Lanark

A Life in Four Books

Alasdair Gray

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781847673749
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

'Probably the greatest novel of the century' Observer'Remarkable... A work of loving and vivid imagination, yielding copious riches' WILLIAM BOYD Lanark, a modern vision of hell, is set in the disintegrating cities of Unthank and Glasgow, and tells the interwoven stories of Lanark and Duncan Thaw. A work of extraordinary imagination and wide range, its playful narrative techniques convey a profound message, both personal and political, about humankind's inability to love, and yet our compulsion to go on trying. First published in 1981, Lanark immediately established Gray as one of Britain's leading writers.

CHAPTER 30.

Surrender

Lanark stared through the ward window at a bed which seemed a reflection of his own except that the figure in it was under the sheets. He said, “Did Thaw really kill someone or was that another hallucination?”

I’m only able to tell the story as he saw it.

“But did the police arrest him?”

No. In hospital he kept vaguely expecting them to, but they didn’t come, which worried him. He wanted to get away from everything he knew, and arrest would have made that easy. “Then it was a hallucination.”

Not necessarily. In 1956 there were a hundred and fifty officially recognized murders in Britain, a third of them unsolved. Thaw certainly felt he had done something foul but denouncing himself to the police needed effort, so he thought as little and slept as much as possible. He didn’t dream nowadays. His mind was under a cold bandage of dullness.

He had a bruised hand, malnutrition and bronchial asthma, and received cortisone steroids, a new drug which healed the asthma in two days. The other things took longer. The hospital almoner wanted to contact his father but Thaw withheld the address. He said he would visit Mr. Thaw when he got out, not really meaning to.

He was released, went home, and packed a small canvas knapsack with some clothes and a shaving kit.

“You said he had given up shaving.”

He resumed it after the Evening News article in order not to look like his newspaper photograph. The knapsack contained one of Mr. Thaw’s old compasses. With over nine pounds in his pocket he went to the bus station at the end of Parliamentary Road. He thought of going to London, of sliding down the globe into the cluttered and peopled south, but at the station the needle of his mental compass swung completely and pointed to the northern firths and mountains. He decided to visit his father after all.

Consider him passing along the route described at the start of Book One, Chapter 18 only he dozes most of the way and gets out at Glehcoe village. He walks up a narrow road to the youth hostel, a road through a tunnel of branches. It is autumn, when the highlands are rich with purples, oranges and greeny-golds which would look gaudy if the grey light didn’t soften them.

“Leave out the local colour.”

All right.

It isn’t yet five o’clock and some climbers are waiting on the hostel steps. Thaw walks round the side of the building to the warden’s quarters at the back, but before knocking at the door he looks through a window. The room is a neat one with small watercolours of Loch Lomond on the walls which used to hang in the living room at Riddrie. He recognizes also a bookcase, writing desk and wooden tobacco jar carved in the shape of an owl. His father sits reading in an easy chair by a warm stove. There is a teapot under a cosy on a low table at his elbow, some cups, a cut-glass sugar bowl, milk jug and plate of biscuits. Two women sit on a sofa opposite. One is grey-haired and sixtyish; the other might be her daughter and is dark-haired and fortyish. The older woman knits, the younger reads. The quiet interior has a completeness, a calm contented polish, which Thaw feels should not be touched. He can break it, not add to it, so he finds a gap in the hedge leading to the road and returns to the village.

He has tea in a restaurant for tourists and wonders what to do. Going back to Glasgow feels impossible so he goes toward Fort William.

The lochside road is a dull one and at the dreary slate-bings by Ballachulish his breathing worsens and later makes him sit on a low wall beside a line of cars queuing for the ferry. An American lady stands by her car staring up the hill at a whitish stone thing like an old-fashioned petrol pump in the woods above. She asks, “Do you know what that is?”

He tells her he thinks it marks the spot where Colin Campbell, nicknamed the Red Fox, was murdered. She smiles slowly and says, “Did I read about that in Robert Stevenson’s Kidnapped?” Thaw says it is possible. She says, “You don’t look too well. Can I do anything to help?”

He mentions the illness and says it will pass. She says, “My husband is also a sufferer,” and gets back into the car. Then she comes out and hands him a paper tissue with some blue and pink torpedo-shaped pellets in it. She says, “Try one of these, they’re new.”

He swallows one and a moment later a happy warmth spreads through him. He looks at her lovingly. She says, “Don’t take more than four a day, they can make you high. We’re going to Mallaig, can we give you a lift?”

He steps into a detached part of America. The seats seem upholstered in soft buffalo hide, the climate is five degrees above skin heat, somewhere a tiny orchestra is playing. The engine is inaudible and, once over the ferry, the lochs and mountains, like films projected onto the windows, pass backward at great speed. The driver, a taciturn man with a thick neck, asks Thaw where he’s heading. After a while Thaw says he’s going to Stirr. The lady says, “You may find Henry a little taciturn. There’s a blood clot in President Eisenhower’s brain and the market’s responding badly.”

Thaw shuts his eyes and dimly sees his father and sister in a grey field. Mr. Thaw holds out a skein of wool which his sister winds into a ball. When he opens his eyes it is dark and the car climbs a long winding drive to a building like Balmoral Castle but with a neon hotel sign on the front. He is breathless again. The lady says, “We’ve looked up Stirr on the map and you’ll never make it tonight. We’re going to stay here and we suggest you do the same. It’s a little expensive but—”

She is clearly going to make a generous suggestion so Thaw interrupts by saying that a good night’s rest is worth any expense. They all get out of the car and enter the hotel. At the reception desk he says he isn’t hungry and will go straight to bed. They bid him goodnight.

The hotel is vast and he is surprised by the smallness of his room. He is very breathless but gets into bed, takes two torpedo pills and sinks into sleep at once.

Twice or thrice next morning he dimly hears someone knocking and calling the time and he rises at last about eleven. He breathes easily but his mind is stupid, his body heavy. He has missed breakfast and takes coffee and toast uneasily in the corner of a huge lounge. He pays his bill at the reception desk and goes outside. The day is windy and overcast. A dislike of returning makes him unwilling to face the long drive-way; besides, the wind is pushing him the other way. He walks round the hotel and over some lawns, fingering the last half-crowns and coppers in his pocket. Passing a rectangular pool of waterlilies he flings them in. A path leads through a rhododendron shrubbery to a gate onto a moor. He goes through.

The moor rises to a ridge between two rocky hills. There is no path, and sometimes the heather gives way to mossy patches where his feet sink and squelch. He takes two or three hours to reach the ridge and rests on the leeward side of an untidy heap of stones. The heather before him slopes down to the ocean, but a hump of it hides the shore. He sees arms of land dividing the grey water, some patched with fields, others rocky and sloping up into mountains. He thinks one might be Ben Rua. He notices that a nearby stone in the heap has a surface carved with words:

Upon
THIS SPOT
King Edward
had lunch after stalking
28th August, 1902

For some reason this seems funny and he laughs a lot but isn’t really happy. He takes another pill which makes him slightly happy, but not much, so he throws the rest away. The wind feels colder. He stands and idly consults the compass. The needle directs him downhill.

After walking for a while he sees the ground sloping away on each side as well as in front. He seems to be on a promontory, but the wind and the slope and his instinct make it easier to go on. The promontory ends in many little cliffs with slopes of heather and tumbled rocks between. Descent is easy at first, then he comes to steeper rocks and must scramble down gullies of loose stones that collapse and slide. He falls the last few yards and lies under boulders among withered bracken, thinking, I’m sore and don’t like it. There is a bleeding scratch along one leg and a shoulder aches. He feels sticky and sweating, his heart hammers and he thinks, I need a bath. He pulls off knapsack, coat, jacket, jersey, and then feels the cold and walks down a steep beach of big pebbles like stone eggs and potatoes. They slide awkwardly. He stumbles across them.

The first wave is no shock but the beach shelves steeply and the next, which is large and sudden, slaps his chest, floats him off his legs and knocks him backward onto the sliding pebbles in two or three feet of water. He rises spluttering, the shirt sticking and rasping on his skin. Laughing with rage he pulls it off and wades out against the sea shouting, “You can’t get rid of me!” He bows his head into the slapping waves, struggles through them with his arms and finds he is rising higher and higher out of the water. His feet are on a submerged ridge, he is waist deep when he reaches the end and steps forward onto fluid. He wallows under, gasping and tumbling over and over in salt sting, knowing nothing but the need not to breathe. A humming drumming fills his brain, in panic he opens eyes and glimpses green glimmers through salt sting. And when at last, like fingernails losing clutch on too narrow a ledge, he, tumbling, yells out last dregs of breath and has to breathe, there flows in upon him, not pain, but annihilating sweetness.

CHAPTER 31.

Nan

Lanark opened his eyes and looked thoughtfully round the ward. The window was covered again by the Venetian blind and a bed in one corner was hidden by screens. Rima sat beside him eating figs from a brown paper bag. He said, “That was very unsatisfying. I can respect a man who commits suicide after killing someone (it’s clearly the right thing to do) but not a man who drowns himself for a fantasy. Why did the oracle not make clear which of these happened?”

Rima said, “What are you talking about?”

“The oracle’s account of my life before Unthank. He’s just finished it.”

Rima said firmly, “In the first place that oracle was a woman, not a man. In the second place her story was about me. You were so bored that you fell asleep and obviously dreamed something else.”

He opened his mouth to argue but she popped a fig in, saying, “It’s a pity you didn’t stay awake because she told me a lot about you. You were a funny, embarrassing, not very sexy boy who kept chasing me when I was nineteen. I had the sense to marry someone else.”

“And you!” cried Lanark, angrily swallowing, “were a frigid cock-teasing virgin who kept shoving me off with one hand and dragging me back with the other. I killed someone because I couldn’t get you.”

“We must have been listening to different oracles. I’m sure you imagined all that. Is there anything else to eat?”

“No. We used it all up.”

With a clattering of purposeful feet a stretcher was pushed into the ward among a crowd of doctors and nurses. Munro marched in front; technicians followed dragging cylinders and apparatus. They went behind the screens in the corner and nothing could be heard but low hissing and some phrases which seemed to have drifted from the corridors.

“… the conceived conceiving in mid conception …”

“….. inglorious Milton, guiltless Cromw...