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Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography

Perhaps the greatest?

Rodge Glass
Bloomsbury, 341pp, £25,

Andro Linklater

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass

It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between the inner and outer essences of man and society. And the great artist himself would live decorously on a large government pension befitting a social treasure. Instead of which, his present biographer, the painfully named Rodge Glass, has been forced to write the life of a self-described ‘fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old, Glasgow pedestrian’, who reproduces in pictures and stories the consequences of God’s cosmic joke in creating a world of hugely sexed Adams and abundantly sadistic Eves, then abandoning them with only a capacity for companionship and imagination to remind them that He ever existed. And at the age of 73, Gray himself still scrabbles to earn enough for the red wine and paint his work requires.

Almost three decades after the publication of his masterpiece and first novel, Lanark, there is no longer any reason to question Anthony Burgess’s 1981 judgement that Gray is ‘the best Scottish novelist since Walter Scott’, or Will Self’s recent estimation that he is ‘a great writer, perhaps the greatest living in the archipelago today’. Except of course there is. The exhilaration of his inventiveness and the scope of his ambition induce his admirers to swoon, just as the repetition of his tropes and the childishness of his fancy impel his haters to wield the demolition hammer — ‘a literary lout’ according to the Irish Sunday Tribune and variants of ‘pretentious drivel’ by assorted Amazon reviewers.