SCOTTISH CULT CLASSIC
GRAY, Alasdair. Lanark: A Life in Four Books Edinburgh: Canongate Publishing. 1981.
8vo. Original publishers’ black cloth with gilt title lettering to spine and red endpapers, Original pictorial dust wrapper in black, white and gold, pp. [xiii], 561, Minimal creasing to top and bottom of dust wrapper spine, traces of humidity to top edge, otherwise near fine.
Revered as one of the greatest Scottish novels, the cult first book of the writer, Alasdair Gray, Lanark, is arranged in four books of the following order: Book Three, Book One, Book Two and Book Four and is therefore famously ambituous in its formal play. There is an epilogue four chapters before the end of the book in which Lanark makes the assertion; “"I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another".
Lanark was conceived when Gray was a student in 1954 and culminated in 1976, although it was first published in this edition by Canongate in 1981. It is a medley of meticulously disguised autobiography, sicence fiction and graphics by the author himself (he illustrated and designed his own work in a style idiosyncratic enough to be recognised beyond his readership).
The novelist and critic Anthony Burgess wrote in a flattering review, "It was about time that Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it", calling Gray the most infuential Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott. Indeed, Gray would usher in a renaissance of Scottish avant-garde writers with profiles such as Irvine Welsh citing him as a major influence for both his exploration of the surrealism of reality as well as his excavation of themes such as mental illness and inequality.
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