Teaching the teachers
Kate Hubbard
MAVIS BELFRAGE: A ROMANTIC NOVEL WITH FIVE SHORTER TALES by Alasdair Gray Bloomsbury, £13.99, pp. 158 This is a small volume — a novella and five stories, which themselves diminish in length, so that the last, a re-telling of a newspaper story about a conman's final fling, is a mere fragment — but by no means a slight one. It is also surprising, perhaps pleasantly so for readers who have hitherto found Gray too tricksy, too zany for comfort, in that though the humour, playfulness and eccentricity of these stories is entirely characteristic, their simplicity, on the surface at least, is less so. And here Gray, habitually hailed as a Scottish Nationalist writer, along with the likes of James Kelman and Agnes Owens, relegates Glasgow and politics to a back seat.
Gray himself describes this collection as illustrating different and painful kinds of education. This should be understood as education of a sentimental and moral nature (the one complementing the other), rather than intellectual. Several characters, liberally endowed with formal qualifica- tions, show themselves lacking in less tangi- ble forms of wisdom. One such is Colin Kerr, the hero of the title story, a prim, inhibited young man, a passion for lego his sole eccentricity, who learns a hard, but humanising lesson when he embarks on an unlikely and doomed romance with the eponymous Mavis. Mavis is attractive, self- ish and amoral, a 'bit of a bitch' as she admits herself. She moves into Colin's home, shared with his father, with her eight-year-old son in tow, a child who con- verses with a knowingness beyond his years: 'It's only fair to tell you that I take much more sugar than is healthy for a growing boy'. When she tires of Colin she openly takes a lover and soon after takes off altogether.
Similarly, in 'A Night Off, another teacher in need of teaching attempts to alleviate his sense of failure and ineffectu- alness by a weekly night out, away from home and family. After an evening where he allows himself to be compromised by a blustering fraud he realises that, 'this sacri- fice to Bohemian good-fellowship had brought . . no greater liveliness, no higher sense of social existence', and furthermore that his truest source of affection and affir- mation lies with his wife and child. That such conclusions avoid triteness is a mark of Gray's light touch.
Where 'Mavis Belfrage' is light-hearted the subsequent tales are introduced as `sober', and they are, in the sense that they are peopled by characters battling through inadequacy, or loneliness, or arrogance, to recognise sobering truths. Most sober of all, indeed striking an anomalous, sour note alongside the charm and innocence elsewhere, is 'Money', which explores the corrupting effects on the narrator of newly acquired wealth and of the false sense of social status wealth confers (the symbiotic relationship of money and class is a recur- ring theme). Gray's playful façade and the curious atonal quality of his writing dis- guise a profound moral seriousness; these tales can all be read, to varying degrees, as parables.
Gray is an acutely self-conscious writer, and an active stage-manager of his own work, with a penchant for helpful notes in the margin. The seeming effortlessness of these stories and his ingenuous de-bunking (he professes bewilderment that his fiction should be described as 'post-modern', mocking the term as 'a specimen of intel- lectual after-birth') should not be taken at face value, nor is he averse to a bit of `intellectual after-birth'. The epilogue to 'Edison's Tractatus' (the penultimate tale of a man too brainy for his own good) lists the ingredients which went into the making of the story, including a long-standing friendship, a woman spotted making notes on a train, the possible applications of the word 'interface'. This helps to illuminate Gray's searching intellect, his magpie-like gathering of material and the creative pro- cess itself. It also draws attention to the fact that his writing is as artful as it is art- less. 'The urge to deliver an uninterrupted monologue is the energy driving most teachers, story-tellers and politicians', writes Gray. These monologues are a pleasure to listen to.
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