Old Men in Love, by Alasdair Gray

This is one of Alasdair Gray's best novels. The artist and writer whose 1981 Lanark is a landmark in Scottish fiction has created some of modern Britain's most striking books. After his unflinching imaginative exam-ination of pornography and repression, 1982, Janine, Gray went on to re-engineer the human body in Poor Things (1992). While not quite as impressive as those three earlier novels, Old Men in Love shows Gray's protean creative energy still burning with a provocative brilliance as the author approaches his mid-seventies.

The book is presented as the "posthumous papers" of a retired Glaswegian schoolteacher with novelistic ambitions. Stylishly illustrated, it intersperses journals and essays by the late John Tunnock with longer narratives he is said to have authored. One tells the story of the gadfly Socrates in Periclean Athens; another shows the bolshie painter Filippo Lippi enjoying art and sex in Renaissance Florence; the longest has a messianic evangelist set up an idealistic sect which goes damagingly wrong in 19th-century England.

This third narrative of charismatic spiritual pride sometimes reads like a satire on New Labour. A preoccupation with the true meaning of democratic accountability is one of several themes uniting these linked stories. Freedom, including artistic freedom, is at the core of Old Men in Love.

Gray is sly and witty, but also, and more impressively, he writes with stylish honesty. Presented as a schoolteacher's book, Old Men in Love has a didactic tone at times, but gets away with it. An urge to teach and to provoke discussion has long been part of Gray's strong sense of artistic mission. He devoted years of his career to assembling a huge anthology of prefaces, bringing together in capsule form work by many of the greatest writers in the English language. John Tunnock is a spoof Great Writer, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Alasdair Gray.

If the book's treatment of love and sex is entertaining, and sometimes even wise, another enjoyable element is its vignettes of Glasgow. Here is a Scotland of coal fires and thick winter fogs where people once "believed teachers, doctors and Labour politicians were the noblest works of God". Directly and indirectly attacking the New Labour project, Gray's novel is very much the product of West-of-Scotland democratic book culture.

Denounced as an ageing "TV-less wee bastard", Tunnock fantasises about writing "the Bible of a new and independent Scotland". Rightly wrapped in self-mockery, Old Men in Love is interested in that possibility. As much of a nuisance as Socrates, Tunnock can be seen as an enemy of the modern British state. Yet to view this book only in terms of its interest in Scottish independence or the Iraq war is to confine its ludic bite as well as its global scope. Postmodern it may be, but this is clearly a work by a lover of Dickens, Scott, James Hogg and John Galt. Its rewardingly readable narratives owe as much to the narrative quirkiness of the great age of 19th-century fiction as to today's tricksiness. Old Men in Love shows Gray's old strengths confidently renascent. Awkwardly proofread, it is watermarked with a disconcerting and entertaining clarity of style: a fine book by the Dickens of Glasgow.

Robert Crawford's 'Scotland's Books' is published by Penguin

Bloomsbury £20 (311pp) £18 (free p&p) from 0870 079 8897

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