Old Men in Love is not, apparently, by Alasdair Gray. It is, apparently, a collection of pieces drawn from the papers of John Tunnock, a retired Glaswegian schoolteacher (and a man with a face like an open grave, if Gray’s frontispiece illustration is anything to go by). Tunnock has recently died; in a breezy introduction, a woman with the suspiciously crossword-clue name of Sara Sim-Jaeger explains how she has allowed Gray to edit and illustrate her cousin’s archive, and how “Bloomsbury Publishing of London, a highly successful firm that had done well out of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter books” has agreed to publish the result. Bloomsbury has done this handsomely, making of Tunnock’s tales a gorgeous object in eye-bending blue and silver, although this is definitely not a book that can be judged by its cover (taking the jacket off reveals the same fine lettering, but an altered title: the words “ARE STILL LEARNING” have sprouted inside the “O” of the word “love”). But it is an attractive cover, even so, and there is more playful loveliness inside, with drawings of thistles and angels, and other arresting illustrations in Gray’s characteristically inky black.

The text is made up from a heterogenous collection of other texts. Extracts from Tunnock’s diaries are interspersed with three of his historical fictions, each one dealing with (relatively) old men in love. The first story, about Socrates’s affection for Alcibiades, is set in classical Greece. The second explores the Renaissance painter Fra Lippi’s love affair with Lucrezia Buti, and the last is set in Victorian England and relates the tale of an evangelical Protestant sect that grows besotted with its leader, the funkily named Henry James Beloved. Further titbits relate Scottish history from the big bang up to the present day, and the history of Tunnock’s Glasgow childhood. Tunnock himself, judging from his diaries, is slightly unsavoury but, nonetheless, likable. From his memories of his childhood we learn that he was a solitary child, brought up by two maiden aunts who sent him to secondary school with a mockable pigskin briefcase. The solitary child grows into a solitary adult, absorbed by two passions: his desire to write a tremendous historical novel, and his yearning for what he calls “young things”. The young things turn out to be a succession of badly behaved, entirely unbiddable young women who occasionally condescend to cohabit with the ageing Tunnock, but whom neither love nor biscuits can tame.

Tunnock’s diaries, from which much of this information comes, are endearing. His multiple tries at writing a tremendous historical novel are a harder proposition. The extracts are the work of a second-rate autodidact and are, therefore, not much fun to read. The Athens chapters feature quantities of clunky dialogue, with Socrates and pals chuckling and clapping their hands to their brows with a hamminess that has a horribly authentic ring of the slush pile. The worst is Alcibiades, who can’t pronounce his “rs”. “We’re wesisting a wicked thweat,” he announces, an Ancient Greek Kenneth Williams. The Victorian section is cheerfully weird, but much more readable (the sect has a sofa, a billiards table and a fireplace in its church, so it is not altogether impossible to fathom Brother Beloved’s appeal). Gray’s startling imagination fizzes throughout, but it’s still a painful proposition in places.

But no mean critic can hope to compete with the meanness of a writer reading himself. At the end of Tunnock’s ramblings, Gray attaches a section entitled “Sidney Workman’s epilogue”. Sidney Workman, a (fictional) critic, is nasty. He has read Old Men in Love, and has only the unkindest of conclusions. “Stuffed with extracts from earlier writings . . . Literary ploys try to unify the whole rag-bag .. . We are left with the dreary tale of a failed writer and a dirty old man . .. This story is neither tragic nor funny.” It’s not, in fact: but that doesn’t prevent it from being beautiful, inventive, ambitious and nuts.

OLD MEN IN LOVE by Alasdair Gray
Bloomsbury £20 pp312

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