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Book: 1982, Janine
Written by Alasdair Gray (Cannongate Books)
Reviewed by Erick Mertz
Jock MacLeish is obsessed: with power, by women, with the prickly politics of the British Empire and much more powerfully than any of these realities, he is obsessed by his spiraling skewed idea of each, powered through the lens of continued loneliness. His prowess as a Scotsman in downtrodden Edinborough is a wellspring of great inadequacy as is his abject usury of those who draw close. Whatever shape or size they come in, these women who he constantly rattles on about cripple something in him. He is shriveled up inside - on the outside as well, when any of the four women he deliberates on question his potency. There is no end to how these deficiencies savage him.
Labeling Alasdair Gray's vision throughout 1982, Janine as psychotic - or manic, dystopic or otherwise deranged - is a largely shortsighted observation. Sure, the lewd and sexually deviant ideals of Jock MacLeish can be well described with all of those adjectives, they just cannot be limited to them. In the sense we are all depraved and shaded in our deepest, darkest perversions, Gray's protagonist is the ultimate voice of post modern debauchery. His failure as a lover and husband takes his unseemly day-to-day fetishes and frames it as behavior with its own unique consequences. Were 1982, Janine mere smut as it has been accused of being it would fail to explore the humor and pathos of its peddler. Call him Humbert Humbert for the Trainspotting crowd.
In order to capture the disjointed mind of Jock MacLeish, Gray employs a series of wild literary devices ranging from an unreliable narrator to contradictory parenthetical remarks to the majority of chapter 11 consisting of skewed typeface and stabbing inverted story lines. The author labels this segment "The Ministry of Voices," a more than apt descriptor for a series of clashing, brawling internal view points. As MacLeish struggles to tell his personal story, wedges of fine and italicized print representative of interjecting voices cram in any slot they fit. It is visually stunning and an innovative tool. The Scottish brogue is limited to dialogue, a device that makes the novel a smoother read than the work of Irvine Welsh which requires an in-speak decoder ring. As a whole, 1982, Janine reads like a series of separate narrative experiments, most of which work well in illustrating how and why MacLeish is mired by the arresting perversions that he is.
The great success of 1982, Janine is its ability to make accessible those most remote and frightening places of our collective psyche. It is an energetic, frenetic and in places a daunting novel to read, but never once does it lose relevancy. You wouldn't want to know or even encounter Jock MacLeigh per se - most of all, let your sister date him, but you leave this leg of his tale hoping his fragile psyche falls into capable hands.
© 2003 - Erick Mertz