Poor Things by Alisdair Gray

What a curi­ous book. This guy is lay­ered a bit like an onion and there real­ly isn’t any rea­son to trust any­one who claims any­thing in the entire book. The humor is droll, very Scotch, and the type that makes you want to smack the peo­ple upside the head for being goof­balls. It was an enjoy­able, some­what rib­ald read that is rem­i­nis­cent of a Jer­ry Springer Show, with a bit more class.

Alis­dair Gray claims that he found the book Poor Things through a col­league and when he sent it for pub­li­ca­tion the orig­i­nal was lost. Con­ve­nient, for now there is no evi­dence to back up his claim that the entire work is fic­tion. The mem­oir was writ­ten by Archibald McCan­d­less and is sum­mar­i­ly dis­missed as pop­py­cock in a rant by his wife Vic­to­ria Bax­ter McCan­d­less. Alis­dair Gray claims that he chose to put the let­ter at the end instead of using it as a for­ward because he felt that it might detract from the sto­ry.

There is also a sort of appen­dix which con­tains sup­posed evi­dence, assem­bled by Gray, to sup­port the claims of McCan­d­less. All of the evi­dence is cir­cum­stan­tial. With all of these con­fi­dence games being played you might miss the con­tem­po­rary social com­men­tary via appar­ent Vic­to­ri­an era social com­men­tary, but it is there.

It is also hilar­i­ous that Vic­to­ria claims that Archibald basi­cal­ly pla­gia­rized themes from oth­er nov­els. [Since that is what Gray cer­tain­ly did, he gives us a wink that he knows we know, how very meta, to beat a dead horse] This is one Franken­stein’s mon­ster of a book, but for all its com­pli­cat­ed­ed­ed­ed­ness it reads like pud­ding eats; effort­less­ly.

Leave a Reply