Alasdair Gray was a maverick and polymath – a writer, artist, polemicist, dissident and civic nationalist – who had an immense influence on contemporary Scottish literature and beyond.
For anyone yet to visit, the stereotype of Glasgow is a city of heavy industry now vanished, heavy Victorian tenements, heavy drinking and heavy rainfall. That idea has been difficult to dislodge.
In Lanark, the protagonist Duncan Thaw bemoans the difficulty in imagining Glasgow creatively, a task that Gray applied himself to assiduously through his career. Lanark itself, an epic that combines vivid fantasy with evocative realism, is where much of that imagination takes place. Its grandeur and ambition would suit the blockbuster treatment.
Lanthimos’s film and Gray’s text are independent but related works. It is worth remembering that adaptations are under no obligation to be faithful to source materials. There is no governing body adjudicating and no code of laws to apply. Traces remain, however. Look out for the interrogation of authority, the imagination of an alternative future, and the indomitable spirit of Bella Baxter. Then read some Alasdair Gray.