The Fall of Kelvin Walker

by Alasdair Gray

Overview

It is the Swinging Sixties and Kelvin Walker has moved from Scotland to London to make his fortune. Through his wanton ambition, a megalomania surfaces that is unrelieved by his insensitive attempts at friendship and romance. Yet is he all bad, or are the true villains the establishment figures who he tricks and deceives? And, ultimately, does it matter?

Gray's twist on the follies of religion, the media and the imperial British centre is as relevant now as ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781838853853
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Series:	Canons
Edition description:	Main - Canons
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	324,227
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from the Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he authored, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures. In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award from the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.

Editorial Reviews

Gray transformed our expectations of what Scottish literature could be

VAL McDERMID

The best Scottish novelist since Sir Walter Scott

ANTHONY BURGESS

A parable, a romp and, as I found, a one-compulsive-sitting read

MELVYN BRAGG

One of the most gifted writers to have put pen to paper in the English language

IRVINE WELSH

A necessary genius

ALI SMITH

One of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times

NICOLA STURGEON

Gray is a true original, a twentieth century William Blake

Observer

Bawdy and exuberant

Guardian

In this version of that venerable themethe ambitious provincial lad undertaking to conquer the worldKelvin Walker, son of a penurious grocer and afire with Nietzschean illusions about power and its uses, departs his native Scotland for London Town, the center of the universe, plotting to make it very big by starting at the . . . top. Backwater naivete and Scottish chutzpah somehow propel him to an envied position as a BBC interviewer, which allows him to rub shoulders with the cream of society. Life comes pouring in from all directions, not the least in the delicious form of Jill, through whose kindly ministrations he finds God. Eventually Kelvin topples from his eminence through a combination of overweening ambition, ultra-rightist fixed ideas and unbending North-country rigidity. Before then, foibles are detected and fools, knaves and imposters flogged. Farce of this kind should be hilarious if it is to be persuasive, yet that level of comedy is not attained by this bright, occasionally amusing and charming little novel, subtitled ``Fable of the Sixties.'' (August 29)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly