1992 novel by Alasdair Gray
Poor Things  First edition |
| Author | Alasdair Gray |
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| Cover artist | Alasdair Gray |
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| Country | Scotland |
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| Language | English |
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| Publisher | Bloomsbury Press |
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Publication date | 1992 |
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| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
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| Preceded by | McGrotty and Ludmilla |
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Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer is a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year.[1][2]
The novel was called "a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book" by the London Review of Books. It is a departure from Gray's usual subject-matter of Glasgow realism and fantasy. However, its Victorian narrative takes in Gray's previous concerns with social inequalities, relationships, memory and identity.[3]
Plot
The main body of the work centres on Bella Baxter, a woman whose early life and identity are the subject of some ambiguity. That ambiguity is complicated by her husband Archibald McCandless's autobiography Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer which distorts the truth about his life with Bella. He claims that she was a corpse, resurrected by McCandless's colleague, scientist Dr Godwin Baxter, who had her brain replaced with that of her unborn fetus, resulting in her having an infant's mind. While designed to be Baxter's companion, her sexual appetite causes her to pursue other men, including McCandless and a foppish lawyer named Duncan Wedderburn, with whom she elopes and embarks on a hedonistic odyssey around Europe, Northern Africa, and Central Asia.
This narrative is followed by Bella's refutation of its facts, suggesting that her "poor fool" of a husband has concocted a life for her from the prevailing gothic and romantic motifs of the period: it "positively stinks of all that was morbid in that most morbid of centuries". This is reinforced by the novel's intricate echoes of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
These fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text, and relates the "discovery" of the papers by his real-life friends, Michael Donnelly and Elspeth King. The introduction also hosts a critique of Glasgow City Council's treatment of its culture and heritage in the neglect of the city's social history museum, the People's Palace, and a brief mention of Glasgow's time as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, which was the subject of a more sustained satire in his novel Something Leather.
Poor Things contains illustrations by Alasdair Gray, which the text claims are by the Scottish etcher and illustrator William Strang. There are also punning additions of fragments of images from Gray's Anatomy. One feature of the novel that has attracted comment is the page of review quotes, featuring a printed erratum strip. Some of these reviews are patently fictitious (such as those from the Skiberdeen Eagle and the Private Nose) and others are attributed to real publications, but seem so harsh that their authenticity is called into question.
