8.2 /10 1 Votes
Country Scotland Publication date 1992 Originally published 1992 Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language English Preceded by McGrotty and Ludmilla Cover artist Alasdair Gray | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback) Genres Fiction, Novel, Historical Fiction, Speculative fiction Awards Guardian Fiction Prize, Costa Novel Award Similar Alasdair Gray books, Guardian Fiction Prize winners, Novels | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Review poor things by alasdair gray
Poor Things is a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1992 and the Guardian Fiction Prize for 1992.
Contents
The novel was called "a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book" by the London Review of Books and is a departure from Gray's usual subject-matter of Glasgow realism and fantasy. However, its Victorian narrative takes in Gray's previous concerns with social inequalities, relationships, memory and identity.
Story
The main body of the work centres on Bella Baxter, a woman whose early life and identity are the subject of some ambiguity. That ambiguity is complicated by her husband Archibald McCandless's autobiography, "Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer," which distorts the truth about his life with Bella. This is followed by Bella's (or Victoria's) refutation of its facts, suggesting that her "poor fool" of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period: it "positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries". This is reinforced by the novel's intricate echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
These fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text, and relates the 'discovery' of the papers by his real-life friends, Michael Donnelly and Elspeth King. The introduction also hosts a critique of Glasgow City Council's treatment of its culture and heritage in the neglect of the local history museum, and a brief mention of Glasgow's time as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, which would be the subject of a more sustained satire in his novel Something Leather.