Alasdair Gray :: Books

Reviews of Old Men in Love:

'The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott' Anthony Burgess

'Alasdair Gray’s new novel, Old Men in Love, exhibits all of those faintly preposterous foibles that make him a writer more loved than prized. The bulk of the text constitutes the posthumous papers of a recondite – yet venal – retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, named John Tunnock (as in the celebrated tea cake), that have, seemingly, been edited and collated by Gray himself.

'This literary subterfuge serves to fool no one who needs fooling, yet will satisfy all who believe that the truth can be found more exactly in chance occurrences, serendipity, and the eggy scrapings from the breakfast plates of the neglected, than any crude, linear naturalism.
'Tunnock is a beguiling figure, at once feisty and fusty. His historical fictions chivvy us into Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy and then bury our noses in the ordure of sanctity given off by charismatic Victorian religious sectaries. Excursions into geological time are placed in counterpoint to diaristic jottings describing Tunnock’s own erotic misadventures and the millennial trivia of the Anthony Linton Blair Government’s final five years.
'Only Gray can be fecklessly sexy as well as insidiously sagacious. Only Gray can beguile quite so limpidly. If I were a Hollywood screenwriter (which, to the best of my knowledge, I am not), I would pitch the film adaptation of Old Men in Love thus: ‘Imagine Lanark meets Something Leather, with a kind of a Poor Things feel to it …’ By this I mean to convey to this novel’s readers that Alasdair Gray remains, first and foremost, entirely sui generis. He’s the very best Alasdair Gray that we have, and we should cherish his works accordingly.'

– Will Self

		RECENT BOOKS by, and about, Gray

	Click image to buy book	A GRAY PLAYBOOK of Shows by Alasdair Gray 1956-2009 A Gray Play Book of long and short plays for stage, puppet-theatre, radio and television, acted between 1956 and 2009, with an unused opera libretto, a film script of the novel Poor Things and excerpts from the pictorial storyboard of the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray (Deluxe edition) Hardback, 336 pps, price £50.00 Order online at Luath Press (link leaves this site) This collection brings together some of Alasdair Gray's best plays. For the first time ever 22 of his works (stage plays, radio scripts and film and television scripts) have been gathered together in one significant volume. This exciting work includes the unabridged scripts of four of his most famous dramas: The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1967), Mavis Belfridge (1968), McGrotty and Ludmilla (1975) and Working Legs (1997), ‘A Play for People Without Them’. These are combined with four one-act sexual comedies written in the '60s and '70s; The Loss of Golden Silence, Dialogue, Homeward Bound and Sand Lang and Miss Watson.

	Click image to buy book	A GRAY PLAYBOOK of Shows by Alasdair Gray 1956-2009 Paperback, 336 pps, price £25.00 Order online at Luath Press (link leaves this site) A Gray Play Book follows the creation of the playwright genius from his first work, written at age 11, to the 2008 one-act play Voices in the Dark. Plus an intriguing glimpse at the, as yet unmade, Lanark movie with sections of the original storyboard. The essential gift for all the fans of Alasdair Gray and his work.

	Click image to buy book	FLECK: a verse comedy Alasdair Gray Format: Paoerback, 216x138mm ISBN: 9781906120375 Published: October 2008 RRP: £8.99 Direct from publisher: £6.99 In 2007 Alasdair Gray began writing a modern verse translation of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust, and after the first act found the Devil lead the hero into a twenty-first century Goethe never imagined. This required a change of names, so the play is now Fleck, a comedy. 'Gray's representation of God sums up what makes this, another in a long list of Faust-inspired texts, worth a look. Gray's wry irreverence is in full and pungent flow. With a torture scene involving an episode of 'The Simpsons' and a speech interrupted by mobile phones, he achieves what he wants to by dragging Faust into the 21st century. It has lights and music and molls and liquor and, though it verges on the brassy cabaret side of things, in turning Faust the tragedy into Fleck the comedy, he succeeds in paying his own delirious, wholly un-Goethean tribute.' ...........................................................Scotland on Sunday

	Click image to buy book	Alasdair Gray's latest novel, OLD MEN IN LOVE Format: Hardback, 320 pages, 234x153mm Published: October 2007 ISBN: 9780747593539

	Click image to buy book	Alasdair Gray's latest novel in paperback, OLD MEN IN LOVE Format: Paperback, 320 pages, 234x153mm Published: October 2009 Men in Love, like The Arabian Nights, is about a storyteller whose stories contain other stories. As in Alasdair Gray's Lanark, 1982 Janine, Poor Things, and The Book of Prefaces, this one has many styles of narrative and location. Periclean Athens, Renaissance Florence, Victorian Somerset mingle with Britain under the New Labour Party, viewed from the West End of Glasgow. More than 50% is fact and the rest possible, but must be read to be believed.
Reviews of Old Men in Love: 'The greatest Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott' Anthony Burgess 'Alasdair Gray’s new novel, Old Men in Love, exhibits all of those faintly preposterous foibles that make him a writer more loved than prized. The bulk of the text constitutes the posthumous papers of a recondite – yet venal – retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, named John Tunnock (as in the celebrated tea cake), that have, seemingly, been edited and collated by Gray himself. 'This literary subterfuge serves to fool no one who needs fooling, yet will satisfy all who believe that the truth can be found more exactly in chance occurrences, serendipity, and the eggy scrapings from the breakfast plates of the neglected, than any crude, linear naturalism. 'Tunnock is a beguiling figure, at once feisty and fusty. His historical fictions chivvy us into Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy and then bury our noses in the ordure of sanctity given off by charismatic Victorian religious sectaries. Excursions into geological time are placed in counterpoint to diaristic jottings describing Tunnock’s own erotic misadventures and the millennial trivia of the Anthony Linton Blair Government’s final five years. 'Only Gray can be fecklessly sexy as well as insidiously sagacious. Only Gray can beguile quite so limpidly. If I were a Hollywood screenwriter (which, to the best of my knowledge, I am not), I would pitch the film adaptation of Old Men in Love thus: ‘Imagine Lanark meets Something Leather, with a kind of a Poor Things feel to it …’ By this I mean to convey to this novel’s readers that Alasdair Gray remains, first and foremost, entirely sui generis. He’s the very best Alasdair Gray that we have, and we should cherish his works accordingly.' – Will Self

			Also available from Bloomsbury Publishing Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography by Rodge Glass, H/B, 352 pages, RRP: £25.00 ISBN: 9780747590156 Order today from Bloomsbury Link leaves this site (available within 48 hours). Alasdair Gray was not always the rapidly ageing, fat Glasgow pedestrian he likes to describe on the inside leaf of his books. There was once a time when he was young; a time when he was really rather thin; many years when he went unpublished and unrecognised. This book aims to document, as faithfully as possible, that journey from son of a box-maker, encouraged to paint, write and do whatever made him feel good, to septuagenarian "little grey deity"; (as Will Self has called him).
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