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4.5
In the deep mud or mire of dystopian Glasgow, somewhere near the dread calendar zone, men and women, like worms, slither down tight holes searching for sunlight or food, hopefully not made from human meat and bones. Their skins are often aflame with dragon scales, and their souls are in hopes of healing as well as loving.All the doctors are helpful, kind, misleading, and utterly untrained.This now classic postmodern novel is thought by many to be one of the greatest novels of all time and is undoubtably the finest novel from Scotland of this century.It is certainly brilliant and endlessly creative, astonishing in its originality, even as it steals most of the world’s literary devices and documents each theft as it’s occurring. When was the last time you read a book whose plot was driven by literary devices rather than a plot assisted by them. The book is determined to begin with Book Three and is followed by a prologue, then an Interlude, Book Two,Book Four, an Epilogue, and a Tail Piece and all content seems made to fall in line accordingly.Also, consider the two leading characters, Lanark, who cannot love or be loved, and Duncan Thaw, the great artist who will not fit in. It turns out, the men are one and the same, and one is an exaggeration of the other.Make sense? Maybe not, but Gray delights in being a savant of the imagination and one of the world’s most knowledgeable academics.Not so surprising then (though I was surprised), when the book logically concludes with a sketch of it’s author.Let me also add, that the book is blindingly insightful in relation to the failure to love and the failure to find it, the calendar zone of the worse dystopian mindset. I kept saying to myself, throughout the book: “My God, that’s me, that’s true.”
