1982, Janine is Alasdair Gray’s second novel, published in 1984, and still his most fought-over book. Gray used pornography as a narrative machine. Plenty of reviewers called that a moral defect. Gray, and others, have called it his best work. The engine of the book is a long night in which Jock McLeish tries to assemble an intricate sadomasochistic fantasy and keeps being interrupted by the real women and real politics he is trying not to see. For kink readers this is not a how-to. It is a Scottish drunk using SM scenes as a wall, then watching the wall fail.
A hotel room, three women, and the pills
The narrator is Jock McLeish, a supervisor who installs alarm systems. He is divorced, alcoholic, nearly fifty. His wreckage collects in one night in a hotel in Peebles or Selkirk. He sets out to spend the night building a pornographic 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. All of them are put through sadomasochistic practices, some described at length. McLeish cannot stay inside the fantasy. Memories of his actual life and lovers keep breaking in. Those memories 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 and, in the morning, has to face what he has done.
Gray’s own warning label
On the first hardback and paperback, Gray wrote his own blurb as an attack. “This already dated novel is set inside the head of an ageing, divorced, alcoholic, insomniac supervisor of security installations who is tippling in the bedroom of a small Scottish hotel. Though full of depressing memories and propaganda for the Conservative Party it is mainly a sadomasochistic fetishistic fantasy. Even the arrival of God in the later chapters fails to elevate the tone. Every stylistic excess and moral defect which critics conspired to ignore in the author’s first books, Lanark and Unlikely Stories, Mostly, is to be found here in concentrated form.” In a 2000 interview he said that when he wrote the pornographic parts he was “deliberately shocking myself,” that he still thought it his best novel, and that he could not reread it — he was “back to being as old fashioned as I was before imagining it.”
Radioactive hogwash, or a study of the little man
The book split critics as few modern novels have. The paperback ends with an appendix of praise and abuse. Jonathan Baumbach in The New York Times granted it “a verbal energy, an intensity of vision.” William Boyd in the Times Literary Supplement called the style “limpid and classically elegant.” Next to Boyd the appendix sets Paul Ableman in The Literary Review complaining of “irritating mannerisms.” Peter Levi on the BBC called it “Radioactive hogwash.” Joe Ambrose in the Irish Sunday Tribune — already hostile to much of Gray — called the author “a vainglorious lout” and “a profoundly reactionary penman.” J. A. McArdle in the Irish Independent suspected that some reviewers had not read the book, and said 1982, Janine “is not pornography but a thoughtful and sad study of the human predicament; to be trapped in a world where the little man, woman or country will always be exploited by the big bullies.”
Will Self, introducing the 2003 Canongate Classic, argues that the pornographic fantasies are how McLeish represses real past love affairs, how his reactionary politics show, and how childhood lands in sex. McLeish’s habit of 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. Dave Langford, reviewing for White Dwarf #55, noted God and several SF themes as guest stars and “a chapter of the most boggling typography since early Alfred Bester.” The current Canongate edition is Alasdair Gray, 1982 Janine (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.
