1982, janine (alasdair gray)

Gray’s northern elegy to women, sex, his youth, the vicissitudes of being Scottish, is one of the more recherché texts of twentieth century British literature. At the conclusion of the book he includes a long list of acknowledged influences, (from Chaucer to Buñuel), but some of the ones that aren’t there include Bataille, De Sade, even Barthes. The interweaving of the personal with the imaginary is pushed in a highly subversive way, as the novel explores the narrator, Jock’s, erotic fantasises, which are chain-linked to memories of youth and early manhood (almost Wordsworthian at times). At the centre of the book is a long section set in the early years of the Edinburgh Fringe, where Jock becomes the accidental lighting designer for a show that flickers and then implodes, with references to Albert Finney and Tom Courtney. This section is a captivating read which might have stood alone as a short novel, but instead, the author framed it within the patchwork of the other chapters which alternate between scenes of the narrator’s youth and aforementioned erotic fantasies. These fantasies gradually acquire context themselves, as the memories reveal the course of the narrator’s romantic and sexual history, which have shaped the nature of the middle-aged fantasies. The novel veers between the exasperating, (even the narrator is exasperated by his fixation on Janine et al), and the appearance of being corsucatingly honest. No-one knows the true contents of an author’s mind, so there is no way of knowing how much the musings of Jock are a palimpsest for the musings of Alasdair, and it is part of the novel’s skill that this ambiguity feels so unresolved, it lies there like a tempting peach, defying the bite of conclusion.

What might be said beyond doubt is that Gray, who I met once as a lad, on a night in North London of copious whisky drinking, was out there ploughing a channel far from the quaint, polite British mainstream of his contemporaries. Think of McEwan or Murdoch or other luminaries and they have none of the visceral wallop of Gray’s prose (in which sense Chaucer seems an extremely apposite reference). Gray skedaddles in the peaks and troughs of another landscape altogether.