Andro Linklater

Perhaps the greatest?

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass<br /> <br type="_moz" />

issue 13 September 2008

Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography, by Rodge Glass

It would be easier to write a biography of Alasdair Gray if he were Chinese. There would be no need to divide image from word, myth-making from realism, truth from ideology. He would be reverentially portrayed as a master of pictography conveying the struggle for harmony between the inner and outer essences of man and society. And the great artist himself would live decorously on a large government pension befitting a social treasure. Instead of which, his present biographer, the painfully named Rodge Glass, has been forced to write the life of a self-described ‘fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old, Glasgow pedestrian’, who reproduces in pictures and stories the consequences of God’s cosmic joke in creating a world of hugely sexed Adams and abundantly sadistic Eves, then abandoning them with only a capacity for companionship and imagination to remind them that He ever existed.

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