On David Greig's "Lanark"

On Tuesday the 8th of September, Lady Rae sentenced Alexander Pacteau to life for the murder of Karen Buckley. The facts of the case are horrific, the consequences desolate. "I find it extremely difficult to find words appropriate to describe the dreadful crime to which you have pleaded guilty," the judge said. The 21 year old belatedly expressed remorse for his actions through his counsel, but Pacteau’s motivations for killing a young woman who he did not know, within minutes of meeting her, remain in darkness, obscure and unexplained.

We can only guess. What has been reported of Pacteau’s life offers hints from which a highly-speculative pen portrait might be drawn. A life lived at odds with the wealth and privilege of his upbringing. One characterised by transgressive dishonesty. Sexual and emotional frustration. Problematic attitudes towards women. Rage. You might begin to piece together an image of a consciousness, capable of doing what he did.

But as the judge pronounced the penalty in the High Court, my mind turned reluctantly towards my appointment with Lanark at the Citizens Theatre that evening. Adapted by David Greig from Alasdair Gray’s celebrated novel, I was already feeling ambivalent about the production. I first read Lanark as a teenager, and returned to it recently. It is a book which I both admire, and find profoundly repulsive. For a great many people, Lanark is simply a book to be cherished, some people's favourite.

It was a mine which blasted open Scottish literature, shattering preconceptions about what Scottish novels could and should aspire to express and to explore. A book which composed, in fine detail, a recognisable image of Glasgow, which used this city to paint and to people other worlds. It situated the city at the heart of a cosmic drama of life and death, of love and rebirth. It was recognisable, but showed sweeping ambition. It embodied a central lesson of Greek drama: the war between the great forces of the universe play out -- even in Riddrie. On your own street. In your own school. Tragedy plays out, day and daily, in small places, close to home. 

Of the four books from which the novel is built, the most naturalistic ends with Duncan Thaw – sick, obsessed, failed, ravaged – walking into the sea. But before the waves claim the artist as a young man, drunken, miserable, and unhinged, Thaw throttles the object of his frustrated love in the muck of the Necropolis, its old monuments blackened and watchful. “I think I murdered you,” Lanark later says to Rima, the reincarnation of the spirit killed among Glasgow’s ancient dead. Neither the novel nor the play make it clear whether this episode is merely a conjuration of Thaw’s fragmented mind, or if the character has indeed choked the life from a young art student for declining to satisfy his emotionally inarticulate and increasingly embittered sexual desires. 

But either way, the episode illuminates the often overlooked darkness and ugliness of Gray’s central character. In the Citizens, Lanark and Rima’s reflect lightly on this conclusion to Duncan Thaw’s short, unproductive and emotionally bereft life. But for me at least, the memory of Karen Buckley robbed the moment of any levity. The idea of writing the Bildungsroman of Alexander Pacteau would seem more than tasteless – it would seem gruesome and perverse. But in some respects, this is precisely what Lanark is. 

It is a thing of wonder to me how Alasdair Gray can be regarded as a mild and genial eccentric. Some folk would draw a distinction between Lanark and Gray’s more explicitly kinky later work - 1982 Janine, for example – but such a distinction seems to be mistaken. For me, Lanark is a remarkable, unstinting depiction of a kind of profoundly unattractive male consciousness. It is the precision of Gray’s depiction of a sexually and emotionally underdeveloped beta-male which is the novel’s chief achievement. The book is a finely-detailed monument to the subjective experience of Scottish misogyny. It is disturbingly recognisable. If they were prepared to be honest, I imagine most men could find part of themselves – however guilty and reluctantly – in Duncan Thaw’s faltering relationship with the world and in his masturbatory fantasies of frustrated desire. 

I’m yet to meet the post-pubescent man who has not had entertained Thaw’s erotic dream of rescuing their beloved from some calamity, suddenly transforming her cool indifference towards you into obligation and love. The car careening out of control down the slope. The fatal projectile coolly deflected by your quick thinking. But for Thaw, the world of fantasy extends far beyond the gendered trope of rescuer and rescued, into grandiose rape fantasies, and sadomasochistic visions of torture and control. Gray’s literary (and to some extent, personal) candour here is unsettling, but impressively unyielding. Psychologically, the depiction is remorseless and confessional. 

Self-loathing gnaws at Thaw, but the combination of desire, entitlement, frustration and profound resentment towards women is a witch’s brew. It is rape culture, playing out in a single dowdy, conventional, not particularly attractive human heart. I’ve rarely seen this imaginative task performed more acutely than in Lanark. The misogynist of most drama is flash: an alpha male, confident, smooth. A user, yes, but caddish. Duncan Thaw, with his tight chest and his crusted scrotum, is anything but. The autobiographical dimensions of the prose also make this acuity disquieting. But fundamentally, I despise the central character. 

I had wondered, feared really, that the Citizens' Lanark might become a couthy index of Glaswegianisms. “Glasgow is a magnificent city”, said McAlpin. “Why do we hardly ever notice that?” “Because nobody imagines living here”, said Thaw.” “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Unexpectly, however, Greig’s staging had precisely the opposite effect. By compressing the heroic sweep of the novel into just under four hours of drama, and stripping the tale away to its essentials, the misogyny of Thaw’s consciousness and choices was, if anything, amplified. 

Audience members anticipating a cosy exegesis of a national treasure’s untroubling Scottish classic could only have been disappointed. I was delighted. This may well be projection, but you could detect a slight unease as times from the Citizens audience as Graham Eatough’s technically impressive play rolled on through its sparkling second Act, and into the final third. The writer, Karen Campbell, put it well on social media shortly afterwards. While ‘technically superb’, the production left her unsure of her reaction, ‘like I was observing with awe rather than experiencing’ the show. I can understand precisely why, for the same reason why I am always bemused when women say Lanark is their favourite book, and disturbed when men reach the same conclusion. 

This is no slight on Greig’s adaptation or the talented ensemble of actors who have brought it to life. Despite the tender humanity Sandy Grierson’s sensitive and understated performance brought to the role – Lanark/Thaw remains essentially unsympathetic. If we strip away the beguiling novelty of the Glaswegian setting, the creative imagination and ambition of Gray’s parallel universes, Lanark is essentially a feeble, self-pitying beta-male's sticky wet dream. Lanark is a book of blistering misogyny. Lanark is a book in which women are cyphers. It is a teenaged book, emotionally. A book shot through with those all too familiar sinister twins of men’s desire for and hatred of women. 

Greig’s adaptation exposes this magnificently. It is precisely the Lanark I remember, but it is not the Lanark of popular memory, embodied in the tun-bellied, peering, (and safely sexless) figure of Alasdair Gray. I sometimes wonder if the qualities of Gray’s art displaces - or at least obscures - understandings of his prose. Perhaps more people claim to have read Lanark than have ever completed it. But there is a friendliness to Gray's drawing and painting, his murals and friezes. While his work can be voluptuous and sensual, in its gentleness, I find it captures none of that fizzing resentment, the spiritual smallness and inarticulacy, the toxic combination of desire and hatred, without which Lanark cannot be understood. Gray may look like a genial eccentric. He doesn’t write like one.