‘Poor Things’ by Alasdair Gray     (1992) –  318 pages

Have you noticed a certain well-edited or over-edited sameness to much of today’s fiction? Then ‘Poor Things’ may be the novel for you. This preposterous novel breaks all the rules. It is a delight, in that sense.

A doctor in Victorian times, Dr. Godwin Baxter, reanimates a dead woman, Bella Baxter, and implants the brain of her unborn baby into her head. Bella calls Dr. Godwin Baxter “God” for short. At first, Dr. Baxter’s friend, Dr. Archibald McCandless, is taken aback upon meeting Bella.

“Only idiots and infants talk like that, are capable of such radiant happiness, of such frank glee and friendship on meeting someone new. It is dreadful to see such things in a lovely young woman.”

But he quickly falls in love with this grown woman Bella with the mind of a child. He agrees to marry Bella in order to take her away from her creator.

“You think you are about to possess what men have hopelessly yearned for throughout the ages; the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman. I will not allow it, Baxter.”

Of course no reader could take this plot seriously, so there is always a humorous sly undertone to this story.

The guiding lights of ‘Poor Things’ are those old favorites, the King James version of the Bible and Shakespeare, with an occasional stop-off for the great Russian literature of the 19^th century.

“She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity,”

‘Poor Things’ is a pastiche of a novel, a hodge podge of stuff taken from different sources. It is supposedly the published memoirs, written in 1880, of Dr. Archibald McCandless titled “Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Health Officer”. So here we have a book within a book. In his memoirs, Dr. McCandless also finds room to put in a letter from Bella Baxter and a letter from her first man friend, a fool named Derek Wedderburn.

‘Poor Things’ also contains wild drawings made by our real author, Alasdair Gray himself.

The last forty pages of ‘Poor Things’ is devoted to critical and historical notes from the author Alasdair Gray. Usually, in a work of fiction, the author’s notes clarify some points raised by the story. Here, in ‘Poor Things’, these notes are part of the fiction, telling what happened to these fictional characters after the novel ends.

‘Poor Things’ is a wild and woolly Victorian story, but unlike most Victorian stories, it is filled with sex.

It has been a while since I have read an amusing pastiche novel like ‘Poor Things’. They don’t make novels like this anymore.

Grade:    A