Zira yazarın 30 yılda yazıp, yaklaşık olarak da 10 yılda yayınlattığı kitabın okuması da oldukça geniş bir zaman istiyor. Gray added an appendix to the 2001 edition of the novel, in which he included a brief biography and elaborated on some of the influences on and inspirations for the novel.

Mutlaka okuyun demiyorum size ama kalıplaşmış fantazya yazınına alternatif bir kitap arıyorsanız kesinlikle okuyun.Also you might think it has got something wrong with it because it starts with 'Book 3' but it is supposed to be like that. In those days I'd identified the character(s) Lanark/Thaw to the person I was in love with (especially the artist parts). He makes the first two remarks about the book quoted above, and anticipates criticism of the work and of the Epilogue in particular, saying "The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don't care". But a key to both might be found in what I think is its philosophical, and therefore essentially literary, context. Lanark really is a novel that defies adequate summary or categorisation, and I feel that any rating would be perfectly justifiable.

Your flood of language is delicious,” says the senior politician he is trying to influence, “and can have no possible effect upon human nature. And though Gray’s startling debut threatens to dwarf almost everything, including his own subsequent work, really there is nothing he wrote that isn’t worth reading, right through to the elegiac (but still saucy) Old Men in Love. Of course the extended metaphor of Lanark communicates the secret gnostic knowledge of the light, but such knowledge is in itself insufficient: “Metaphor is one of thought’s most essential tools. Despite the flaws listed above, Gray's writing is for the most part endlessly inventive, and his descriptions are among the best I've read, although they can get self-indulgent.A more narcissistic, misogynistic and antisocial character I've seldom met, and I found it hard to keep reading about him.