The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A History Maker by Alasdair Gray
William M. Harri

Alasdair Gray. A History Maker. Harvest (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1996. 224 pp. Paper: $14.00.

Alasdair Gray sets his recent novel in the twenty-third century, and like many science fiction works, it is full of sex, violence, and adventure. But the novel is less Gray’s exploration of the sci-fi genre than it is a unique fable about power, fame, and gender relations. In the intervening centuries between our time and the novel’s, the modern nation states have fallen as capitalism expired.
A History Maker seems most like Gray’s 1985 novella The Fall of Kelvin Walker as Wat Dryhope, like Kelvin, is both a sympathetic and repulsive character. Indeed, both works demonstrate that the protagonist’s individual development need not be the vehicle for the author’s didactic purposes. Gray instead relies on a more organic understanding of the conflict he creates: the matriarchies have established a stable utopia, but this future promotes a lot of unnecessary death and killing. Rather, Gray calls attention to the need for interdependence between men and women, not in the name of patriarchy, but in the name of community. This political goal becomes clear by the novel’s end.
What finally makes A History Maker unique is that Wat, the apparent hero, fails to have any part in the remaking of his society. In this way, Gray expresses his own ambivalence toward hero worship, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a method of sociopolitical improvement. From his quasi-Hegelian perspective, change can be produced by the individual, but progress demands the efforts of the collective. [William M. Harrison]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction A History Maker by Alasdair Gray William M. Harri Alasdair Gray. A History Maker. Harvest (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1996. 224 pp. Paper: $14.00. Alasdair Gray sets his recent novel in the twenty-third century, and like many science fiction works, it is full of sex, violence, and adventure. But the novel is less Gray’s exploration of the sci-fi genre than it is a unique fable about power, fame, and gender relations. In the intervening centuries between our time and the novel’s, the modern nation states have fallen as capitalism expired. A History Maker seems most like Gray’s 1985 novella The Fall of Kelvin Walker as Wat Dryhope, like Kelvin, is both a sympathetic and repulsive character. Indeed, both works demonstrate that the protagonist’s individual development need not be the vehicle for the author’s didactic purposes. Gray instead relies on a more organic understanding of the conflict he creates: the matriarchies have established a stable utopia, but this future promotes a lot of unnecessary death and killing. Rather, Gray calls attention to the need for interdependence between men and women, not in the name of patriarchy, but in the name of community. This political goal becomes clear by the novel’s end. What finally makes A History Maker unique is that Wat, the apparent hero, fails to have any part in the remaking of his society. In this way, Gray expresses his own ambivalence toward hero worship, both as a cultural phenomenon and as a method of sociopolitical improvement. From his quasi-Hegelian perspective, change can be produced by the individual, but progress demands the efforts of the collective. [William M. Harrison]

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