The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 56

THE GUARDIAN Friday November 27 1992 DLrQ EfDSDS For the past 27 years The Guardian has awarded a prize for contemporary fiction. This year's winner is Alasdair Gray for his novel Poor Things published by Bloomsbury (14.99). The judges, chaired by James Wood, the Guardian's chief literary critic, were Laura Gumming, Jonathan Coe and Philip Hens her. Poor Things has also won this year's Whitbread Novel Award. On the short list were Ulvertbn by Adam Thorpe; Dunedin, by Sbena Mackay; The Heather Blazing, by Colm Tdibfn; and The Republic of Love, by Carol Shields The Guardian In their search for swift certainties the ruling classes are making scapegoats out of minority groups and cultural theorists Terry Eagleton Fiction Prize YEAR or two ago, a cir-I cular letter was doing fl the rounds of the Ameri- can campuses, warning LJ unwary academics of a sinister enemy in their midst, and promising to rush a lecturer to their college faster than you could order a pizza to combat this unsavoury influence.

The letter was the work of a well-known right-wing educational association, and among the names on its letterhead were a fair few Captains of industry: business executives, chairs of corporations and the kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of '68 a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath. But theory is just the symptom of a deeper cultural crisis, which extends all the way from falling standards of literacy and the antics of Madonna to university syllabuses which include nothing but lesbian poetry and the semiotics of road signs. That such syllabuses exist only in the fantasies of the political right doesn't make them any less real a threat. It is not, however. Monsieur Der-rida who has triggered this crisis, but the very Captains of Industry who are after his blood.

In its classical period, capitalism drove a wedge between culture and the rest of social life. Those human values which were unable to survive in the marketplace had to find a home else- usual beauty). An entire school of in triguing Glaswegian novelists began to appear in his wake. Gray himself began to look rather marginal, something Leather, his last novel before Poor Things, took the cleverness so admirable in his previous books to extremes. Many reviewers felt that his enormous talent was being somewhat dissipated in this peculiar tale like.

The new enemy turned out to be not some Trotskyist groupuscule or new wave of black militancy, but so the missive solemnly intoned Deconstructionism. There are several rich ironies ot fetishism in the office. about this document. For one thing, it's comically clear that its authors haven't a clue what Deconstruction Poor Things was almost universally seen as a tremendous return to form. Jonathan Coe wrote in the London Review of Books of Gray's "sudden resurgence of imaginative ism actually is, which is something of a disadvantage if you're out to hammer it.

It's hard to imagine the sales director of Toyota Tennessee energy. Philip Hensher ALASDAIR Gray is an idiosyncratic, ingenious and entertaining writer. For over ten years, he has been praised by critics, and recommended by one ordinary reader to another, without ever really seeming to enter into the mainstream of British fiction. In the opinion of the judges of the Guardian prize, Poor Things was not only one of the most accomplished books of the year, but one of the most individual. Gray exploded onto the literary scene in 1981 with Lanark.

A compendious and chaotic novel, clearly mulled over for many years, it blended fantasy and a poetic sense of place to great effect. His subsequent books, Unlikely Stories, Mostly and 1982, Janine, developed the playfulness evident from the start. Some critics complained of a lack of seriousness, or of self-restraint; Anthony Burgess described 1982, Janine as evidence of a "large talent deployed to a somewhat juvenile Gray began to seem in danger of becoming a figurehead rather than a substantial writer. He single-handedly revived the literary illustrated book (Poor Things is a volume of un- From his base in Glasgow, Coe went on, Gray "has continued to offer much needed proof that it is doggedly ploughing his way through Jacques Derrida's Grammatology. What they do know is that this trend of thought is hostile to traditional American values and before we still possible to write credible, enter taining, animated novels which are also vehicles for -socialist ideas.

If the Tories have their way, English Literature will become the linguistic equivalent of the Tower of London too smugly accuse them of paranoia Elizabeth Young, reviewing Poor Things in the Guardian, considered it to be the "most substantial" book nere, we should pause to note that they're dead right. that he had written since Lanark. Yet another irony is that a good Gray, she wrote, has finally man number of us on the political left have for some years been ursine the aged to unite a number ot appar ently irreconcilable obsessions with women, fiction, politics, and Scottish history into what is a bibliophile's paradise of postmodern deconstructionists to be more political: to come out from behind the cover of their floating signifiers and say something a little more concrete about apartheid and the International Monetary Fund. Why should the right-wine bullies pick on this precision. Poor Things revives an intriguing The winner: Alasdair Gray PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS ROBERTSON literary torm, the medical romance.

politically frail little creature? Not least the choicest irony of all Like Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or The Island of Doctor Moreau, Gray's when it is now rapidly passing out of fashion. What exactly is going on here? Why are sales directors getting steamed up about post-structuralism? Why is it that for the first time since the 1960s, the American cam where, and culture was one place where they could be cultivated on the side. This fissure ran all the way down the human body: one part of it was converted into an efficient productive instrument, while its symbolic, emotional, libidinal energies were syphoned off elsewhere, to find shelter in the three mighty regions of art, religion and sexuality. These things mattered less and less to early capitalism; but they couldn't be wholly dispensed with either. For culture had to be on hand to remind you, not least in times of political tumult, of what values you fundamentally lived by.

Though it was often enough sharply critical of what happened in the marketplace, its role was also to legitimate it to provide you with a set of high-minded rationales for your less than high-minded practices. With the advent of advanced capitalism since the last world war, all this has been transformed. Culture is still needed for spiritual legitima- puses have become places of fierce political contention? And this, let us note, at a time when so many other political struggles have been defused and rolled back. Or is that the whole point? Is this recent squabbling over Theory" a massive displacement of frustrated radical energies, which DO YOU KNOW SOMEONE SUFFERING FROM GREAT WAKERING? (ptcpl. v.b., panic which sets in when you badly need to go to the lavatory and cannot make up your mind about what book or magazine to take with you.) HELP IS JUST INCHES AWAY! (On the opposite side of this page in fact.) novel raises serious philosophical and historical issues within the engaging framework of nineteenth-century melodrama.

What seems at first an amusing farrago of virtuous Scotswomen, wicked English rakes, Parisian brothels and monstrous medical experimentation, slowly shows itself to be a meditation upon sexual morality and upon notions of femininity. In our discussion, Alasdair Gray emerged relatively quickly, from an exceptionally strong shortlist, for the Guardian prize. We all admired the other books on the list. However, there was no doubt in our minds that Gray's continuously surprising fable gave the most pleasure to the reader. The list of writers Gray has been compared to is almost comic in its variety Dunbar, Rabelais, James Joyce, Smollett and George Douglas Brown.

But Gray is utterly his own man, and any reader should be able to take immense and deepening delight from Poor Things. It is as irresistible as cream cake, and as nourishing as lentils; and no prize that we can confer on it could possibly increase its many and various merits. can find no outlet in the classical arenas of political combat and so have been funnelled into discourse, textuality, signification? This is not wholly stupid notion. Post-struc turalism is among other things a fRiotfranhv. War.

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