ublished in 1992, Poor Things once more saw Alasdair Gray at the height of his creative powers. The title of the book refers to the semi-fantastic narrative of one Archibald McCandless M.D., subtitled 'Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer'. As was the case with Lanark, the reader finds this text encircled by another, this time an elaborate and detailed introduction and postscript, openly penned by Gray himself. A third narrative is to be found however, in the form of a letter by one of the characters described at length within McCandless' 'Poor Things', refuting the validity of that text.
McCandless' tale is one in which a somewhat otherworldly Doctor, Godwin Baxter, revives the body of a woman drowned by suicide. Deciding that any life which was so unhappy as to will its own destruction should be best left in termination, Baxter transplants the brain of the woman's unborn child into the body of its mother. In time that woman becomes Bella Baxter, a fabulously freethinking woman with whom McCandless predictably falls in love, and, in the fullness of time, ultimately marries.
Gray's book is a masterful blending of styles, filled with subtle meta-narrative gamesplaying. His introduction to the book, in which he describes the factual uncovering of a fiction (or the fictional uncovering of a fact), warns the reader that he/she may easily mistake the found narrative of Archibald McCandless for 'a grotesque fiction'. He also pre-empts the critic by acknowledging that the book may merely be 'a blackly humorous fiction into which some real experiences and historical facts have been cunningly woven' (p. XIII). This, of course, is precisely what it is, a wonderfully bewildering compendium of historical fact and high Gothic fantasy. That Gray provides a chapter of notes 'critical and historical' at the books end, only serves to further puzzle and confuse the reader. These annotations to McCandless' text are every bit as unreliable, while being just as paradoxically factual and useful, as were those contained within Lanark's 'Index of Plagiarisms'. Gray's familiar mix of close-up realist detail, opinionated polemic, and wildly creative fiction are intermingled to such a degree within these notes as to render what should be a clarifying appendix all the more baffling.
The trick of having a central narrative 'found' (in this case in a pile of rubbish, and appropriated by Michael Donnelly for Glasgow's People's Palace Museum) is not a new one. Nor is the bookending of the main text by that of another, often contradictory, author without precedent. Such intertextualities are, however, the very stuff of Gray's playful style. He even nudges the reader in the direction of his sources in the introduction: 'a book like Scott's Mortality and Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner'.
But while the structure of Poor Things may owe much to Hogg, thematically it draws from two other, even darker texts. Perhaps the most striking among these is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a tale born of nightmare, and one which has entered the public consciousness in a not unsuitably twisted and reconstructed fashion. That Poor Things also borrows the partly epistolary narrative technique of that book only furthers the obvious comparisons. There is, however, another similarly debased text to use varying perspectives in order to cast light on a singular tale: Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Both of these are, of course, stories with which everyone in the Western World is familiar, albeit mostly in their altered and disfigured cinematic forms. Stevenson's 'urban Gothic', while set in London, owes much to the twisting streets and dark duality of Edinburgh's Old Town, where it was quite possible to turn down from a safe, respectable street and immediately find oneself in an apparently different world, one of poverty and filth.
It is through this atmosphere of social duality which so infuses Poor Things that Godwin Baxter is seen to be at once a respectable, if slightly enigmatic, financially secure Doctor residing in the affluent Park Circus area of Glasgow, and a grotesque abomination itself capable of sordid human experimentation. Godwin Baxter thus appears to embody the spirits of both Victor Frankenstein and of his creation. He is simultaneously the crudely constructed grotesque, resulting from Sir Colin Baxter's 'revolutionary' medical practices, and the deviant visionary, capable of manufacturing a living being from dead tissue.
There is, however, another way in which Baxter can be seen to be a construction. His name is a very deliberate reference to the life of Mary Shelly. The full name of the character is given as Godwin Bysshe Baxter: Godwin after Shelley's father William Godwin; Bysshe after her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley; and Baxter after the Scottish family with whom the young Mary spent many holidays near Dundee. This manner of 'construction' can thus be extended to encompass the book itself, stitched together in the Frankenstein-method from fact, history and literature: the remnants of 'dead' texts and tales.
There is in Gray's novel another character whose name reveals much, not merely about himself, but about the text as a whole. Archibald McCandless is referred to by Bella as Candle. At first this is the infantile abbreviation of a childish mind incapable of handling such a long, 'unreasonable' name, but it becomes one to which the more mature Bella will always cling: '"Please be Bell's new Candle you new wee candle maker"'. This succinctly pinpoints Gray's recurrent preoccupation with 'light'. In Lanark the dual worlds could comfortably be characterized as oppositions of 'light' and 'dark', with that of Thaw as the former and Lanark as the latter. Indeed it is Lanark's goal to find the light and it is only upon doing so that he is finally afforded some form of redemption.
Similarly, in 1982 Janine the dichotomy of 'light' versus 'dark' is made just as clear. All of the painful soul-searching, the fantasizing, the avoidance, and the ultimate confrontation of the past take place during the night. It is only with the arrival of a new day, with the rising of the sun, that Jock McLeish is able to find hope, to determine to live his life, rather than to run from it. That themes of 'light' and 'dark' are common to both Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde is, then, perhaps unsurprising. Indeed, the opposition is one fundamental to all Gothic fiction.
But if Candle is her 'light', then what of her 'God'. It can be no coincidence that Bella constantly refers to Baxter in such pious terms, for, while it may be a convenient abbreviation of his name, it is also a very apt description of their relationship. Bella's 'God' is indeed her creator. Irrespective of which account of events the reader ultimately chooses to favor, Godwin Baxter is unquestionably responsible for the recreation, of his 'Bella Caledonia'. Whether through surgery, or merely by tenderness and tutorship, it is clear that Baxter was in no small measure instrumental in the rebirth of Victoria Hattersley.
And it is she of course who has the last laugh. Having read Archibald McCandless' substantial tale, the reader is then confronted by the covering letter of the newly re-titled Victoria McCandless, which, in reasoned and moderate tones, sets about contradicting and making a nonsense of all that went before. Unable, out of sentiment perhaps, to destroy Candle's final work, she instead deems it necessary only to discredit what is already an unlikely tale. Gray himself naturally intervenes in order to clarify, but his annotations only confuse matters further. Like the ever-ambiguous Sir Walter Scott, Gray offers the fantastical with one hand, while simultaneously proffering the rational with the other, leaving the reader chasing their own tail.
The forgoing was adapted from Blurring the Edges, 1997.
