Sampurna Chattarji on books

SAMPURNA CHATTARJI ON BOOKS

Alasdair Gray’s Lanark is a book I first encountered in 2005, and I return to it every year. I’m at the Lanark-moment in my life again, newly amazed at how absolutely compelling this hard-to-summarise novel is.

Inventively structured, hilariously annotated, it tells the stories of Lanark and his alter-ego, Duncan Thaw, set in surreal Unthank and the all-too real city of Glasgow. Oracles, dragonhide, deterioration wards, doctors in white coats, and incurable patients whose bodies are sources of energy and food, are some of the things that make Unthank not just fantastical but also chillingly apocalyptic. When Lanark wants to know how he got there , the Oracle tells him Duncan Thaw’s story — his early years, his coming of age as an artist and his despair as a man. Beautifully-written, funny, moving, Lanark is big, rich, strange and very, very rewarding.
Sampurna Chattarji is a poet and author of Sight May Strike You Blind