Poor Things

Poor Things is a novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year. The novel was called "a magnificently brisk, funny, dirty, brainy book" by the London Review of Books, and 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. 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, the scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter, who had her brain swapped with that of her unborn foetus, 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 (or Victoria'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 Frankenstein.