apparently very little life experience, and to try and find some import in that limited experience. A con, a contrivance, a patchwork of unfinished ideas like the appaling Martin Amis' appalling London Fields, but much worse and much longer. So who are all the people who find this such a masterpiece? Are they people who've never read another book? Scots who delude themselves that they have a James Joyce on their hands because some publishers' promo says so (try Todd McEwen's McX, albeit by an American)? Guardianista reviewer types who can't be bothered reading it but have been told that it's great and modernist so just repeat the blurb they've been given? Either the Emperor has no clothes or I missed something, but the thought of revisiting this rather than trying a different 500+ pages by someone else has little appeal. Read the dust-jacket of the Magic Mountain instead. It's shorter.

A Twentieth Century Colossus, 19 Sep 2005
This is one of the great Scottish novels of the twentieth century. Why? Because of its breadth, scope and vision. It is at one and the same time a hymn celebrating Glasgow and a grim tale of science fiction. The two threads of the story are deftly woven together to make an unforgettable whole. I read it originally whilst "in exile" in England and it brought Glasgow immediately to mind.
The author is one of those Renaisssance men who occasionally appears to light up our dull, everyday lives. He writes superbly, paints well - and probably makes a mean coffee too!

A brilliant book, 17 May 2004
I was recommended LANARK by a friend and was absolutely bowled over by it - and completely ashamed that I'd never heard of Gray before now.

It's very difficult to describe what the book is about - it has two parallel stories, one of a young idealistic artist in Glasgow trying to develop his art in thankless surroundings; the other of a loner in Unthank, a version of Hell (or Glasgow) trying to save his city (Unthank - or Glasgow) from the depredations of industrial capitalism and the onslaught of big business.

The book is elegiac, wise, beautifully written, very clever, hilarious in points, self-parodying and full of wonderful satire. It is also full of engaging charaters, and has a great storyline. Impossible here to depict how the halves intertwine, or the sheer energy of Gray's fiction.

He took 25 years to write this book - it was worth it. One of the classics of the 20th century. Buy it, read it, give it to your friends!

AN OCCASIONAL DEFENSE of Mr Gray, 10 Mar 2005
Unaccustomed as I am to the review process, the preceding comments gave me cause to write a response regarding the latest offering from the pen of Alasdair Gray.

Although not an 'aficionado', I have a number of Gray's eclectic prose and poetry on my shelf and it is true the stories presented in this collection are far removed from their predecessors. This is not to say that the short stories in 'The Ends of Our Tethers' are inferior to those found in 'Unlikely Stories, Mostly' or 'Ten Tales Tall & True' they are just different, in a similar way that 'Our Man in Havana' is different to 'Brighton Rock'.

In my opinion it is wrong to 'grade' writers according to their contemporaries, just as it would be wrong not to go to an Auerbach exhibition because all his paintings were similar and not as diverse as those of Lucian Freud.

'The Ends of Our Tethers' is full of Gray's usual meat and potatoes - political and cultural commentary all spooned over with a tasty, reduced, gravy of humorous libidinous proclivities. True, it lacks the fleshed out narrative tales that are scattered in his previous writing and some stories are almost footnotes, jottings even marginalia, but they are worthy of scrutiny nonetheless, and not just by 'aficionados'.

Teachers: six sorry stories, 31 May 2004
Alasdair Gray has never been the most uplifting of writers - even when he enters the realm of fancy or humour, it is always with a bittersweet edge. This is perhaps most evident in "Mavis Belfrage", ostensibly a novel - in actuality a book of six short tales. Here we are firmly grounded in the real world, with no magic lamps or deus ex machina; every tale rings horribly true [especially for those of us within the thankless profession of education]. Although there are no happy endings,