Alasdair Gray – Poor Things (1992) Review

8.5/10

Warning: some spoilers for the 2023 film Poor Things by director Yorgos Lanthimos. The film treats some information as reveals late in the story, while some of that information is communicated quite early in the novel and I will mention some of it.

All the trouble starts for Archie McCandless when he meets the eccentric and repulsively ugly Godwin Baxter. Both men are young doctors, but Godwin is clearly a genius and invites Archie over to show him his latest medical experiments. Alasdair Gray never explains it in obvious terms but he drops many hints that Godwin is some kind of Frankenstein creature. He has a lumpy head, blocky hands with tiny fingers and a screeching, underdeveloped voice. A self-made man, if you will. Godwin introduces Archie to what is ostensibly his niece, Bella Baxter, but it quickly becomes clear that Bella is a created thing also. Godwin a.k.a. God fished the body of a 25-year old woman from the river and inserted a baby’s brain inside her skull. Bella’s brain develops quite quickly in her adult body.

Archie quickly points out a very thorny issue here that goes to the heart of this entire novel:

“You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages: the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman. I will not allow it, Baxter.”

Even though Archie strongly objects to this entire affair, both men quickly fall for Bella and by the time she is mentally a kid, Archie can’t help but blurt out that he wants to marry her. Typical. At this point, Gray flips the table and makes Bella into something that makes the stuffy and patriarchal Victorian hearts of these men flutter in extreme discomfiture: Bella is very sexually promiscuous, direct and dominant, and so taking up behavior that is commonly only accepted in men. What is even funnier is Bella’s childlike directness and complete disregard for any social norms. Everything she says makes her male lovers squirm from many-pronged attacks on their egos:

“I am not deserting you, God,”  she told him soothingly, “or not right away. Candle is very poor so we’ll both find it handy to live with you for a long time. […] But I am a very romantic woman who needs a lot of sex but not from you because you cannot help treating me like a child, and I can not CAN NOT treat you like one. I am marrying Candle because I can treat him how I like.” 

Gray makes Poor Things feel like a rediscovered classical gothic novel but approaches it in a postmodern way. His novel is full of dark humor and is self-consciously gothic. (“I think we make for a very gothic couple,” Bella says.) The anxious handwringing by all the male characters around Bella is even more exaggerated by putting the story in the 1880s. In effect, putting the story somewhere around the Suffragette movement of the early 1900s. Bella’s story may be interpreted as a reflection of that time and male reactions to it. The story is framed as the diary of Archie McCandless and Gray imitates the writing style of self-effacing yet melodramatic gentlemen from that time, but don’t worry if that sounds dry or tedious, because Gray’s writing is actually fascinating and the story and dialogue are so strange that it is a very compelling book to read. Together, the satirical tone, faux-Victorian style and the layered themes give the text a lot of flavour.

Bella steals the show here and I would call her an artistic achievement by Gray. She approaches life as a kid enacting life in a toyhouse, and everything she says and does electrifies the novel. Meanwhile, the clowns who are the men around her eat themselves up in anxiety over love, status, ego and purpose, and Gray brings this to the reader in a deadpan, darkly comedic way that is full of quotable lines and humorous twists. Bella “ elopes” with a foppish dandy, Duncan, and the important point here is that we only ever see the story from his eyes as he loses his mind and describes Bella as some evil Satanic Lilith. We always only see Bella from a male point of view, in a post-modern approach to show that she as a woman doesn’t have a voice here, until Gray flips the script again and has Bella add letters that show her perspective which is far more rational than Archie’s or Duncan’s.

I can’t help but feel that the novel peters out as Bella grows up and learns about politics and poverty. The quirkiness and comedy that went hand in hand with Bella’s youthfulness disappear, and more serious socialist themes start to pop up as Bella decides what to do with her life. Her role as foil for the male characters changes. The crazy eroticism disappears and all that seems to be left is Bella as a placeholder character for Gray, as a fresh, innocent, unspoiled soul who learned about economics and politics and chose to do good. Her final words feel so sour and serious. It ends with twenty pages of notes of Bella arguing in letters about politics and is a far cry from the invigorating chapters earlier in the novel. It feels like Gray wanted his novel to have a strong political flavour and something of the joy got lost in it.

The 2023 film adaptation is so good that it may overshadow this novel, but it is still worth a read and appreciate it as a funny and complex piece of writing.