If one takes off the dustjacket of the first edition of Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, the clothbound cover bears the foil legend “WORK AS IF YOU LIVE IN THE EARLY DAYS OF A BETTER NATION.” Such is the reverence his work receives in his homeland of Scotland, this slogan went on to be chiseled into its new parliament building, erected after the country voted for devolution in 1997. This phrase is now synonymous with Gray and the cultural flourishing that he and the so-called second Scottish literary renaissance inaugurated in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Now that his acclaimed novel has been adapted with aplomb by the Greek auteur, Yorgos Lanthimos, a whole new global audience is going to be introduced to Gray’s radical imaginative vision.

Poor Things is a scabrous satire of the stifling rationalism and oppressive hierarchies of class, imperialism, and gender that propelled Glasgow’s rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century. Like most of his works, it’s a metafictional labyrinth that some scholars would lazily deem postmodernist but is overtly modeled on James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner and pastiches the period-appropriate gothic novels with their epistolary melodrama and undercurrent of the supernatural.

Gray depicts himself as the mere editor of a manuscript that was discovered dumped outside a law office. The bulk is this found memoir of Archibald McCandless, telling the story of how as a struggling poor medical student McCandless was taken under the wing of Dr Godwin Baxter, a grotesquely corpulent scientist with a penchant for unconventional medical experiments. He recruits McCandless as his assistant on his most ambitious yet: removing the brain of a pregnant suicidal woman and inserting the one of her unborn child, christening her Bella.