'Lanark' by Alasdair Gray

This big novel is almost every kind of novel rolled into one. Half the book is a realist narrative, that of Duncan Thaw’s childhood and life as a student at the Glasgow School of Art, where his obsessive artistic vision and his inability to develop satisfactory relationships lead him through madness to drowning himself in the sea. This (largely autobiographical) bildungsroman is wrapped in a quite different kind of narrative, that of the character Lanark who arrives (with sand and seashells in his pockets) in the city of Unthank, a kind of sunlightless unterGlasgow, where he falls in with a group of people he is completely unable to relate to and develops dragonhide, a disease (enlarging perhaps on Duncan Thaw’s eczema) that turns his skin to scales (manifesting his emotional repression). Eventually Lanark is swallowed by the earth and finds himself at the Institute, a sort of hospital where people are supposedly cured of their metaphorical diseases (dragonhide, softs, mouths, twittering rigours (it is fun at parties to classify people by these diseases)). When Lanark discovers that hopeless cases are used for food (the blancmangy substance he has been eating) he determines to leave, and eventually returns to Unthank, which is descending into an apocalypse he is powerless to prevent. Pinned out by an ‘epilogue’ in which the Lanark argues his fate with the author (‘Nastler’), and an Index of Plagiarisms, Lanark is the bicameral tale of a man “bad at loving”, both in the ‘real’ world and in one in which his neuroses are externalised and made concrete.