1982, Janine is Alasdair Gray’s second novel, published in 1984, and still among his most fought-over books. Gray used pornography as a narrative engine, not only as sensory filler. For kink readers this is not a how-to. It is a Scottish drunk building SM scenes as a wall, then watching the wall fail.
Jock McLeish and the fantasy cast
The narrator is Jock McLeish, a supervisor who installs alarm systems — nearly fifty, divorced, alcoholic. In one night in a hotel in Peebles or Selkirk he tries to assemble an intricate sadomasochistic fantasy. The cast: Janine, drawn from a childhood memory of Jane Russell in The Outlaw; Superb, short for Superbitch; and Big Momma, an obese lesbian.
They are put through detailed SM practices, some described at length. McLeish cannot stay inside the fantasy. Memories of his real life and lovers keep breaking in and push him toward suicide. Chapter 11 is a typographical blast: the text splits into several voices on the page, including God’s. The crisis ends when he vomits the pills he hoped would kill him. In the morning he has to face what he has done.
Gray’s own attack blurb
On the first hardback and paperback Gray wrote his own blurb as an attack: an already dated novel set inside the head of an ageing, divorced, alcoholic, sleepless security-installations supervisor tippling in a small Scottish hotel bedroom; full of depressing memories and Conservative propaganda, mainly a sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy; even God’s arrival in later chapters fails to elevate the tone; every stylistic excess and moral defect critics ignored in Lanark and Unlikely Stories, Mostly is here in concentrated form.
In a 2000 interview he said that when he wrote the pornographic parts he was deliberately shocking himself. He still thought it his best novel and could not reread it — he would be back to being as old-fashioned as he was before imagining it.
Critics split
The paperback appendix collects praise and abuse. Jonathan Baumbach in The New York Times granted verbal energy and intensity of vision. William Boyd in the Times Literary Supplement called the style limpid and classically elegant. Paul Ableman in The Literary Review complained of irritating mannerisms. Peter Levi on the BBC called it radioactive hogwash. Joe Ambrose in the Irish Sunday Tribune called the author a vainglorious lout and a profoundly reactionary penman.
J. A. McArdle in the Irish Independent suspected some reviewers had not finished the book, and said 1982, Janine is not pornography but a thoughtful, sad study of being trapped where the little man, woman, or country will always be exploited by bigger bullies. Will Self, introducing the 2003 Canongate Classic, reads the pornographic fantasies as how McLeish represses real past love affairs, shows his reactionary politics, and lands childhood in sex; linking sex with “homecoming” comes from a hard relationship with his mother. Self also reads the title: 1982 as one of Scotland’s many nadirs, including the destruction of the coal industry that had employed McLeish’s father, under a Conservative government McLeish supports.
Typography and the current edition
Dave Langford, reviewing for White Dwarf #55, noted God and several SF themes as guest stars and called chapter 11 the most boggling typography since early Alfred Bester. The current Canongate edition is dated 1 July 2010, ISBN 978-1-84767-444-9.
The SM in the book is long, specific, and not hygienic. It is the fantasy a frightened Tory technician uses to not look at his life — and then the fantasy becomes the only honest document he has.
