Now he saw that Hell was the one truth and pain the one fact which nullified all others. Sufficient health was like thin ice on an infinite sea of pain. Love, work, art, science and law were dangerous games played on the ice; all homes and cities were built on it. The ice was frail. A tiny shrinkage of the bronchial tubes could put him under it and a single split atom could sink a city. All religions existed to justify Hell and all clergymen were ministers of it. How could they walk about with such bland social faces pretending to belong to the surface of life? Their skulls should be furnaces with the fire of Hell burning in them and their faces dried and thin like scorched leaves.
Where to start with Lanark? The beginning, maybe, but which beginning? An epic novel by Alasdair Gray--author of the novel that became the Lanthimos movie Poor Things--Lanark is split into four books, ordered 3, 1, 2, 4. The "outer" books are the story of Lanark, a man who wakes up to find himself in the strange, grotesque city of Unthank, where the sun never shines, controlled by a shadowy "Institute" where he soon finds himself a patient, growing scales and feasting on human flesh. The two "inner" books are a realist coming-of-age story about one Duncan Thaw, a clear stand-in for Gray himself, growing up in the lower-middle class of Glasgow and struggling to pursue a life of art and love. It's implied that Thaw and Lanark are the same person, but the exact mechanism of the transition is never really explained. Perhaps Unthank is the Glasgow of the afterlife, but if so, that means nothing good for Duncan Thaw.
Thaw is a sensitive kid, prone to bouts of depressive hysteria. His parents become accustomed to "curing" him by throwing him into a bathtub full of ice to shock him to his senses. Except for a brief exile to the Highlands during World War II, his life must be fashioned in the context of Glasgow, a gray industrialized city where beauty and passion seem in short supply. Thaw seems to feel more deeply than his peers; he excels in English but struggles to make himself care about mathematics, and so he stumbles toward an uncertain future. More than anything, he's frustrated by the attentions (and lack thereof) of girls, who are easily incorporated into his worlds of personal fantasy and dreaming but more difficult in real life. In Book 3, Thaw lucks into an art school scholarship, but this, too, is too repressive and prescriptive for his yearning for self-expression. He flunks out because, instead of doing his final project, he takes a commission painting a mural in a humble parish church. The mural balloons into a project of years, as Thaw tries to paint the entire story of creation. It attracts the attention of critics, but no money, and the parishioners, unable to use the church space, hate it. There is no space, Gray suggests, for the true artist in the social scene, which makes other demands: the demands of industry, capitalism, clergy, etc. Thaw's failure sends him into a manic episode where he possible, but maybe not, kills a young woman who spurns him.
I recently read Alistair Moffat's History of Scotland, and I noticed that Thaw's story draws in sneaky ways from Scottish history: he makes a rich friend at art school with the name of Kenneth McAlpin, the name of the legendary first king of Scotland; another associate, more pointedly, is named Macbeth. A decorator that helps him in the parish church is named Rennie, like Charles Mackintosh Rennie, the modernist architect who designed the Glasgow School of Art. Someone more knowledgeable about Scotland than I might be able to pick apart the references and assemble them into a kind of interpretation, but for me, it made it clear enough that Gray thinks of Lanark as reflecting Scottish history at large.
The Lanark books are--weirder. The first takes place mostly at a hospital run by a mysterious institute. (Lanark arrives at the hospital by leaping into a mouth-shaped hole in the ground and being swallowed.) The hospital treats people who, like Lanark, have "dragonscale," a condition where they grow scales and slowly become lizard-people, then combust. Lanark is cured, but he discovers that those who don't make it become food for the other patients. This is a big theme in the novel--"man," Gray writes, "is the pie who bakes and eats himself." By making an annoyance of himself, Lanark is allowed to leave with his lover, Rima. The fourth book finds him back in Unthank, a place he despises and wants to leave, but with which he becomes increasingly entangled. Unthank, we discover, is due to be sacrificed for its "human energy"; the local administrators cow Lanark into acting as a delegate to the assembly in Provan (a version of Edinburgh) and speaking out for them. Time in this strange world moves more quickly than in ours, and Lanark finds himself over the course of what feels, in a narrative sense, like weeks or months, growing to old age. Rima has a son, Alexander, in a matter of days, then leaves Lanark; the next time Lanark sees him, he's a teenager, then a grown man.
Unthank is Glasgow; that's clear enough. But the strange, speculative recasting of the Duncan Thaw sections as "Lanark" has the effect of universalizing the story, even as it remains rooted in its specific Scottish cultural context. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the forces that threaten Unthank, and the people that Lanark has come to love in his short time in this strange world, are the same forces that threaten the world that That lives in: the rapacious demands of corporate interests, the disinterest of elected figures, a greedy idolization of economic progress, the disposability of common people. In the book's epilogue (which comes before the end, rather than after it) Lanark meets a man who claims to be the author of the book we're reading. The author and the reader control Lanark's life as surely as the social forces he battles--though there are hints, too, that Lanark has ways of escaping his creator's control. During the conversation, the author-figure (who is not named Gray, but is Gray) diagnoses the problem as being too little love. It seems a startling simplification for this enormous, inventive, complicated, perhaps over-complicated novel, but who can say it's not true?