A NUTTY BEAUTY - Rated 
...and a joy to read and view!
Enriched with the athor's fine letterings, drawings and various stylish illustrations (well, he's a "painter certificated by Glasgow Art School", isn't he?) which make the book a true pleasure for the mind and eye alike, all the rest is schizophrenia galore. But what a feast of it!
The narration is made up from a triangulated collection of texts, sprinkled with the main character's diaries. We are transported to Classic Athens, to Renaissance Italy and to Victorian England, with savouries from Scottish history and the narrator's sexual musings.
The author's ideas and creative imagination are all over the place, and fun to read, with their weird and sharp propositions.
A startling book, to be sure, ambitious and impossible not to like.
In a Spin - Rated
To read Alasdair Gray, a man who interrupts his own interruptions, is a joyful nosedive into freewheeling post-modernist headspin. The only way to do it is to let go, let it happen and trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Men in Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all up in the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet and teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, dead in mysterious circumstances, brought to life by his diaries, a writer who failed to write three novels. Why three? Why not seven, or forty seven? There is a reason. Gray is examining himself in this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, set in the Athens of Socrates, in Renaissance Florence and Victoria's Britain.
When reading Gray erroneous questions tag onto every given fact. You suspect clues or trickery or just plain playfulness as this master of verve draws you into a verbal Alice-through-the-looking-glass world where you pretty much write your own story led by the maddest hatter at that proverbial tea-party. Or at least, I do, playing constantly suspicious, because the innocuous breezy side-step will, in the end, and long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himself in his own novel, Gray responds to the question 'End notes or footnotes' with 'Marginal notes. I like widening my readers' range of expectations.' There we have it, wider they cannot be. Don't expect storytelling. This is philosophical meandering around topics that range from Iraq to the tug-of-war between art and commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Men in Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen and trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity and wit, the blooming anger and growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.
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