Returning to Unthank

Today's Guardian Review featured a fascinating piece by William Boyd about Alasdair Gray's Lanark. Boyd recalls his strange relationship with the novel — he moved in the same circles as Gray in Glasgow and, whilst working as a kitchen porter, briefly its publisher &mdsah; and rereads it to see how it has stood the test of time. Generously conceding that his own initial reactions — the ones which caused him to doubt some of the allegorical sections of the novel — were misplaced, he decides that Lanark is still a novel that changes lives.

From that wonderful opening plate, which recalls the engraving at the start of Leviathan, through the strange allegorical world of Unthank, the sharp and precisely detailed pain of Duncan Thaw's life in Glasgow, to Gray's final authorial intervention, it's a wonderful, thoughtful, beautiful novel. Gray has essentially fulfilled the ambition he ascribes to Duncan: to write a version of the Divine Comedy for the 20th century and to illustrate it with his own drawings.