Lanark: a life in 4 books by Alasdair Gray Page A

waves of cheering in a football stadium. Crowds poured over the circular floor from tunnels on every side and disappeared through square doors between the tunnel entrances. Among white-coated nurses and doctors Lanark saw people in green dustcoats, brown overalls, blue uniforms and charcoal-grey business suits. He looked upward and staggered giddily. He was staring up a vast perpendicular shaft with gold and orange light flowing continually up the walls in diminishing rings like the rings of a target. Munro gripped his arm and led him to a door which opened, then slid shut behind them.
    They were in a lift with the still air of a small ward. Munro looked up at a circular mesh in the middle of the ceiling and said, “The sink, please. Any entrance.”
    There was a faint hum but no sense of movement. Munro said,
    “Our corridors have confusing acoustics. Did you ask something?”
    “Why do people only walk in one direction?”
    “Each ward has two corridors, one leading in and the other out. This allows the air to circulate, and nobody goes against the current.”
    “Who were the people in the big hall?”
    “Doctors, like you and me.”
    “But doctors were a tiny minority.”
    “Do you think so? I suppose it’s possible. We need engineers and clerks and chemists to supervise lighting and synthesize food and so on, but we only see those in the halls; they have their own corridors. They’re a strange lot. Every one of them, even the plumbers and wireless operators, think their own profession is the institute, and everyone else exists to serve them. I suppose it makes their work seem more worthwhile, but if they reflected seriously they would see that the institute lives by purging the intake.”
    “Purging the intake?”
    “Doctoring the patients.”
    The lift door opened and Lanark’s nostrils were hit by a powerful stink, the foul odour he had first noticed when Gloopy vanished in the dark. Munro crossed a platform to a railing and stood with his hands on it, looking down. To right and left the platform curved into distance as though enclosing an enormous basin, but though searchlights in the black ceiling cast slanting beams into the basin itself Lanark was unable to see the other side. From high overhead came huge dismal sounds like a dance record played loudly at an unusually low speed, and from the depths beyond the railing came a multitudinous slithering hiss. Lanark stood at the door of the lift and said shakily, “Why did we come here?” Munro looked round.
    “This is our largest deterioration ward. We keep the hopeless softs here. They’re quite happy. Come and look.”
    “You said I need see nobody whose problem is not a form of my own!”
    “Problems take different forms but they’re all caused by the same error. Come and see.”
    “If I look over that railing I think I will be sick.” Munro stared at him, then shrugged and re-entered the lift. He said to the mesh, “Professor Ozenfant,” and the door closed and the air softly hummed. Munro leaned against the wall with his hands tucked into the opposite sleeves. He frowned at his shoes for a moment then looked up with sudden brightness saying, “Tell me, Dr. Lanark, is there a connection between your love of vast panorama and your distaste for human problems?”
    Lanark said nothing.
    The door opened and they entered another huge roaring ceilingless hall. Pulses of sound and bright air beat down from above and flowed out into the surrounding tunnels with crowds of people from the surrounding lifts. Munro led the way to a tunnel with a block of names on the wall by the entrance:

M c ADAM
M c IVOR
M c QUAT
M c WHAM
M c CAIG
M c KEAN
M c SHEA
MURRAY
M c EVOY
M c MATH
M c USKY
NOAKES
M c GILL
M c OWEN
M c VARE
OZENFANT
    They sped along it hearing bodiless voices conversing among the clamour:
    “… glad to see the light in the sky …”
    “….. frames were shining on the walls …..”
    “… you need certificates …”
    “….. camels in