13 September 2015

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.

24 comments :

  1. Beautifully put, I anticipate seeing this production this week, and wondered if you'd seen it. I adore the novel, not in a cuddly way, but as someone who recognised the stark, unheroic, male Scottish psyche I saw so often throughout life, reflected in those different shards of the books. I had never seen this portrayed before in any previous work of fiction, and knew that Mr Greig would be able to somehow dissect and lay it all out to see. You have shown how relevant it is with regards to current times in your own elegant way.

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  2. I was looking forward to your thoughts on Corbyn, but this is very worthwhile and beautifully put together. I'd always assumed that Lanark was a 1980s period piece or merely an achievement of atmosphere. I was mildly dissatisfied or nonplussed by the novel when I read it (in... 2003?). Maybe I was repulsed? For me Lanark leads straight to Banks and you rightly affirm rather than chip away at its monumental status.

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    1. On Mr Corbyn, I am still trying to get my head around it all. Such is the surfeit of confidence in the media about his inevitable fate -- my inclination is to pull back, for reasons I expecressed at greater length here. My suspicion is that too few people in England will thole his politics. I do understand a horror of the Blairite second generation apparatchiks - the empty vocabulary and all of the alienating robotic mannerisms - but I've never found uncharismatic crowds to be soft on uncharismatic speakers. Mr Corbyn has a plain style -- but we'll see. Once I gather my wits.

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    2. One issue i have with Alasdair is his claim that Glasgow had not been ‘imagined’ in literature, which is just not true - Guy McCrone’s novels alone sold by the shedload, but they were about middle-class life rather than angsty arty folk or shipyard workers with spanners between their teeth.

      Writers go in and out of fashion, often inexpicably. I spoke with Fred Urquhart in the 90s, whom i am ashamed to say i had never heard of before. Fred's Scottish stories have little to do with Glasgow and often have gay themes. Orwell, for one - despite disliking what he saw as an unhealthy obsession with homosexuality - was a big admirer and wrote that he may one day produce a masterpiece,

      Fred's stuff was all out of print when I spoke to him, his family have thankfully made him POD on Amazon. He is very good, yet most of us know nothing of his stories.

      So, as Vonnegut used to say, it goes.

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    3. I have "I Fell for a Sailor" on my bookshelf. Will have to take it down again. There was one tale I was particularly struck by when I read it first -- but I can't recall it off the top of my head. But as you say, a largely forgotten voice.

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    4. Wow, he does sound worth investigating.

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    5. He has, as Edwin says, seemed to have slipped between the cultural cracks.

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  3. Andrew: '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.'

    Yes, the trouble is that Alasdair has become a national - indeed nationalist treasure. ‘Alasdair Gray’ has become for many like the Victorian ‘Shakespeare’ - a projection of social values. Betjeman - as has often been pointed out - was also transformed into something safe and cuddly, when his verse is often pretty dark and, yes, darkly sexual.

    Yeats was another such ‘public man’ -


    'YOU think it horrible that lust and rage
    Should dance attention upon my old age;
    They were not such a plague when I was young,
    What else have I to spur me into song?'

    All nations squeeze their national bards into moulds, into something they are not, and it is sometimes necessary to say (as, for example. with Burns) that there may be a gulf between the sanitised public image and the writer - or the writer's works.

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    1. You wonder if it is a frustration. In another context, when Nicola Sturgeon canvassed my stairwell during the General Election, I asked her how she felt about being the object of any number of people's projections. Her answer was diplomatic and political -- "it is good for the party", or words to that effect. But it left unanswered, unsurprisingly, my more personal, more prying query.

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    2. Iago:
      'But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
      For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.'

      Kit Carson once found the body of a white woman in an Apache camp - incredibly she had on her a novel in which Kit Carson rescues a white captive. The gulf between Carson as he saw himself and as he was seen by his contemporaries troubled him: "I have often thought that as Mrs White read the book, she prayed for my appearance, knowing that I lived nearby. . .I have much regretted the failure to save the life of so esteemed a lady"

      Re Alasdair must add i have been a nodding acquaintance for 40 years and he is the kindest of men - few weeks before his accident, he was gving cash to beggars in Byres Rd a sight you do not see too often.

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    3. Constitutionally (in the personal rather than the legal sense), I think I am particularly sensitive to these kind of things. I may be riding a very personal hobby horse here which others are less troubled by.

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  4. Thinking about Alasdair's art and politics, the Bella Caledonia figure is a representation of a Scotland we like to think we are - wise (not bad-looking too), compassionate, traditional (in a good way), strong, managing to wear a jolly glengarry at an impossible angle (it looks as if Dougal from the Magic Roundabout is hiding under it) etc.

    But Mibbes naw - maybe Her Bellaness has wandered in from the world of Something Leather and is looking to thrash her loyal servants with that bloody thistle.

    This Scottish dualism is damned confusing at times..

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  5. In a lot of words, this post seems to imply a correlation between the moral uprightness of a novel's protagonist to its merit as a piece of art.

    A regressive style of analysis, I would've thought.

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    1. A bit of a low blow, that. I would hope it was crystal clear that this is not what I was suggesting. Several of those several words underline my admiration for the book's achivements.

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    2. That is not at all the case - Andrew is doing something much more interesting. Huckleberry Finn - for example - has been transmuted (transmutilated) from novel to play to movie to TV series, yet I would guess most adaptations - certainly all the ones I've seen - deal with the novel's bleak passages by ignoring, eliding or prettifying them.

      Andrew's last sentence works for Mark Twain also.

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    3. And in American literature, an even odder practice seems to be growing up in some forums for teaching -- deliberate excision of racist passages, on grounds of their offensiveness. The unaccountably stupidity of this astonishes me.

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  6. Interesting analysis. I deliberately didn't re-read the novel before going to see the play at the Lyceum, and found I remembered more than I realised. It's odd, really. I don't like the book, but I know great literature when I see it. The stage adaptation was mostly a triumph.

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    1. More of a coincidence for me. As is often the case, I moved house and unearthed it from the bottom of my bookcase and thought -- I should re-read you now I am a bit more ancient and hopefully a bit wiser. I didn't anticipate that anybody would attempt to pull it into a play. Although the three hour production sounds heroic -- you couldn't have done the text any justice in less time.

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  7. Thank you. That is exactly what I feel about "Lanark". I've never read anyone who had the nerve to say it, to pinpoint its mean, lethal misogyny so astutely. I'm glad if the play is challenging audiences to reconsider their reading of the novel.

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    1. I haven't had the chance to ask David Greig about this. I saw him last shortly before the show was going into his rehearsals - and he was understandably tight-lipped. I'd be interested to hear how consciously, if at all, this was an agenda. I think, perhaps, it is at least partly an inadvertant consequence of the staging. By compressing the tale, Lanark/Thaw's faults are significantly magnified.

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  8. Not entirely sure if the Lanark of popular memory and the sexless Gray are a bit of a strawman, Mr T: the wretched central character you describe is exactly what I read when it first came out, and most folk I know who read it then saw the same thing.

    One thing that may in fact be the 'wrong' memory, however, is of the fabled greatness of the novel. It is not (partly because it written over too long a time) - Janine 1982 is better, though still not great, and in fact everything Gray ever needed to say is in the relatively tiny Fall of Kelvin Walker.
    But I do think you've done a neat writerly trick linking all this to Pacteau.

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  9. To my mind, 1982, Janine is the working out of these elements of Lanark. McLeish's character demonstrates (and emphasizes) these same flaws, investigates where they come from, and finds the way to move beyond them to something better. I think it the greater book.

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