Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)

Product Information

The real mission and spiritual duty of all human beings is to seek the knowledge by which such a home-going can be achieved. Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here.

It is a combination of a real-life type story about a boy/young man growing up - which is a real page turner, utterly gripping and convincing - and a fantasy of what the future might be like. Alasdair Gray’s early masterpiece definitely has some flaws—weak secondary characters, poorly written female characters—but is such a wild ride that I didn’t mind them too much. Lanark is a postmodern hero’s quest tale with a dystopian bent and metafictional components to its structure, including a coming-of-age section that reflects the author’s own youthful experiences.This human warmth is an element lacking from the framing dystopia, because that setting, and all its whacky goings on, distract from the humanity, as it's meant to do. But the dystopic sections are valuable for other reasons: for their depiction of vast, illogical space, of an incomprehensible and deeply criminal military-industrial complex that will stop at nothing to realize a profit. He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care". Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures.

Or should we believe Bella’s counter-narrative, in which she furiously asserts that she is a real person after all? It's difficult to sympathize with him as he has few redeeming qualities, yet the story has an undeniable pathos.Facebook sets this cookie to show relevant advertisements to users by tracking user behaviour across the web, on sites that have Facebook pixel or Facebook social plugin.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. The inventiveness and the subtlety are gone, and now it feels like something that's waiting for you to assign a one-to-one correlation between its world and the world outside the text. I feel like he must not have had any editor of any kind, because there is no way that anyone competent would let this pass. On a pure enjoyment scale it certainly ranks lower than on a basis of originality, ambition and honesty. Anyway, it's good, but it's also flawed, as to be fair the author himself admits in a rather interesting confessional Epilogue.The reader is confused right from the start and is left to wonder what he is reading till the last part. An adaptation of Lanark by Alastair Cording was staged by Glasgow's Tag Theatre Company at the Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, during the Edinburgh International Festival in August 1995.