Adam Mars-Jones
Flash Shallows
Alisdair Gray’s first published novel was the mighty Lanark, which combined the life story of a young Glasgow artist with the fantastic adventures of a man called Lanark on a number of inhospitable planets. The universe it describes is in flux, but has some reliable principles: energy, for instance, is always acquired at someone’s expense. Last year’s 1982 Janine was more consistently located, in the head of a sadomasochistic superviser of security installations trying to drink his memories away in a Scottish provincial hotel, but similar ideas were present; Scotland was viewed as a giant security installation itself, packed with English warheads, and as a slave who had come to enjoy the state of bondage.
England was appropriating Scottish energy long before the oil started coming ashore. As Gray put it for an American readership, Edinburgh is Scotland’s New York. Scotland has no Washington. So it’s about time Gray addressed himself to the bright planet that lives off the dark ones, to Scotland’s Washington: to
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying