And it lets me utter some fine sentiments which I could hardly trust to a mere character. Though not essential to the plot it provides some comic distraction at a moment with the narrative sorely needs it. “Usually, but mine is too important to go there. “I thought epilogues came after the end.” There will also be a prologue before book one, and interlude in the centre, and an epilogue two or three chapters before the end.” Homer, Virgil, Milton and Scott Fitzgerald used it. “ I want Lanark to be read in one order but eventually thought of in another.

“When Lanark is finished (I am calling the work after you) it will be roughly tow hundred thousand words and forty chapters long, and divided into books three, one, two and four.” Let’s start with the book’s structure, something that is out of the ordinary, a structure best described by the author, in the book itself It’s a bummer really as I was going to write a whole piece about how ‘Lanark’ is nothing like ‘Ulysses’… This is it…the first major Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott” “It was about time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. Attempting to find the Ulysses reference by Burgess has been part of the ‘Lanark’ journey, I never found the alleged reference, maybe he never compared the two, however I have found a lot of references comparing Gray to Joyce, and the oft dragged out quote: I know only a little about Anthony Burgess, famous because Stanley Kubrick made a film based on one of his books, or that he spat the dummy and refused to turn up to the Booker Prize in 1980 because William Golding had written a better book, or that he wrote a LOT of reviews. At that time, I was encouraged to add Alasdair Gray’s ‘Lanark’ as the Scottish Ulysses, as apparently Anthony Burgess had referred to it as such.

I did extend the listing of twelve adding a number of novels that other readers have claimed fit the Ulysses tag. Based on a list of twelve “novels that have been described, whether by critics or the authors themselves, as the Ulyssi of their respective cultures”, compiled by writer Joshua Cohen, late last year I added a post “A World of Ulysses”.

Lanark alasdair gray review