Customer Reviews
In a Spin - By: Tom Scott, 13 Oct 2007 
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 & trust the author's bounce will keep you from smacking into the ground. Old Menin Love, how do I love that title, repays that trust. Gray has enough bounce to keep us all upin the air. Here the main character takes the biscuit. John Tunnock - and, yes, you're probably supposed to wonder if that's toilet & teacake or anything else that goes with too much tea - is a wheeze, deadin 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 himselfin this novel. The three unwritten novels derive from three plays written by Gray 30 to 40 years ago, setin the Athens of Socrates,in Renaissance Florence & 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, & long after you dismissed it, turn out to be the point. Playing himselfin 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 & commerce. A wheeze, but brilliantly done, Old Menin Love demonstrates that the only way is to let go, let it happen & trust, while hanging on for dear life. Despite all the genial eccentricity & wit, the blooming anger & growing gloom, there is a point to it - an unmissable treat of a book.
