Master of the masquerade

Not even the Akond of Swat in all his whoness, whyety, whichery and whatage could compare to the enigmatic, whimsical mask of deconstruction that purports to be Alasdair Gray. He was a student of the Glasgow School of Art and a quondam painter, but is he an artist? He wrote the 1980s magically realist novel Lanark, but is he a novelist? He was famous, but is he a success? Is this book fact or fiction or a gallimaufry of jottings? He asserts on the copyright page, his ‘moral right’ as Gray to be its author, but inside passes himself off as an American millionairess, a cake, an algorithm and a critic. Even the title is unreliable: Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers on the dustjacket becomes on the coverboard the more plaintive Old Men in Love Are Still Learning.

Nothing is as it seems except its good looks. OMIL is the most handsome, satisfyingly tactile, typographically adventurous, richly decorated £20 book that could be bought. In that respect, Gray and Bloomsbury have produced a masterpiece.

The words are another matter.

Gray’s charm is that he has no side, nor does he have bottom — meaning solidity. He’s all front, disguises, tricks and ploys. The old men here are Socrates, a Glasgow schoolteacher, Fra Filippo Lippi and a Victorian evangelist. Each is begun, but none is developed, except for the teacher who, as Gray says in his guise as critic, ‘comes to a well-deserved end through an affair with a drug-dealing procuress’. Taken simply as writing, they consist of a succession of published or discarded works from the 1970s to the present, connected by various literary devices with the aid of sumptuous colophons and artistic epigraphs. Writing as the critic, Gray himself disparages the result as a ‘rag-bag’ whose central story is ‘the dreary tale of a failed writer and dirty old man’.