Marabou Stork Nightmares Marabou Stork Nightmares Marabou Stork Nightmares is an experimental novel by Irvine Welsh, and his second novel. The book's narrative is split into two styles: a conventional first person account of the past and a more surreal, stream of consciousness account of an otherworldly present. Like many of Welsh's novels, it is written in Edinburgh Scots dialect. The plot consists of the memories and hallucinations of the protagonist, Roy Strang, making him an extreme example of an unreliable narrator. Roy Strang narrates the book from an (at first) unexplained coma, which he has been in for the previous two years.
What is a Masterpiece? confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea", that it has "a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of an artist's own epoch and yet keep a relationship to the past". The highest masterpieces are said to be "illustrations of great themes." Clark also implicitly excluded the erotic from considerations of what constituted a masterpiece, based on his perspective that a necessary condition is the balance between sense and form (works that are too sensual are, therefore, unbalanced and not to be categorised at masterpiece level). What is a Masterpiece? What is a Masterpiece? is