Book 118: "Lanark" by Alasdair Gray

[kittiwake]

Duncan Thaw, an artist living in Glasgow, and the man who arrives in the city of Unthank by train at the beginning of the book and takes the name Lanark, are one and the same person. Lanark isn’t quite as useless as Thaw, but it's hard to like a book with such an unlikeable protagonist, even though the book covers interesting political and social issues. I only really started to enjoy it in the final quarter, when time becomes unreliable (even outside the Intercalendrical Zones), and Lanark meets someone who can tell him what is going on.

I like the way the book is organised. Books 1 and 2 are about Thaw, and books 3 and 4 are about Lanark (and they happen in that chronological order), but book 3 comes first, which means that as Lanark arrives in Unthank knowing nothing about his past or the city that will become his home, the reader is in the same boat.