[First published in The Independent as 'The seamy side of sexless Scotland'. For more about Alasdair Gray see: alasdairgrayspace.net]

While it would be perfectly accurate to describe Alasdair Gray as a writer and artist, to do so would be to miss the point. Alasdair Gray is a subversive, a dryly humorous underminer of conventions, a ridiculer of humbug in the best Scottish tradition. He defies easy categorisation; he is a highly regarded author who is also an acclaimed and collected artist, a writer in his fifties who has a cult following among readers half his age.

After the publication of his first novel, Lanark, he was profiled by I-D magazine and described by Anthony Burgess as the first important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott - more diverse sources of kudos are hard to imagine. Gray’s books are intriguing objects in themselves. Illustrated by Gray’s distinctive pen and ink drawings, the text laid out according to his idiosyncratic views on typography, they are full of footnotes, both erudite and silly – Lewis Carroll or Beatrix Potter is just as likely to be cited as Milton or Kafka – and these, like the blurbs on the dust jackets, are not mere appendages, they are as much a part of Gray's creation as the text and the illustrations.

Throughout his volumes every convention of publishing, however arcane, is sent up. But the more obscure the convention, the funnier: the first edition of his unlikely stories mostly contains an erratum and slip on which is printed: ‘this slip has been inserted by mistake’.

Gray’s slightly shambolic appearance and gleeful ridiculing of the literary establishment – the dust jacket of Poor Things sports spoof reviews by Auberon Quinn in the Private Nose and Paul Tomlin in the Times Literary Implement (‘I enjoy these wee things’) – belie the fact that since the publication of Lanark he has, in a sense, become part of that establishment himself. As an author whose books are routinely reviewed by the national papers – and now as a Whitbread winner – he is a major figure in Britain as well as a local hero in Scotland.

He not only commands large advances, he is often stopped by autograph hunters and fans. Asked how he feels about this he says: ‘Cheerful, cheerful....’ His modesty is not disingenuous. Blinking through his glasses he says how surprised he was when recently the University of Bologna paid for his flight to Italy and accommodation so that he could give a lecture.

Poor Things is Gray’s first major novel since 1982 Janine, although he has published a number of others during the subsequent decade, from the entertaining and prophetic satire of Westminster politics, McGrotty and Ludmilla, to Something Leather, a collection of interlinked short stories. Even before it was published, however, Gray was confident that Poor Things would make its mark, seeing it more on a par with Lanark, which narrowly missed the Booker prize shortlist. ‘It's done very much in the style of, well, several Victorian novels. I think it has a good chance, partly because the Victorian pastiche with a Frankenstein tint seems to be very fashionable these days.’

The plot is of suitably gothic complexity. ‘I had a kind of dream in which I was introduced to a youngish woman, sitting staring out at a yard. I had a notion that the person who had brought me to see her had invented her at that age by a kind of Frankenstein operation, and I remembered his voice saying: “It's important that she sees as many things as possible because she won't be able to think until she's got some memories to think about.” Anyway, when I woke up I was quite interested with that idea, with somebody coming alive at a greater age than usual, the idea of not going through the normal baby procedure first....’.

The book is in the form of a number of written accounts which have supposedly only recently come to light. One is by Archibald McCandless, a friend of the surgeon who ‘created’ the woman by replacing her brain with her unborn child's ‘blank’ brain; another by the woman herself. Inevitably the accounts do not tally, so the reader is left with a choice of whom to believe. Was the heroine, Bella Baxter, the passive creation of a hideous but brilliant surgeon, or an intelligent woman who escaped from a frigid general before he could perform a clitoridectomy on her?

‘The book ends with a quantity of notes,’ says Gray. ‘I as editor of the book, take the line that Archibald McCandless’s account is the true one and to that her account is the desperate effort of a woman who is incapable of facing up to her origin. But,’ he adds laughing, ‘it is obvious that I am insanely prejudiced.’

Since the publication of Poor Things Gray has been able to return to work on his Anthology of Prefaces, to be published by Canongate, the small Scottish publishing house he helped set up. The Anthology is, he says, a big rather scholastic history of English literature. It is obviously a project which is very dear to him. He admitted to his former London publishers, Jonathan Cape, that he was hoping to get a very big advance for Poor Things in order to be able to continue working on it. The frosty reaction to this frankness led Gray to offer Poor Things to Bloomsbury who accepted it before selling the paperback rights to Penguin. However, he comments: ‘I don't want to be thought of as having shifted totally my allegiance to England for financial reasons.’

What with the novels and the anthology, Gray has been spending more time writing than painting or drawing in the last few the years, although he trained as a painter at Glasgow School of Art. Like the hero of Lanark, a novel which has considerable autobiographical elements, one of his first major paintings was a mural in the church which was demolished not long after the paintings completion. He is, he says, ‘very fond of murals’.

While his paintings have been compared to those of Stanley Spencer, his pen and ink drawings, particularly of female nudes, are reminiscent of those of Eric Gill. He is not surprised by the comparison – both are artists he admires – although when the similarity of subject matter is mentioned, he says modestly: ‘We are both interested in erotic subject matter, but I'm not quite sure if it always comes out sexy...’. Nevertheless, the frank sexuality of some of his work, whether as an artist or writer, can be seen as one facet of his warts-and-all portrayal of the world.

There is a dark apocalyptic streak running through Gray’s work, a reflection of a world in which things often get worse rather than better. The Scotland of his writing is not the clean-scoured, early-rising, sexless Scotland of picture postcard images; it is an altogether more violent, threatening – and interesting – place. ‘I am,’ he says, ‘more and more aware of the unrespectable side of Scottishness.’

Despite sometimes confronting the reader with this uncomfortable view of the world, Gray’s books are, above all, readable. It is their humour, pace and plot which draw the reader along; bigger issues are there for those who seek to find them. Consequently, although Poor Things could be seen as a somewhat philosophical novel – the idea of a new brain implanted in an old body could have come straight from Descartes – Gray dismisses this, to concentrate on the novel's entertainment value. ‘I think it's the funniest book I've ever written,’ he says happily. Then, with a subversive twinkle in his eye he adds; ‘It's also the most socialist, really. But of course,’ – he continues in a stage whisper – ‘people don't need to notice that’.

Julia Thrift

Julia Thrift interviews Alasdair Gray about his book, Poor Things