There was once a slogan, “You’ve read the book. Now see the movie.” These days, if one is lucky, the opposite might apply. But still I wonder: If you loved “Poor Things,” the Oscar-nominated film starring Emma Stone, will you read the book? That would be Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel, “the most sheerly entertaining pseudo-Victorian romance since A. S. Byatt’s ‘Possession,’” as I put it in my 1993 review of the American edition. Gray — who died in 2019 at the age of 85 — was arguably the major Scottish literary figure of the 1980s and ’90s. “Poor Things” is just one title in his wide-ranging bibliography, though he singled it out as his “happiest novel.”Both an artist and a writer, Gray spent eight years working on his first book, a sprawling semi-autobiographical phantasmagoria called “Lanark,” which appeared in 1981 when he was 45. It was widely acclaimed a masterpiece, even likened to a Scottish version of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In its pages, Gray interlaces two storylines: One focuses on the life and education of a Glasgow painter named Duncan Thaw, while the other follows his alter-ego, Lanark, in a dystopian future ruled by an Institute, Council and Foundation. While Thaw struggles to find love and achieve “enough courage and happiness to die without feeling cheated,” his other self must navigate a kind of hellish fun house of distorting mirrors and shape-shifting enemies, where the sun never shines and people turn into dragons. Both selves eventually recognize that “a good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties.”Gray’s subsequent novel, “1982, Janine” (1984), as well as “Something Leather” (1990), again pushed literary boundaries — but this time by using erotic fantasies to critique sexual and societal norms. As a committed democratic socialist and opponent of modern-day corporations and conglomerates, Gray believed that “the world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied.” He regularly exhorted his readers to “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Little wonder, then, that his 1992 monograph, “Why Scots Should Rule Scotland,” tracks the centuries-long history of how England and its ruling classes consistently denigrated and exploited Scotland. It ends: “I believe an independent country run by a government not much richer than the People has more hope than one governed by a big rich neighbor.”That same year, Gray brought out “Poor Things.” On opening its first edition, the unsuspecting reader immediately discovered a “Blurb for a High-Class Hardcover” and below it a “Blurb for the Common Reader.” (Both are dropped from the recent movie tie-in paperback.) Such winking, literary playfulness characterizes much of Gray’s fiction, as does his fondness for working variations on the classics of the past. “Poor Things,” for example, pays homage to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Wilkie Collins’s “The Moonstone.
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Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/02/28/poor-things-alasdair-gray-books/
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