Tributes to the Clydeside Michelangelo

Alan Bissett

"Alasdair Gray's head contains multitudes: apocalyptic visions, humanity, trickery, political rage, as well as what seems like the entire histories of both Scotland and literature. He is a writer and artist deeply committed to making Scots see ourselves in new ways, clearing away the mental clutter of advertising and junk which surrounds us each day, in order to open new landscapes in the mind. Lanark, obviously, is his masterpiece. But his second novel 1982, Janine is not far behind it. Like much of Gray's work, it's a portrait of a lonely man clinging on, but because Gray goes about things with such a sense of fun and restlessness, we never feel oppressed by it. We are lucky to have Alasdair Gray among us, to cock a snook at our rulers and show us a way out through our own imaginations."

Rodge Glass

"I was first dropped into a world with Alasdair Gray in it about ten or eleven years ago, when he walked into a pub I was working in, ordered a gin and tonic, and then had to listen to me going on about his books until he could no longer bear it. It's hard to say exactly what influence he's had on my life, but perhaps the fact that I was his student at university, then his secretary, then his biographer; the fact that I followed him around for several years, heard his voice in my head in my sleep, watched him closely, performed alongside him (including early versions of Fleck) and, at the end of the process found myself slipping into impresisons of the impressions he slipped into; perhaps all this gives a sense of his place in my life. After playing the parts of God and Fleck when writing my biography, I've become really fond of the play, and am glad to see Gray attempting to shame Scottish theatre into performing it by getting so many writers to do a reading in this way. I hope Scottish theatre feels suitably ashamed of itself and makes the darn thing happen with actual actors. Soon. As for Alasdair's work itself, Alasdair believes that all his work is about one single thing: democracy. And it is."

 

Will Self
"Gray is in my estimation a great writer, perhaps the greatest living in this archipelago today. Others agree. I've only just now looked up 'Lanark', his magnum opus, on the Amazon.com website. The reader reviews fulsome. One said: 'I owe my life to this book. In 1984 I was marooned in the Roehampton Limb-fitting Centre, the victim of a bizarre hit-and-run accident, whereby an out of control invalid carriage ran me over several times. The specialists all concurred that I would never walk again, even with the most advanced prostheses they had on offer. After reading Lanark by Alasdair Gray, such was my Apprehension of a New Jerusalem, arrived at by the author's Fulsome Humanity, tempered by the Judiciousness of his Despair, and the Percipience of his Neo-Marxist Critique of the Established Authorities, that... I found myself growing, in a matter of days, two superb, reptilian nether limbs. These have not only served me better than my own human legs as a form of locomotion, they have also made me a Sexual Commodity much in demand on the burgeoning fetish scene of the South West London suburbs.' Any encomium I could add to this would be worse than pathetic."

 

For more tributes to Alasdair Gray, go to www.festmag.co.uk/books