This is the first American edition.The Guardian Ocober 5, 2007 Christopher Tayler: Not so long ago, it sometimes seemed as though the age's master plot revolved around a sexual encounter that caused at least one of its participants to be hauled up before a tribunal. Bill Clinton was this scenario's Exhibit A, of course, but his troubles only strengthened a fascination that started to grip writers at around the time of David Mamet's Oleanna (1992). By 2001, JM Coetzee, Philip Roth, Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen and many other novelists had inadvertently made the shamed professor a stock figure in heavyweight fiction.Post Bin Laden, post Bush, different characters have proliferated. Terrorists and traumatised New Yorkers have flourished, but the prevailing figure is almost certainly the horrified western intellectual trying, and usually failing, to sort out his or her responses to the carnage on the world stage. These characters have come in a range of varieties, from glassily appalled to insufferably smug, and it's probably too early to say much about them in general. If any of them are candidates for the shamed professor's crown, though, it's the ageing male writers, ambiguously modelled on their creators, who interleave their disgusted political commentary with fogeyish asides about mobile phones and soliloquies on their lust for younger women. Such figures are at the heart of Coetzee's and Roth's latest books, and now here comes another in the person of John Tunnock, the protagonist-narrator of Alasdair Gray's new novel.Not that Gray - or Roth, or Coetzee, for that matter - has written a conventional narrative themed around September 11 and subsequent events. True, Tunnock's diary begins on that date, when he walks into his local pub in Glasgow and finds it "buzzing with the communal elation that usually follows Scottish football victories". In an epilogue penned by one Sidney Workman, a fictitious academic from Gray's Lanark (1981), however, we're helpfully told that Old Men in Love is merely a bunch of extracts from Gray's screenplays and other writings "cynically sandwiched between references to the 2001 Trade Center [sic] atrocity and May 2007 Scottish election in order to give the whole thing spurious contemporary relevance. When all the above is discounted we are left with the dreary tale of a failed writer and dirty old man, who comes to a well-deserved end through an affair with a drug-dealing procuress".Like Gray's Poor Things (1992) and, as Workman laboriously points out, innumerable novels since the days of Walter Scott, Old Men in Love is presented as a found manuscript. In her introduction, Lady Sara Sim-Jaegar - the name is an anagram of "Alasdair James Gray" - explains that she was unexpectedly summoned to Scotland earlier this year to take charge of a distant, recently murdered cousin's property. Tunnock, the cousin, a retired headmaster, was found dead in his home last April, it seems, having accidentally been pushed down the stairs in the course of "an amorous struggle". The University of Glasgow wasn't interested in his papers - a diary, plus three fragmentary historical fictions - and so Lady Sara has entrusted them to Gray, who promised to edit and illustrate them and have them published by Bloomsbury in a high-gloss edition. In this, he has clearly been as good as his word.Tunnock, "an old-fashioned socialist" who took early retirement in order to look after the formidable aunts who brought him up, turns out to have nursed extravagant ambitions. For most of his life, he planned to write a historical epic depicting the rise of capitalism, an epic in which the relationship between elite culture and mass servitude would be juxtaposed with a series of romantic relationships. When his aunts died, he started work on this projected masterpiece, provisionally entitled "Who Paid for All This?" But his plans kept changing and he didn't finish much of it. He also "lashed out a bit" by picking up a series of troubled young women, having apparently had no sex life to speak of before 1998. "My fondness for young things could lead to difficulties," he notes in an early diary entry. "What is the age of consent? (Memo: find out.)"When not scribbling in his diary, discussing politics with his friends or being given a hard time by one or another of the "young things", who boss him around and filch his booze and antiques, Tunnock presses on with his book. He starts with a few chapters on Socrates' love for Alcibiades, set during and after Athens' imperial expansion under Pericles. Bogged down in period detail, he then decides to skip forward to quattrocento Florence and show Filippo Lippi romancing a nun while painting masterpieces for the Medici family. Finally, he writes a much longer section on Henry James Prince, a Victorian clergyman who set himself up as a cult leader in Somerset using funds provided by his rapturous disciples. He also files accounts of marching against Blair, of his education and teenage difficulties with girls, and of the constant second thoughts that prevent his book's completion.Gray makes all this more enjoyable than it might sound by unpacking his box of tricks: amusing marginal notes, prefaces in the middle of the text, lots of pre-emptive self-disparagement and so on. As Jonathan Coe once put it in an essay on Gray's 1982, Janine (1984), you get an immediate sense of being "in thoroughly genial if eccentric company". Tunnock himself is so eccentric and genial that it's hard to work out how to take his project's failure: if the history of high culture is also the history of exploitation, as his fictions all argue, what does that make him? And what are we to make of his scooping up girls from the street? As in much of Gray's writing, a gloomy parable about the artist-outsider's dependence on the social order he criticises lurks in the background, and in this respect Tunnock seems to get off rather lightly.Sidney Workman also has a point in that the historical chapters really have been fashioned from some TV plays Gray wrote in the 1970s. Though the frame he's devised for them works well, it's almost too successful: Tunnock's diaries are much more interesting than his other compositions. Yet in spite of all Gray's games, which are often pretty funny, there's something appealingly direct about the way his characters get to grips with political questions - chiefly Scottish independence and the decay of the postwar social democratic settlement. Workman claims that this book will be his last, "for he is seventy-two and in poor health". Let's hope this is no more accurate than Gray's earlier announcements that he's hanging up his pen, because as the blurb says, he's "the very best Alasdair Gray that we have." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.