Lanark

Bulk alone - 560 or so pages - signals Scottish first-novelist Gray's determination: he means to make a detailed, leisurely analogue to today, to set it in a future-world city much like Glasgow called Unthank (where there is no natural light), and to place the whole thing around an historical mystery man named Lanark. Lanark, suffering from a throwback skin disease called "dragonhide," is sent for treatment to the Institute, a hospital/research-center/university where human ecology has been strictly perfected: cured patients in turn become doctors; selective cannibalism un-kinks the food chain. But Lanark, along with pregnant girlfriend Rima, can't abide the strictures (which resemble an exaggerated modern-day British social-welfare bureaucracy); they escape and wander the "intracalendrical zones" where time and space are askew. True, Gray pulls up short for the next two or three hundred pages and interjects the autobiographical travails of an asthmatic, unhappy Glasgow art student named Duncan Thaw; and then, still later, there's a disarming intermezzo in which Gray cheerfully acknowledges and catalogues the writers and books from whom he is borrowing and lifting. But apart from these genial emperor's-new-clothes, the main of Gray's big metaphorical structure is built on fantasy. And though this construct has its moments - Lanark's and Rima's relationship is more rancorously realistic than usual in the genre, and some of the speculation (like a time credit-card that substitutes for money by simply deducting from the cardholder's life span) is diverting - it never even comes close to cohering. The eye (unlike Wyndham Lewis' in The Human Age), instead of being scathing, is more simply chafed; there's a sharp edge here, but it glints only once in a long while. Some appeal for fanciers of grand-scale sociological futurescapes, then, with more ambition than real imagination or power. (Kirkus Reviews)