Luda

Grant Morrison

Review by Claire Biddles

The story of an ageing drag queen and her sinister acolyte, Luda is the first prose novel by comics legend Grant Morrison, best known for their work on Doom Patrol, Batman and their own mind-bending 1990s series The Invisibles. Set in a dream version of Morrison’s hometown of Glasgow, the story of magic, deception and squalor is spun by Luci LaBang, a once-relevant queen now reduced, at age 50, to roles in regional pantomime. When the young, mysterious Luda arrives on the scene begging to become the student to Luci’s master, her life descends into a chaotic hell of sex, tragedy and secret societies.

Like Morrison’s best comics work, Luda is vivid and bejewelled, crammed with ostentatious phrasing and imagery. They strike a skilled balance between magic and kitchen sink realism, as Luci travels between bacchanalian sex parties and her squalid flat; engages in magical rituals, then waits for the bus into town. In their comics—and their real life rituals as an occult practitioner—Morrison has always imbued clothing and cosmetics with special meaning, and in Luda this concern comes to the fore: in a dress from childhood that becomes a totem, and in the stage make-up that is used as raw material to summon ‘the glamour’, the particular magic of depiction and disguise that Luda and Luci trade in. The only sections lacking in sparkle are those describing the pantomime rehearsals, which become somewhat repetitive later in the novel.

Intriguingly, despite its bizarro-Glasgow setting, Luda was first published in the US, with this UK release coming over a year later via Europa Editions. The references to actual places in Glasgow—including murals by Alasdair Gray, to whom Luda’s psychogeography is indebted—come into their own in this release, forming a Frankensteined, amalgamated alternative reality. One of the book’s best scenes describes Luci’s meeting with a shadowy figure at what is clearly the Kelvingrove Museum. Where the rest of the city is chopped up, mirrored and made fanciful, this most bizarre of Glasgow landmarks is described exactly how it is in real life.

There’s an argument for Luda as Morrison’s most explicitly queer work to date, not just in its references to drag and characters of multiple and changing gender expression, but in its reflection of Morrison’s own expansive, multitudinous conception of gender, sexuality and self. It may be their first work in novel form, but Luda feels quintessentially Grant Morrison—glittering, kaleidoscopic and still boldly transgressive.

Published by Europa Editions UK