A review by tom_f
Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray

2.0

packed this in about halfway, just finishing up 'book one' after trudging through 'book three', failing to reach 'book two' or the concluding 'book four'. middling sections giving me ominous flashbacks to machen's The Hill Of Dreams: expressionistically autobiographical account of a brooding, struggling young male artist tearing their hair out in the pursuit of carefree, intellectually inferior young women while shackling themselves with artistic burdens of greater and greater portent and self-seriousness. gray has a good sardonic ear for bitter smalltalk but the ironic humour this provides is a weak flame to huddle round amidst this long and dreary scottish midwinter. i've almost totally forfeited my investment in the novel's fading first quarter, which sharply traded a humdrum dystopian city for a crudely phantasmagorical hopsital. neither scenes were particularly interesting but it's the petty sexuality and sub-blakean bluster of the second quarter that really have allowed the fire to sputter and expire. midway through this experience i ripped through Charles Brandt's luxuriously juicy investigation into the disappearance of jimmy hoffa, I Heard You Paint Houses, which reminder of the joys of reading have saved me from fullblown stockholm syndrome.