Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer is an epistolary novel by Scottish writer Alasdair Gray, published in 1992. It won the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize the same year. A postmodern retelling of the gothic horror novel “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, the narrative follows the life of Bella Baxter, a surgically fabricated woman created in late Victorian Glasgow. Bella’s navigation of late 19th century society is the lens through which Gray delivers social commentary on patriarchal institutions, social equality, socioeconomic matters and sexual politics. The novel itself is epistolary, being composed of a fictional novella entitled “Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer”, several extended letters, a spread of original illustrations, as well as an Introduction and Critical Notes. The bracketing Introduction and Critical Notes feature a meta-textual component, in that they simultaneously exist in the novel’s fictional canon, but are also credited to real-life author Alasdair Gray. The novel is illustrated by Alasdair Gray, despite the text claiming the illustration were created by Scottish painter and printmaker William Strang.

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, scientist Dr Godwin Baxter, who had her brain replaced with that of her unborn fetus, 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 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. These fictitious historical documents are prefaced with an introduction by one Alasdair Gray, who presents himself as the editor of the following text, and relates the "discovery" of the papers by his real-life friends, Michael Donnelly and Elspeth King. The introduction also hosts a critique of Glasgow City Council's treatment of its culture and heritage in the neglect of the city's social history museum, the People's Palace, and a brief mention of Glasgow's time as the European Capital of Culture in 1990, which was the subject of a more sustained satire in his novel Something Leather.

Film adaptation

A film adaptation of the book was produced with Yorgos Lanthimos directing and Tony McNamara writing the script. The cast includes Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Kathryn Hunter, and Jerrod Carmichael. The adaptation was released in theatres on December 8, 2023. The film enjoyed rapturous acclaim, winning several prizes including the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice Film Festival as well as four Academy Awards later that year.

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