Product Description

'Alasdair Gray's new novel, Old Men in Love, exhibits all of those faintly preposterous foibles that make him a writer more loved than prized. The bulk of the text constitutes the posthumous papers of a recondite - yet venal - retired Glaswegian schoolmaster, named John Tunnock (as in the celebrated tea cake), that have, seemingly, been edited and collated by Gray himself. 'This literary subterfuge serves to fool no one who needs fooling, yet will satisfy all who believe that the truth can be found more exactly in chance occurrences, serendipity, and the eggy scrapings from the breakfast plates of the neglected, than any crude, linear naturalism. 'Tunnock is a beguiling figure, at once feisty and fusty. His historical fictions chivvy us into Periclean Athens, Renaissance Italy and then bury our noses in the ordure of sanctity given off by charismatic Victorian religious sectaries. Excursions into geological time are placed in counterpoint to diaristic jottings describing Tunnock's own erotic misadventures and the millennial trivia of the Anthony Linton Blair Government's final five years. 'Only Gray can be fecklessly sexy as well as insidiously sagacious. Only Gray can beguile quite so limpidly. If I were a Hollywood screenwriter (which, to the best of my knowledge, I am not), I would pitch the film adaptation of Old Men in Love thus: 'Imagine Lanark meets Something Leather, with a kind of a Poor Things feel to it ' By this I mean to convey to this novel's readers that Alasdair Gray remains, first and foremost, entirely sui generis. He's the very best Alasdair Gray that we have, and we should cherish his works accordingly.' - Will Self

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #253187 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 311 pages

Review
`Gray's startling imagination fizzes throughout. Beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts' --Sunday Times

Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday
`Alasdair Gray, it seems, is unwilling to muck about with a good formula... A work of some genius... If you like Alasdair Gray, this has it all.'

Christopher Tayler, Guardian
`As Jonathan Coe once put it in an essay on Gray's 1982, Janine (1984), you get an immediate sense of being "in thoroughly genial if eccentric company"... There's something appealingly direct about the way his characters get to grips with political questions.'

Customer Reviews

In a Spin
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.

When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.