Poor Things by Alasdair Gray (1992)

Any number of novels have unreliable narrators (Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Nabokov's Pale Fire come to mind), but few others, if any, have three unreliable narrators as this one does.

The first narrator is the author, who claims to have been given a long-lost manuscript which was supposedly written in the late 1800s by a Scottish doctor. He even includes purported historical accounts taken from old newspapers and such which support the probable veracity of the account.

Then begins the found manuscript, which is titled, "Episodes From the Early Life of a Scottish Public Health Officer," as written by Archibald McCandless. This narrator tells the fantastical story of a young woman whose body has been reanimated by McCandless's mentor following her death by drowning, with her damaged brain being replaced by the brain of her yet unborn child. Both men fall in love with her -- a beautiful woman who has adult passions along with childlike innocence and curiosity. Included in this section is a long letter from the woman to her creator (whom she knows only as her guardian, not remembering her prior life), recounting her learning experiences as she becomes a feminist and a crusader for socialist causes.

The next section of the novel is a refutation of Dr. McCandless's account by the woman in question, who has become a medical doctor herself. She says her husband's manuscript (yes, she marries him) is exaggeration and fiction, disputing each major incident by telling her rational version of what happened.

My paragraphs do little to convey how clever this book is, or how funny, or how serious, or how tricksey. When Dr. Virginia McCandless accuses her husband of imitating the popular literature of his time, the reader can easily see that he might have taken inspiration from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. One can also easily see that the real author, Alasdair Gray, has also copied some of the conventions of 19th Century literature, most notably the device of the found manuscript. Such little ironies and references abound throughout the novel, making this a book worthy to be read more than once. When you think about it, such medical matters as electricity being used to shock life back into a seemingly dead body and transplants of bits and pieces of one body into another are not even considered unusual these days. Archibald McCandless's version may be intended to be the true one.

I must include here a quote coming from Dr. Virginia McCandless's supposed letter, which conveys how I feel when listening to Republican presidential debates: "And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do."

I highly recommend this novel, which can be enjoyed from several different angles. It was the 1992 winner of England's Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize.