A History Maker

Alasdair Gray "has found a way to perfectly evoke a cracked, slightly out-of-balance sense of our reality," said Newsweek on the publication of Poor Things. "And although he warrants comparison to Laurence Sterne, to William Blake, to Flann O'Brien, you can't put him in any choir. He's a soloist first and last, a glorious one-man band. The one-man band is back, this time with a kilted sci-fi yarn full of poetry and porridge, courage and sex. In prose "as unaffectedly affected as ever" (Independent on Sunday), Gray here tells a ripping tale of border warfare, military and erotic, set in Scotland's Ettrick Forrest in the twenty-third century. Supperbly muscled Wat Dryhope, son of the Ettrick chief, is unhappy about his clan's violent and permissive lifestyle. Only when challenged by the fearfully seductive Delialah Puddock and her plot to restore the competitive exploitation of human resources does he learn to embract the woman and traditional values he truly loves. Of course nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems in a novel by Alasdair Gray-"a genuine experimentalist, transgressing the rules...boldly and imaginatiely" (New Republic). As on British reviewer said of this "sly political allegory," which ends with an arch set of "Notes Explaining Obscurities": "The novel is rarely so, well, novel."