Confronted by all these eccentricities, it’s hard to believe that they are the work of the man who last year won Britain’s Whitbread Prize for Novel of the Year and the Guardian Fiction Prize, the man Anthony Burgess called “the first major Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott.” It’s harder still to think that all this funkiness is supposed to make the book more, not less, accessible. But that’s what Gray himself insists. “The main requirement of a book,” he says, “is that it be an entertainment.”
Wonder of wonders, when you do sit down and read “Poor Things,” the whole thing does make sense. The pictures illuminate the text, and the text-italic here, sans-serif there-is actually logical. Everything works together with what blues singer Robert Johnson called “Elgin movement from head to toe.”
“Poor Things” purports to be “Episodes From the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer,” edited by Alasdair Gray. McCandless’s manuscript describes his adventures in late-19th-century Glasgow with a Frankenstein-like doctor and scientist, Godwin Baxter, and Baxter’s protegee, Bella, who, thanks to Baxter’s surgical sorcery, has the body of a woman and the brain of a child. McCandless’s story describes her education, both sexual and intellectual, from innocence to experience.
McCandless’s narrative ends with his marriage to Bella. To that manuscript, editor Gray has appended a letter from Bella, written years later, in which she angrily repudiates her husband’s story about her monsterish origins. This Bella, who now calls herself Victoria McCandless M.D., is humorless, high-minded and hard to take, but she’s nobody’s Victorian plaything. You can’t help but admire her.
There is a deep streak of anti-authoritarianism in everything Gray writes. His stories are full of childlike adults who are upset by the poverty and cruelty so casually countenanced by their “normal” companions. Perhaps the most telling moment in “Poor Things” comes when one of Bella’s friends tells her, “You find the world horrifying, Bell, because you have not been warped to fit it by a proper education.”
Gray calls this novel “a Scottish socialist’s love letter to the Victorian period,” but while it is full of tips of the hat to freethinkers and reformers, it is more than anything a wonderful yarn. Part Gothic romance, part satire, part essay on Victorian mores and feminism, “Poor Things” also makes room for parodies of 19th-century travel writing and the mysteries of Conan Doyle and Wilkie Collins. You can almost hear Gray cackle as he describes Godwin Baxter’s eerie laboratory or the Parisian brothel where Bella works. Mismatching cliches, he creates a world as hilariously off key but on the money as those old Universal monster movies where all the Transylvanian townsfolk dressed like Swiss peasants and spoke with English accents.
A master of pastiche and collage in words and pictures, Gray has found a way to perfectly evoke a cracked, slightly out-of-balance sense of our reality. 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.
