![]() “Because nobody imagines living here,” said Thaw. “Glasgow is a magnificent city,” said McAlpin. In this passage, Thaw ponders the lack of imagination for people in the city of Glasgow and the cost of this lack of imagination Lanark’s name changes to Thaw in the second two books for no explicit reason but this further goes to illustrate the liminality of identity. The central character in the first two books is named Lanark who akin to Joyce’s characters is a persona in constant transition. ![]() Rather than trying to universalize humanity in abstraction, he instead drives us to the particular, the intimate and the real. Like Joyce’s Dublin, Gray sets much of his wanderings in an unsympathetic repose of Glasgow in all its decay and longing. Like Joyce, Gray is tearing away the facade of society and looking deep beneath the images toward a deeper notion of what is really animating life. ![]() For those not familiar with Lanark, it is reminiscent of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses with echoes of William Blake’s poetry, Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the Looking Glass, and George McDonald’s Lilith and splashes of Irvine Welch and David Foster Wallace. Doug Gay, a colleague who teaches Practical Theology at University of Glasgow, recently posted a citation on his Facebook page from Alastair Gray’s stunning 1981 novel Lanark that gave voice to much of what I been wrestling with for the past two weeks. ![]()
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