Jonathan Coe writes:

Although it doesn’t proceed chronologically, Glass’s new biography of Gray does enable us to trace the chronology of his work, which might be useful for those trying to anchor themselves in these choppy generic waters. It reminds us, for instance, that Gray was already 41 when he completed his first novel. From his working-class parents – especially his father – he inherited the political philosophy that runs through all his writing: his belief that ‘socialism can improve social life, that the work we like best is not done for money, and that books and art are liberating.’ And indeed, from his teenage years onwards, ‘books and art’ preoccupied Gray in equal measure. The writing of his first novel, Lanark, which took two decades, went hand in hand with his studies at the Glasgow School of Art and his first commissions as a painter of large-scale, teeming, Hieronymus Bosch-style murals. From the mid-1960s he also made a decent living writing plays for BBC television and radio. (The first, The Fall of Kelvin Walker, starred Corin Redgrave, bizarrely feminised by Glass as ‘Corinne’ in his text and ‘Connie’ in his index.) In this way, Gray began slowly to build up a reputation in his home country, while the leaking of fragments of Lanark to literary magazines helped to spread rumours that something exceptional was taking shape.

(LRB 20 November 2008)

Bloomsbury | hardback 341 pp. |ISBN: 9780747590156