In Alasdair Gray's Lanark, the ceiling of artist Duncan Thaw's studio is scrawled with quotations, two of which read:

Gray yokes together Virgil and Marx (along with Freud, Dante, Blake and many other katabatic luminaries) in order to underline the ways in which postmodern capitalism may be understood as a contemporary, secular form of Hell. In the other narrative strand of this mammoth, passionately socialist, sardonically self-questioning novel, the hero Lanark lives in a dystopian city without sunlight or love. The task he sets himself is to understand how the city came to be like this, and how it, or he, can be returned to the ordinary paradise he sometimes remembers from an earlier life. Lanark's Unthank is a fantastical, futuristic version of Thaw's 1950s Glasgow, which Gray represents as similarly lacking in human affection, freedom and creativity. As his name suggests, Thaw's task is to release the frozen core of humanity in himself and his environment. He proves to be a spectacular failure in this, and his alter ego, or perhaps post-ego, Lanark fares little better. And yet the novel as a whole is richly affirmative of ordinary virtues and pleasures: individual autonomy, breathable air, the affection between a father and son, light and architectural grace.