Tag: Iain Banks

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The Twittering has gone

 

From unsplash.com / © Brett Jordan

 

At the end of last month, the amount of time I spend roaming the Internet was suddenly halved. This was because when I went Twitter-browsing, and tried to look at the Twitter threads of the numerous people, publications and organisations I read regularly, I was greeted by something new – a page inviting me to ‘sign in to Twitter’.  At its bottom, the page made the teasing comment: ‘Don’t have an account?  Sign up.’

 

Yes, billionaire Elon Musk, who took over the platform last year in a blaze of publicity, if hardly a blaze of glory, had blocked access to it for non-members.  If you want to see what’s on Twitter, you now have to join Twitter.  Musk had previously expressed disapproval at AI companies using Twitter’s data to train their models, which this move would put a stop to.  But there’s an equally feasible, more desperate explanation for it.  Since Musk’s taking of the Twitter helm, it’s been well-documented how the platform has all but gone down the plughole in terms of membership, advertising revenue, technical reliability and overall credibility.  Perhaps this blocking represents a last-throw-of-the-dice attempt to encourage a few million people, who’d hitherto enjoyed seeing Twitter without being on Twitter, to come aboard.

 

Sorry, Elon.  Thanks but no thanks.  I had fun peering into Twitter in the past, and I no doubt wasted far too much time doing so, but being denied access to it now is not going to turn me into a committed, signed-up Twitterer.  Indeed, I avoid social-media membership, not being on Facebook, Instagram or anything similar.  Using WhatsApp is about as far as I go.  This is partly because I’m a technophobe at heart and have a distrust of shiny new forms of communication pushed upon me by eager super-rich tech-tycoons.  I have good reasons for that mistrust.  See, for example, the affair of the dodgy British political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which among other things had a helping hand in Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign.  The firm’s shady activities were helped by a data breach involving the personal details of up to 87 million people, ‘inappropriately’ taken from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

 

Also, it’s partly because if I was active on social media, I suspect I’d spend most of my time arguing with idiots and arseholes.  And there are a lot of those on Twitter.  There always have been, though there seem to be many more now since Musk did away with much of the site’s moderation and declared an ‘anything goes’ policy on ‘freedom of speech’.  Well, that’s what he calls ‘freedom of speech’, though most sane people would call it ‘havering and slabbering by far-right-wing turnips’.

 

I’d always thought Musk was a jerk, but I’d assumed too he possessed some intelligence and business acumen.  For one thing, he was a vocal admirer of the works of the late Iain Banks, especially Banks’ science-fiction series of Culture novels, with which he claimed to share a ‘utopian anarchism’.  The fact that he read books – unlike Trump, who’s allegedly never read one in his adult life – suggested to me that at least some of his grey matter was working.  Although I imagine knowing that Musk, the world’s number-one, right-wing, libertarian, billionaire man-boy, was a fan of his would send poor old Banks twirling in his grave.*

 

© Time Warner Books UK

 

Well, since he took over Twitter, I’ve had to revise my opinion of Musk’s IQ downwards.  He’s overseen the platform with the finesse of Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies trying to run the kitchen in a Michelin-starred sashimi restaurant.

 

His proprietorship began in late October 2022.  Before the year was out, he’d shed 50% of Twitter’s employees and reportedly 80% of its contractor workforce, while warning remaining staff to adapt to a ‘hardcore’ working culture of long hours and high pressure.  His efforts to charge users for verified accounts were a shambles – as evidenced by a notorious, supposedly-verified ‘Twitter Blue’ account by one George W. Bush who tweeted, “I miss killing Iraqis”  The platform swelled with troll accounts because there was neither the manpower left, nor the inclination on Musk’s part, to curb them.  And an end-of-the-year poll by Musk inviting Twitter users to vote on whether or not he should stay as its Chief Executive, presumably meant to shore up his position, didn’t go the way he’d intended.  57.5% of respondents told him to quit.

 

2023 has brought Musk no respite.  Only yesterday, the BBC reported that Twitter has lost half its advertising revenue since Musk’s takeover – something he’s admitted himself.  Besides not wanting to have their services and products featured next to comments by charmers like Andrew Tate and the Taliban leader Anas Aqqani (who recently praised Twitter for its ‘freedom of speech’, ‘public nature’ and ‘credibility’ – I bet that made Elon feel better), advertisers can’t have been happy at limits imposed earlier this month on the number of tweets users can view per day.  The maximum is 1000 for non-verified users, 10,000 for verified ones.  This on top of the fact that their adverts aren’t reaching outsiders like me anymore.

 

Making Musk’s life even harder is sneaky Mark Zuckerberg’s recent decision to launch a rival, Twitter-lookalike platform called Threads.  This got 30 million sign-ups on the first day of its existence and 100 million within a week.  (Having one of Zuckerberg’s Instagram accounts automatically entitles you to a Threads one, so the new platform was bound to start life with impressive membership numbers.)  Musk, predictably, was not happy about this.  In addition to calling the pasty-faced, blank-eyed Zuckerberg a ‘cuck’, he said he was ready to take him on in both a cage-fight and a penis-measuring contest.  Not being a fan of Zuckerberg either (see the aforementioned Cambridge Analytica scandal for one reason), I have to say there hasn’t been a confrontation where I’ve so badly wanted both parties to lose since…  Since….  Well, since last month, when Yevgeny Prigozhin squared up to Vladimir Putin.

 

Incidentally, Musk has a fan-club of ‘edge-lords’, who are predominantly young, male, white and (I’d hazard a guess) virginal, and whose thinking seems to be: “Oooh, I’m really edgy because I’m very right-wing and I say offensive things about women, black people, Muslims, lefties, gays and transpeople on social media!  Though always from the safety of my parents’ basement.”  These types worship the ground Musk treads upon and, lately, I’ve noticed their comments below online news articles reporting Twitter’s woes.  Obviously, they defend their hero to the hilt.  They claim he’s engaged in a cunning game of three-dimensional chess.  What Musk’s doing, they say, is part of some brilliant strategy that’ll outfox the evil, liberal establishment and result in him and Twitter taking over the world.  Though if, say, Bill Gates was responding to queries from journalists by sending them poop emojis, as Musk has been doing for the last four months, I suspect they’d be less inclined to hail that as a sign of genius.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Royal Society

 

So anyway, that’s Twitter off my radar.  It’s a shame, because for many years pre-Musk it’d been a good source of information and entertainment.  Occasionally, I’d find stuff on it that was thought-provoking.

 

For a long period I was obsessed with Scottish and British politics – I’m less so now – and regularly visited the Twitter-threads of a wide range of political pundits, polemicists and bloggers: David Aaronovitch, Derek Bateman, Bella Caledonia, Alastair Campbell, Nick Cohen, Chris Deerin, Ian Dunt, Kenny Farquharson, Flying Rodent, Gerry Hassan, Owen Jones, Pat Kane, Alex Massie, Darren McGarvey, Iain McWhirter, Craig Murray, Laurie Penny, Scot Goes Pop, Wings Over Scotland, Mic Wright…  I obviously didn’t agree with all the opinions they expressed, but I felt it important to know what people with different views to mine were thinking.  I should add that, for various reasons, I stopped reading some of those folks’ thoughts.  Either they became bitter and twisted (McWhirter), or were embroiled in scandal (Cohen), or went howling-at-the-moon mad (Murray, Wings Over Scotland), or simply got too annoying (Deerin, Massie).  Or they died, which was sadly the case with Bateman.

 

Also, as someone who writes a little fiction, I found access to other writers’ Twitter threads invaluable.  Writers commonly tweet and retweet names of magazines, anthologies and publishing houses that are looking for new work, and these heads-ups led to me getting a good amount of stuff published.  Plus, it was good to know the thoughts of writers who tweeted regularly – not just about writing, but about life generally.  These ranged from big names such as Stephen King, William Gibson, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin to less famous, but equally engaging, ones such as Anne Billson, Simon Bestwick, Charlie Stross and the late Christopher Fowler.

 

Twitter also alerted me to a few magazines and publishing houses I should stay clear of.  Usually, this was because their staff and associated writers turned out to be extreme-right-wing dingbats who tweeted approvingly about the likes of Jordan Peterson, Tucker Carlson, Tommy Robinson, Laurence Fox, Giorgia Meloni – the only woman worth listening to, apparently – and the bare-chested, horse-riding, bear-wrestling Russian he-man Vladimir Putin.  Oh, and they all thought Elon Musk was the bees’ knees.  No surprise there.

 

One thing’s for sure now.  I feel as little urge to sign up with Threads as I do with Twitter.  One reason is my antipathy towards Zuckerberg.  Another reason is that I don’t want to be on a social media platform that shares its name with the most horrifying and apocalyptic film of all time.

 

© BBC / Nine Network Australia

 

* For the record, Banks was cremated and his ashes were scattered in Venice, Paris and the Firth of Forth.

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Remembering Iain Banks

 

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Duncan

 

Ten years ago today, on June 9th, 2013, the Scottish novelist Iain Banks passed away at the age of 59, struck down by a gall-bladder cancer that’d only been diagnosed two months earlier.  Here’s a slightly updated version of the tribute to him I wrote at the time. 

 

Iain Banks became a big thing for me, and for many people like me, when he found success, fame and a certain notoriety with the publication of his first novel, The Wasp Factory, in 1984.  This was because he seemed to tick a lot of important boxes.

 

Like me and the crowd I hung out with, he came from a Scottish background, so we were familiar with many of the places he wrote about.  Like us, his politics were left-of-centre, with a leaning towards the cause of Scottish independence because independence seemed the best way to avoid being saddled with right-wing Tory governments whom few people in Scotland ever voted for.  And like us, he was obviously into literature, but he was also into some strange, off-beat writers whom stuffy literary critics would dismiss as being too ‘genre’ for serious consideration – Mervyn Peake, Brian Aldiss, M. John Harrison, and so on.

 

You could argue that Alasdair Gray had blazed the same trail a few years earlier with his 1980 novel Lanark, but there was one important difference.  Gray had been a young man in the 1950s.  Banks, like us, was clearly of the 1980s.  Like it or not – and we did not – Banks and us, his readers, were Maggie Thatcher’s children.

 

The Wasp Factory made an immediate stir with its blackly funny plot about Frank Cauldhame, a maimed delinquent living in a remote part of Scotland, who amuses himself with the shamanistic killings of insects, seagulls, rabbits and young children.  In quick succession Banks followed it with Walking on Glass (1985), which showed the influence of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books (1946-59); The Bridge (1986), a paean to both the Forth Rail Bridge and Gray’s Lanark, with a healthy dose of the J.G. Ballard short story Concentration City (1957) mixed in; and in 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first of many epic outer-space novels about an interstellar anarcho-utopian society called the Culture.  The Culture novels were attributed to Iain M. Banks, a move by his publisher to help fans of ‘serious’ mainstream fiction and fans of science fiction identify what was what in his output.  At the time, the speculative fiction magazine Interzone remarked that it was delighted to see Banks at last ‘come out of the closet’ as a sci-fi writer.

 

In August 1987 Banks was scheduled to appear on a discussion panel at the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Around the same time I’d agreed to edit the latest edition of a small literary magazine called Alma Mater, published by some fellow-students at the University of Aberdeen’s English Literature Department.  Dr Isobel Murray, who’d been my tutor at Aberdeen for the past year, was chairing the Book Festival panel and I used my connection with her to persuade Banks’s agent to let me interview him after the panel, for Alma Mater.  I later offered Dr Murray a grovelling apology for brazenly using her name as my calling card.

 

© Abacus Books

 

The panel, which I attended, produced a few sparks.  In addition to Banks and Murray, it featured the Glaswegian writer Frederic Lindsay, whose 1983 novel Brond had recently been made into a TV series, directed by Michael Caton-Jones and starring a very young John Hannah.  (By a sad coincidence, Lindsay also died in 2013, just ten days before Banks did.)  And it was rounded off by another Glaswegian, Ronald Frame, author of the just-published novel Sandmouth People.  If it’s unfair to say that the tweedy Frame was a young fogey at the time, he certainly gave the impression of being one.  When somebody in the audience asked the authors about their views on self-censorship, he said pompously: “I would never include anything I might regret in five years’ time.”

 

Banks immediately spluttered, “But those are the best bits!”

 

Afterwards I met up with Banks and a few of his friends and conducted the interview in a pub in Edinburgh’s Rose Street – either the Kenilworth or the Auld Hundred, if I remember correctly – with Banks speaking into the mic of the clunky tape recorder I’d bought with me, transferring his voice onto a crackly cassette tape that, like almost everything else I possess, now resides inside a cardboard box somewhere in my Dad’s attic.

 

I asked him about the hostile reception that The Wasp Factory had received in some quarters.  (The Irish Times had described it as ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’.)  Banks had been surprised by this.  He’d expected some flak from animal rights groups, but not from the critics.  He’d learned that one reviewer who’d blasted the book as ‘the literary equivalent of a video nasty’ also worked in the Conservative Party office in London, which pleased him no end.  Offending that guy had been an honour.

 

I also asked him about his fondness for peppering his novels with references to the popular culture of the time.  In The Bridge, for example, just before the car accident that sets the surreal plot in motion, the hero slots a copy of the Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) into his car stereo.  Wouldn’t that make the books look rather dated a few years later?  “Yeah,” he agreed, “it’ll date them.  But what the hell?”  He believed that characters living in a particular time and particular place would be influenced by the current popular culture, so he didn’t see why he should shirk from mentioning the music, books, films and TV programmes of the moment.

 

I quoted Brian Aldiss at him – Aldiss had famously said that all good science fiction hovers at the edge of being something different from science fiction.  Banks agreed with that, sort of, but he also disagreed.  Enthusiastically, he told me how Consider Phlebas came with all the trimmings of the traditional Isaac Asimov / Robert Heinlein ‘space opera’: giant spaceships, laser cannons, inter-planetary battles.

 

© Little, Brown

 

Did he, I asked finally, worry about being pigeon-holed, with one half of the world viewing him as a ‘Scottish’ author and the other half viewing him as a ‘sci-fi’ one?  Not at all, he said.  He was quite at ease with being regarded as Scottish.  And being seen as a sci-fi author didn’t bother him either, since science fiction was an ‘old love’ for him.

 

From Rose Street, we moved to Greyfriars Bobby’s Bar in Candlemaker Row, just behind the statue of the famous Edinburgh terrier who’d spent 14 years in the adjacent graveyard guarding the grave of his dead master.  Poor wee Bobby, I remember musing, wouldn’t have lasted long if he’d been a character in The Wasp Factory.  By then a good number of pints had been drunk and the conversation had descended somewhat from the lofty heights of literary discussion.  I recall talking to Banks about Arthur Montford, the lugubrious Scottish TV football commentator famous for his eccentrically patterned sports jackets and for his catchphrases that included “What a stramash!” and (uttered all too often) “Disaster for Scotland!”  At some point too we discussed the 1966 Hammer horror film Dracula Prince of Darkness, which had featured the Scottish actor (from Shotts in North Lanarkshire) Andrew Keir.

 

The next issue of Alma Mater, containing my interview with Iain Banks, was published later that year.  A series of cock-ups by the typesetter meant that it looked pretty ropey, though thankfully the pages featuring Banks were okay.  The following year, I heard that Banks would be making an appearance at Edinburgh’s Science Fiction Bookshop in West Crosscauseway (now long vanished) and I went along to give him a copy of the magazine.  To my surprise, he remembered me and enthused about the mini-pub crawl we’d done that day: “That was a good afternoon!”

 

After that I read several more Banks novels: Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993).  The Crow Road, his stab at writing a sprawling family saga, is the book that everyone talks about, although I have to say that it’s not one of my favourites.  Sure, it has one of the best opening lines in modern literature (“It was the day my grandmother exploded”), but as with most other sprawling sagas about eccentric families, I find it too contrived for its own good.

 

© Little, Brown

 

On the other hand, I think Espedair Street, which is about a hapless rock musician who’s found fame, fortune and much unhappiness and is now trying to live anonymously in a rough part of Glasgow, is marvellous.  I also think it’s the warmest and most relatable Iain Banks book that I’ve read.  Among my all-time favourite novels about rock ‘n’ roll, it’s up there with Harlan Ellison’s Spider Kiss (1961) and John Niven’s Kill Your Friends (2008).

 

And I like Complicity, which welds a serial-killer plot onto Banks’ intense distaste for the corruption and inequalities of the recently-ended Thatcher era.  Much of it is set in Edinburgh, where scuzzy journalist-hero Cameron Colley boozes in a series of pubs ranging from the upmarket Café Royal on West Register Street to the desperate, late-opening Casbah in the Cowgate.  By then I’d lived in Edinburgh and I knew Colley’s haunts well.  I’d even had an experience similar to one he has in the Café Royal, when he stands in front of the bar’s gantry (which doesn’t contain a mirror although it looks as though it does), can’t see his reflection and in a drunken panic believes himself to be a vampire.

 

After Complicity, however, I stopped reading Iain Banks, probably because by then there were just too many young Scottish writers competing for my attention: Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, James Robertson.  Banks’s success in the 1980s, of course, had helped pave the way for all these slightly younger Turks.  It wasn’t until after his death that I read more of his stuff: the collection State of the Art (1991), whose stories lean towards science fiction, so the name ‘Iain Banks’ on the cover contains that all-important initial-letter ‘M’ to warn readers of serious mainstream literature to keep clear; The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007); Stonemouth (2012); The Quarry, published posthumously in 2013; and Banks’s one book of non-fiction, Raw Spirit (2003), which details his experiences while he works on the rather enviable assignment of visiting, and sampling the products of, as many of Scotland’s whisky distilleries as he can.

 

Among these later novels, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, another sprawling family saga, perhaps sticks most in my mind.  That’s largely because of the following quote, wherein the narrator muses on the connection between being right-wing and not having an imagination, and which could be the manifesto for Banks’s own politics: “We got talking about how some people were selfish and some weren’t, and the difference between right-wing people and left-wing people.  You said it all came down to imagination.  Conservative people don’t usually have very much, so they find it hard to imagine what life is like for people who aren’t just like them.  They can only empathise with people just like they are: the same sex, the same age, the same class, the same golf club or nation or race or whatever.  Liberals can pretty much empathise with anybody else, no matter how different they are.  It’s all to do with imagination, empathy and imagination are almost the same thing, and it’s why artists, creative people, are almost all liberals, left-leaning.”

 

Meanwhile, I found Raw Spirit so informative that, as I read it, I tried to record what it said about the distilleries Banks visited, the whiskies he drank, and his opinions on their flavours, in a series of mind-maps.

 

 

Banks was so prolific that, looking at his bibliography, I see there are still nearly 20 books of his that I haven’t read yet.  That includes the entire series of Culture novels.  So, I still have much catching up to do with the great man’s oeuvre.

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The big Gray man

 

From pinterest.co.uk

 

Today, January 25th, 2021, has been designated ‘Gray Day’ on Scottish social media in honour of the celebrated Glaswegian polymath Alasdair Gray, who died in December 2019.  As my way of marking the occasion, here’s a reposting of a blog entry I wrote shortly after the great man’s death.

 

Much has been written about Alasdair Gray, the Scottish novelist, poet, playwright, artist, illustrator, academic and polemicist who passed away on December 29th, 2019.  I doubt if my own reflections on Gray will offer any new insights on the man or his works.  But he was a huge influence on me, so I’m going to give my tuppence-worth anyway.

 

In 1980s Scotland, to a youth like myself, in love with books and writing, Gray seemed a titanic cultural presence.  Actually, ‘titanic’ is an ironic adjective to use to describe Gray as physically he was anything but.  Bearded and often dishevelled, Gray resembled an eccentric scientist from the supporting cast of a 1950s sci-fi ‘B’ movie.  He once memorably described himself as ‘a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian’.

 

He was also a presence that seemed to suddenly loom out of nowhere.  The moment when Gray became famous was in 1981 when his first novel Lanark was published.  I remember being in high school that year when my English teacher Iain Jenkins urged me to get hold of a copy and read it.  I still hadn’t read Lanark by 1983 when I started college in Aberdeen, but I remember joining the campus Creative Writing Society and hearing its members enthuse about it.  These included a young Kenny Farquharson (now a columnist with the Scottish edition of the Times) explaining to someone the novel’s admirably weird structure, whereby it consisted of four ‘books’ but with Book Three coming first, then Books One and Two and finally Book Four.  And an equally young Ali Smith recalling meeting Gray and speaking fondly of how eccentric he was.

 

In fact, I didn’t read Lanark until the following summer when I’d secured a three-month job as a night-porter in a hotel high up in the Swiss Alps.  In the early hours of the morning, after I’d done my rounds and finished my chores and all the guests had gone to bed, I’d sit behind the reception desk and read.  It took me about a week of those nightshifts to get through Lanark.  I lapped up its tale of Duncan Thaw, the young, doomed protagonist of what was basically a 1950s Glaswegian version of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which constituted Books One and Two; and I similarly lapped up its alternating tale of the title character (mysteriously linked to Thaw) in the grimly fabulist city of Unthank, which constituted Books Three and Four.  A quote by sci-fi author Brian Aldiss on the cover neatly described Unthank as ‘a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch’.

 

© Canongate

 

That same summer I read The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka (1983) and the fantastical half of Lanark struck me as reminiscent of the great Bohemian writer.  Gray himself acknowledged that Kafka’s The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) had inspired him: “The cities in them seemed very like 1950s Glasgow, an old industrial city with a smoke-laden grey sky that often seemed to rest like a lid on the north and south ranges of hills and shut out the stars at night.”

 

The result was an astonishing book that combines gritty autobiographical realism with fanciful magical realism.  Fanciful and magical in a sombre, Scottish sense, obviously.

 

With hindsight, Lanark was the most important book in Scottish literature since Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair trilogy (1932-34).  By an odd coincidence I read A Scots Quair four years later when I was working – again – as a night-porter in a hotel in the Swiss Alps.  So my encounters with the greatest two works of 20th century Scottish literature are indelibly linked in my mind with nightshifts in hotels decorated with Alpine horns and antique ski equipment and surrounded by soaring, jagged mountains.

 

Lanark also appeared at a significant time.  Three years before its publication, the referendum on establishing a devolved Scottish parliament had ended in an undemocratic farce.  Two years before it, Margaret Thatcher had started her reign as British prime minister.  During this reign, Scotland would be governed unsympathetically, like a colonial property, a testing ground, an afterthought.  So Lanark was important in that it helped give Scotland a cultural identity at a time when politically it was allowed no identity at all.

 

Whilst telling me about Lanark, Iain Jenkins mentioned ruefully that he didn’t think Gray would ever produce anything as spectacular again.  Not only did it seem a once-in-a-lifetime achievement but it’d taken up half of a lifetime, for Gray had been beavering away at it since the 1950s.  He once mused of the undertaking: “Spending half a lifetime turning your soul into printer’s ink is a queer way to live… but I would have done more harm if I’d been a banker, broker, advertising agent, arms manufacturer or drug dealer.”

 

© Canongate

 

However, two books he produced afterwards, 1982, Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992), are excellent works in their own rights even if they didn’t create the buzz that Lanark did.

 

Janine takes place inside the head of a lonely middle-aged man while he reflects on a life of emotional, professional and political disappointments, and masturbates, and finally attempts suicide whilst staying in a hotel room in a Scottish country town that’s either Selkirk or my hometown, Peebles.  (Yes, Peebles’ two claims to literary fame are that John Buchan once practised law there and the guy in 1982, Janine might have had a wank there.)  The protagonist’s musings include some elaborate sadomasochistic fantasies, which put many people off, including Anthony Burgess, who’d thought highly of Lanark but was less enthusiastic about Janine.  However, it seems to me a bold meditation on Scotland in general and on the strained, often hopeless relationship between traditional, Presbyterian-conditioned Scottish males and the opposite sex in particular.

 

Poor Things, a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow, initially seems very different from Janine but in fact it tackles similar themes.  The narrator, Archibald McCandless, relates how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature.  McCandless soon falls in love with her.  There follows a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy, but near the end things are turned on their heads because Bella takes over as storyteller.  She denounces McCandless’s version of events as a witless fantasy and portrays herself not as Frankenstein-type creation but a normal woman, albeit one ahead of her time in her views about feminism and social justice.  Again, the book is a rebuke of male attitudes towards women, especially insecure Scottish ones that are partly possessive and partly, madly over-romanticised.

 

© Canongate

 

Gray’s other post-Lanark novels are entertaining, if less ambitious, and they’re never about what you expect them to be about.  The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) looks like it’s going to be a comic tale of a Scottish lad-o’-pairts on his way up and then on his way down in London, but it turns into a caustic commentary on the loveless nature of Scottish Calvinism.  Something Leather (1990), which is really a series of connected short stories and again features much sadomasochism, isn’t so much about kinkiness as about Gray’s disgust at the politicians and officials who oversaw Glasgow being European City of Culture 1990, something he regarded as a huge, missed opportunity.  A History Maker (1994), a science-fiction novel described by the Daily Telegraph as ‘Sir Walter Scott meets Rollerball’, isn’t an absurdist sci-fi romp at all but a pessimistic account of how humanity can never achieve peaceful harmony with nature.  And Old Men in Love (2007) promises to be a geriatric version of 1982, Janine, but is really an oddity whose ingredients include, among other things, ancient Athens, Fra Lippo Lippi and the Agapemonites.

 

Gray was also a prolific short-story writer.  He produced three collections of them, Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall and True (1993) and The Ends of out Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories and had several more stories published in Lean Tales (1985), alongside contributions from James Kelman and Agnes Owens.  I find the quality of his short fiction variable, with some items a bit too anecdotal or oblique for my tastes.  But many are excellent and Ten Tales Tall and True is one of my favourite short-story collections ever.

 

The fact that Gray was also an artist meant that his books, with their handsome covers and finely detailed illustrations, made decorous additions to anyone’s bookcases.  The illustration by Gray I like best is probably the one he provided for his story The Star in Unlikely Stories, Mostly.

 

© Canongate

 

He also liked to make mischief with the conventions of how books are organised, with their back-cover blurbs, review quotes, prefaces, dedications, footnotes, appendices and so on.  For example, he wasn’t averse to adorning his books with negative reviews (Victoria Glendinning describing Something Leather as ‘a confection of self-indulgent tripe’) or imaginary ones (an organ called Private Nose applauding Poor Things for its ‘gallery of believably grotesque foreigners – Scottish, Russian, American and French.’)

 

As an artist, Gray was good enough to be made Glasgow’s official artist-recorder in the late 1970s and to enjoy a retrospective exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2014-15.  His artwork included a number of murals on the walls of Glasgow and it’s a tragedy that some have been lost over the years.  Among those that survive, perhaps the most famous is at Hillhead Underground Station.  It contains the memorable and salient verse: “Do not let daily to-ing and fro-ing / To earn what we need to keep going / Prevent what you once felt when wee / Hopeful and free.”  Also worth seeing is the mural he painted, Michelangelo-style, on the ceiling of the Òran Mór restaurant, bar and music venue on Glasgow’s Byres Road.  It looks gorgeous in the photos I’ve seen of it, although regrettably when I went there with my brother a few years ago to attend a Bob Mould gig, I was already well-refreshed with several pints of beer… and forgot to look upwards.

 

I never got to meet the great man, though I’m pretty sure I saw him one night in the late 1980s in Edinburgh’s Hebrides Bar, talking with huge animation to a group of friends and admirers.  I was, however, too shy to go over and introduce myself.

 

One writer in whose company I did end up during the late 1980s, though, was Iain Banks, whom I got to interview for a student publication and who then invited me on an afternoon pub crawl across central Edinburgh.  Banks was delighted when I told him that his recently published novel The Bridge (1986) reminded me a wee bit of Lanark.  “I think Lanark’s the best thing published in Scotland in years!” he gushed.  Come to think of it, it was probably the favourable comparison to Gray that prompted Banks to take me on a session.

 

From austinkleon.com