Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics) (original 1981; edition 2002)

The brilliant odyssey of a man who will stop at nothing to escape from 'The Man.' Grey has been called Joyce, Kafka, and Pynchon rolled into one. ( )

Fascinating, confusing, weird. I can't even begin to offer a plot synopsis. I was fascinated by parts and bored to tears by other parts. Epic strangeness that nevertheless strikes amazingly close to home at times. A novel not soon forgotten. ( )

Duncan Thaw, an artist living in Glasgow, and the man who arrives in the city of Unthank by train at the beginning of the book and takes the name Lanark, are one and the same person. Lanark isn’t quite as useless as Thaw, but it's hard to like a book with such an unlikeable protagonist, even though the book covers interesting political and social issues. I only really started to enjoy it in the final quarter, when time becomes unreliable (even outside the Intercalendrical Zones), and Lanark meets someone who can tell him what is going on.

I like the way the book is organised. Books 1 and 2 are about Thaw, and books 3 and 4 are about Lanark (and they happen in that chronological order), but book 3 comes first, which means that as Lanark arrives in Unthank knowing nothing about his past or the city that will become his home, the reader is in the same boat. ( )

This novel is a mix of dystopia with fantasy elements and bildungsroman. We start in the future where we come across a dysfunctional group of pseudo-cognoscenti hanging out in a cinema-cum-coffee shop called The Elite. In this section of the book, Lanark, our hero, lives a rather purposeless life in Unthank (parallel universe Glasgow), cavorts with these layabouts there before being sucked underground by a big pair of lips. He enters a vast Orwellian compound known as the Institute where everyone's a doctor, or becomes one. He saves a woman, Rima, one of the layabouts, from turning salamander. He discovers that Soylent Green is people, and for that reason decides to leave the subterreanean Institute. But before doing so, he is told the story by a portable oracle of his former life as one Duncan Thaw. Thaw lived in the real Glasgow, which I was pleased to see meticulously described for the first time in any fiction that I have ever read. Over 300+ pages Thaw grows from child to neurotic art student. He has terrible asthma. He masturbates avidly. He can't get a girl. His mother dies horribly. His relationship with his father is deeply moving. The relationships throughout these two central books are so genuine, so vivid. This human warmth is an element lacking from the framing dystopia, because that setting, and all its whacky goings on, distract from the humanity, as it's meant to do. But the dystopic sections are valuable for other reasons: for their depiction of vast, illogical space, of an incomprehensible and deeply criminal military-industrial complex that will stop at nothing to realize a profit. Future rereadings are merited. That's high praise. ( )

Creative pot of realism and fantasy, salted with science fiction, an apocalyptic coming-of-age story ( )