Old Men in Love
Alasdair Gray Bloomsbury, 312pp, £20
It's a truism that old people like to gripe about their health, but the Glaswegian author and artist Alasdair Gray has been making an unusual habit of it lately. "I could die any minute! Watch out! I've already had one heart attack!" he warned, before appearing at the Aye Write! book festival this year. In his new novel, Old Men in Love, he suggests that, as he is "72 and in poor health", his first novel for ten years will be the last of his career. It is hard to know how seriously to take this claim of retirement: it wouldn't be the first time that Gray has attributed fictional sentiments to a real person in his novels, or claimed he has written his final book. Still, there might be a ring of truth to his recent grumbles. Old Men in Love has a sense of finality about it, not least because it opens by announcing the protagonist's death.
John Tunnock was a retired headmaster whose taste for destitute young women led to his recent, violent demise. He also harboured some fairly grand literary pretensions, and Old Men in Love is presented as his collected papers, "edited" by Gray and decorated throughout with his distinctive pen-and-ink illustrations.
Tunnock's diary entries, which start on 12 September 2001, are a mix of the political and personal, devoting as much space to issues such as Glasgow's anti-war march and the Scottish drug trade as to his own life. They also record his writerly concerns: he being an "old-fashioned socialist" (like Gray), his intended masterpiece is a trilogy of historical novels called Who Paid For All This?. Set in classical Greece, Renaissance Italy and Victorian England, the books examine the virtues of these capitalist states "and the devil's bargain that created them". Each focuses on an eccentric old man in love who shares Tunnock's affection for "young things": Socrates, the Florentine painter Filippo Lippi and Henry James Prince. Flitting from one story to the next, Tunnock eventually abandons the unfinished project to start a comprehensive political history of Scotland from the Big Bang onwards, before his love life distracts him from this plan, too.
In a more linear novel, the various political tracts would feel uncomfortably didactic and lumpen. But Gray is an old hand at turning his staunchly socialist world-view into entertaining prose. His politics are palpable in every book he has written, but even his 1997 pamphlet Why Scots Should Rule Scotland makes its case playfully, breaking up Gray's polemical onslaught with pithy interjections from his exasperated publisher ("Fascinating, perhaps. Is it relevant?"). Gray prevents Tunnock's diaries and literary projects from becoming too stodgy by switching from one to the other often, and injects knowing wit into the narrative through mar ginal notes. "Outsourced is postmodern slang for run more cheaply in foreign lands," one drily explains; elsewhere, when one of Tunnock's lovers describes him as "a decent old spud", we are told that "spud is demotic for potato: a popular article of British working-class diet, usually served boiled with meat or fried as chips. Being commonplace yet comfortably nourishing, it is some times used as a mild term of endearment."
What really holds the book together, though, is its slightly ridiculous anti-hero. Earnest and inconstant, by turns a pompous old curmudgeon ("I avoided discussing contemporary politics because that interrupted my studies of Med ician Florence") and a would-be social improver who wants his books to "open people's eyes" (his italics), Tunnock is both pathetic and sym path etic. In other words, he's everything you would expect of a Gray protagonist, down to his proclivity for the kind of feisty, argumentative women who beguile the heroes of Lanark or 1982, Janine and any number of Gray's short stories.
Old Men in Love shares more than thematic links with Gray's back catalogue: chunks of the text have been adapted or directly lifted from various plays and books Gray has written since the Sixties. These plagiarisms are highlighted in the novel's epilogue, whose author, Sidney Workman, is the fictional critic who supplied the footnotes to Lanark. But, for all its familiar themes and self-references, Old Men in Love feels less like an overview of Gray's past career, and more like the culmination of a lifetime spent honing his unique ideas and approach.
So if this is his final novel, there could be worse places to stop. It is certainly not his last book, however: A Life in Pictures, a non-fiction work about his visual art, is due to be published next year. And hidden underneath the dust jacket of this new novel, printed in Gray's hand-drawn font, the book's full title hints that maybe he's not finished with fiction just yet, either - Old Men in Love Are Still Learning.
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
