Poor Things summary

Alisdair Gray’s novel is set in his native Glasgow, a Scottish city haunted by late nineteenth-century ghosts – the remnants of the lost world of Victorian Britain. 

The Victorian age was one of industry and empire. Glasgow embodied its spirit like few other cities. It was home to the scientists who conceived the steam engine and the philosophers who invented capitalism. It was Glasgow, too, that built the empire’s ships and trained its economists and engineers.

The events recounted in Poor Things begin in 1878, but the novel opens a century later. By then, the British Empire was a thing of the past, and Glasgow’s iconic shipyards were being dismantled. Its Victorian architecture, meanwhile, was being bulldozed to make way for motorways and malls.

The first character we meet is Michael Donnelly, a local historian who sees the city’s redevelopment as an act of vandalism. Donnelly saves what he can, rescuing portraits of long-forgotten grandees from their soon-to-be-demolished townhouses. One day, he finds old file boxes in the bins outside a defunct legal firm’s offices. Recognizing the name of the first woman doctor to graduate from Glasgow University, he takes one of the boxes home. 

On it is a crossed-out inscription written in faded ink:

Estate of Victoria McCandless M.D. For the attention of her eldest grandchild or surviving descendant after August 1975. Not to be opened earlier. 

Below, someone has scrawled “No surviving descendants.” Inside, there’s a small book entitled Episodes from the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer, self-published in 1909 by a man called Archibald McCandless. There’s also a letter from his wife, Victoria McCandless, disputing the account contained in her late husband’s “aberrant” book. 

Donnelly reads both documents – and then forgets them. In 1990, he rediscovers them and gives them to a friend, the Glaswegian writer Alisdair Gray. The novelist agrees that this grotesque Victorian melodrama is a “lost masterpiece,” but he disputes Donnelly’s claim that it’s pure fiction. Gray has written enough fiction, he says, to recognize history when he sees it. Donnelly counters that he’s written enough history to recognize fiction when he sees it. Agreeing to disagree, the two men republish the book in a critical edition containing Victoria’s letter and decide to let readers make up their own minds.

ANALYSIS

The past, it’s said, is a foreign country – as alien to us as any nation whose language and customs we don’t understand. For Gray, it’s weirder than that. For him, the past isn’t a place at all, not even metaphorically: it only exists in the stories we tell about it. 

Donnelly, by contrast, seeks an objective account of “how things really were” in the objects he saves from history’s rubbish. But what do such mute objects really tell us? The past only speaks in written sources. But, as Donnelly discovers, such sources are too talkative: they quarrel and contradict each other; they tell too many stories. 

Critics regard Poor Things as a postmodern novel because Gray playfully develops an idea associated with that school of thought – that “reality” isn’t something “out there” in the world waiting to be found, but something we make. We construct fictions, in short, and agree – or fail to agree – that they constitute so-called reality. In Poor Things, such agreement is elusive. For the fictionalized author Alisdair Gray, the narrative presented in McCandless’s book is a “complete tissue of facts.” Donnelly, on the other hand, says it’s a “blackly humorous fiction.” McCandless asserts the truth of his narrative; his wife calls it an “infernal parody of my life story.” Ultimately, it’s left to readers to decide what is real.