Scotland, Indiana, Alasdair Gray's Lanark

I have already written about Alasdair Gray here and this is me playing the fan boy for his novel Lanark: A Life In Four Books.  Some excerpts from The Guardian's Glasgow belongs to us Janice Galloway:

That the solid black lines of the cover encompassed a text chunky as a doorstop is another authorial joke, for Lanark is a novel built on shifting sands, defying solidity at a number of levels. Opening it reveals not one, but four books arranged slightly out of synch on a vaguely epic canvas stitched about with literary allusions and quotations, aphorisms, illustrations, and sermons. Within these books, the stories of Duncan Thaw and Lanark, men who inhabit cities called Glasgow and Unthank, interlace and reflect upon each other. Thaw, who is revealed from the age of five or so, inhabits more the "naturalistic" books; Lanark, ageing by the page, the more surreal, but that the cities are the same city, both men the same man is never in question. There is nothing particularly complicated in that. Indeed, the story as shown in the author's own honed to the bone precis is, on one level, simple enough....

At first, that cover was rather off-putting for me. And I found inside a spark to something more for me from Indiana, something Ms. Galloway points out for herself as a native of Scotland.

A city imagined at length into being itself. I had fleetingly encountered so-called "magic realism" in translated Spanish, swallowed whole some oddball 19th-century Russians, a few American books that contained depictions of very "ordinary" lives told with grandeur and depth, but nothing of the kind about, well, home. I had barely encountered any of my country's writers at all, let alone one this engaged with the present tense, this bravely alive. Scotland, my schooling had at times implied, at times openly professed, was a small, cold, bitter place that had no political clout, not much cultural heritage, joyless people and writers who were all male and all dead. As modern Scots, we were unfit to offer Art, politics or philosophy to the world, we were fit only for losing at football games. Not so, this book said: on a number of levels, not so.

Not that the voice was naive. It too had been subjected to the unspoken Scottish catechism, but the familiar panoply of self-hatreds and jealously internalised repressions were present in the text, outed, as it were, that they might be moved beyond. "I do not love Glasgow much," Thaw admits gloomily. "I sometimes actively hate it. But I am at home there." And who can blame him? His city is sick and repressive, lacking light, hope and love. It breeds asthmas and illness. dependencies and unhealthy sexual stupors, threatens dragon-hide and twittering rigor - all versions of emotional and intellectual hopelessness. Yet how he strives.

Sorry, but the idea of being unfit to offer anything cultural does sound like an Indiana attitude.  Ms. Galloway makes this claim for Alasdair Gray:

Alasdair Gray's big book about Glasgow is also a big book about everywhere. Its insistence on the literal if mistrusted truth - that Glasgow and Scotland and every small nation and individual within it are part of the whole wide world - is something worth saying indeed. Dear reader, delay no longer. Engage with the text. Imagine. Admire the view.

Indiana needs someone to do that for it (and it's not me). Every place or group its inhabitants think of as marginalized needs a book like Lanark. Give it a read.