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Alan WarnerAlan Warner
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Bibliography |
Prizes and awards |
Critical perspective
BiographyScottish novelist Alan Warner was born in 1964. Together with Irvine Welsh and A. L. Kennedy he is seen by many critics as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary Scottish literature.
His short story 'After the Vision' was included in the anthology Children of Albion Rovers (1997) and 'Bitter Salvage' was included in the Disco Biscuits (1997).
Genres (in alphabetical order)Fiction, Short stories
BibliographyMorvern Callar Cape, 1995 Children of Albion Rovers (contributor) Canongate, 1997 Disco Biscuits (contributor) Sceptre, 1997 These Demented Lands Cape, 1997 The Sopranos Cape, 1998 The Man Who Walks Cape, 2002 The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven Cape, 2006 The Stars in the Bright Sky Cape, 2010
Prizes and awards1995 Somerset Maugham Award Morvern Callar 1998 Encore Award These Demented Lands 1998 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award The Sopranos 2002 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award (shortlist) The Man Who Walks
Critical PerspectiveOver the last decade, a new image of Scotland has grown up in the work of writers like Irvine Welsh, Iain Banks, James Kelman, and others, where we are no longer encouraged to see Scotland as the land of rosy-cheeked lads with bagpipes and lassies in tartan and velvet, but as a place of flesh and blood characters with social problems - unemployment, poverty, isolation, boredom, lack of social stimulation - searching desperately, be it through humour, rave parties, sexual promiscuity, drug or alcohol abuse, violence or crime, for a way out.
Whereas the majority of the above-mentioned writers concentrate on urban Scotland however, Alan Warner turns his attention to life in the rural areas, particularly on the coast and islands. His work shows an intimate knowledge and appreciation of landscape, climate and the changing of the seasons and how this affects the lives of the humans who inhabit the landscape. Never, for example, are we allowed to forget how the winter can kill a person in minutes, as it did the pilot in These Demented Lands (1997) who survived a plane crash only to die of exposure on the winter hillside. His descriptions range from the banal - 'my bottom was saturated wet-through on the sodden grass' - to the poetic: 'the purple bruises of bluebell banks had begun to appear on the slopes above the hotel'; 'the bus was slithering and swaying into the lowlands - instead of the impossible places, the ground now became creamy pastures, high walls, the mosses killed by city-nearness, came up close to the window'.
Lest the reader think for one minute that the Highlands are backward or cut off from the urban world, however, Warner litters his works with all the accoutrements of modern living. Drugs, rave parties and discotheques are a common motif - his interest in the rave culture in fact, has led him to be considered a member of the group (including, amongst others, Irvine Welsh), first nominated by the magazine The Face as the 'chemical generation'. Mobile telephones, CD players, computers, television aerials, satellite dishes, private planes and naval submarines also root Warner's Scotland firmly in the twenty-first century. His descriptions of places and buildings - from the tree church in Morven Callar (1995) to the Drome Hotel in These Demented Lands and the convent in The Sopranos (1998) are mini masterpieces, a breathtaking combination of the hyper-real (complete with smells and temperatures) to the gothic. One such example is the house of The Man Who Walked, from the book of the same name. The description begins in a restrained manner 'The garden was not kept with accuracy. There was no differences between the scrub around the house and the actual garden where it began …' then gallops on wildly through a minutely detailed description of the smell 'canned pilchards, sweat and something else, worser', the old man's collection of disused sinks, baths, cisterns, drinking troughs and mangers ('something to do with his water obsession'), his bar stool collection, the old Coke vending machine, culminating with a report of how the man had collected 'Scotia's swankiest newspapers' and used them to turn his home into a network of papier-maché tunnels, igloos and cupolas to which he liked to invite 'crazies and freethinkers from miles around'.
But Warner is as interested in human beings as he is in place. His novels are peopled by a strange collection of salt-of-the-earth locals, people trying to get by, hormone laden young women, eccentrics, failures washed up from the south, and madmen. Warner does not seem to have a particular sex or age group he identifies with - he is equally at home with, and able to create credible narrative from, a group of frustrated convent girls (The Sopranos) or a cynical, half-crazed ex-mercenary (Brotherhood in These Demented Lands). His characters are a mass of contrasts and paradoxes, never more so than in the personality generally considered to be Warner's piece de resistance, the splendid Morven Callar, from his first novel of the same name, who also re-appears in These Demented Lands.
Morven is a modern-day Moll Flanders, a personality of astonishing complexity. From one point of view she is a twenty-first century bimbette with a passion for quirky clothes, CDs, shaving her legs and painting her toenails. She has a casual attitude to sex, contraception and drugs, and is a mixture of matter-of-factness and cynicism with a strong instinct for self-protection. She is a calculating opportunist, seemingly without guilt or remorse, a raunchy woman of the world, who makes the most of her chances (she disposes of her dead lover's body, sends off his recently completed novel for publication with her own name on it, empties his bank account and blows the lot on expensive Mediterranean holidays, only to return penniless to Scotland). Yet there is another side to Morven: she could be seen as an innocent, a piece of flotsam bobbing on the waves of fortune ('you look like an angel come to this earth'). She is capable of great tenderness and human closeness - with the grandmother of her friend, for example, or for the dying Mr Brotherhood Senior in Warner's second book. She is adored by her foster-father, her best friend Lanna (though they temporarily fall out when Morven discovers she slept with her boyfriend) and the community in which she lives. Many of those who meet her have an urge to protect her, as does the Aircraft Investigator in These Demented Lands. But Morven knows what's good for her: she resists the possible Pygmalion scenario and the appalling but convenient alternative of selling herself sexually to the notorious owner of the Drome Hotel and spends a season washing plates and living in a seedy caravan in order to pay her debts. Her language is simple and direct. When a character tells her about Brotherhood's reported affair with Siamese twins for example she retorts, 'Big deal. I've done worse …. That's no so naughty; just being first to do it in Toytown'. Although her life is peppered with obscenities, her vocabulary is surprisingly ladylike. Morven is, without a doubt, her own woman, and one cannot help but respect her for this. Certain aspects of her story remain mysterious and unresolved: why did no one ever question the disappearance of her lover? Who is the father of her baby? What exactly was she doing during her time abroad? … but this only adds to her mystique and we live with the delicious expectation that she might make a re-appearance in a future novel.
Humour is never far from Warner's thoughts. The names of his characters: the Devil's Advocate (a religious character who looks into the lives of saints, 'an investigative journalist for God'); the Aircraft Investigator; The Man Who Walks (because he is so mad, no one wants to let him on the train); Most Baldy (to differentiate him from his brother who has slightly more hair); Sister Condron, alias Sister Condom; are worthy of Dickens. They give the characters a timeless quality and also serve the practical purpose of saving the reader from having to remember a series of possibly unusual Scottish names (in The Sopranos, this necessity is overcome by Warner giving us a list, a sort of dramatis personae in the opening chapter).
Warner is a master in the art of comic crescendo - he tends to start off with simple descriptions and then pile on one outlandish detail after another, often with a few obscenities for good measure. In The Man Who Walks (2002), for example, the main character receives a phone call to say that his uncle has run away. Slowly, the caller explains how he escaped, revealing not only that he slaughtered the Nephew's pet budgerigars before going, but also that he took his mother's two sets of false teeth 'for his own mouth' and stole the World Cup kitty from the local pub. 'For a man with a glass eye, your uncle's pretty long-sighted when it comes to pub kitties', he ends laconically.
I do not know if Warner would appreciate the comparison, but I am often reminded when I read his funnier excerpts of his countryman, the comedian Billy Connolly - they seem to share the same taste for exaggeration, for combining obscenity with cheekiness and shocking their audience into laughter by their outrageousness.
Often Warner combines humour with extraordinary brutality. It is difficult to dislodge from one's mind for example the macabre but hilarious description of Morven Callar disposing of her dead lover's body. Fuelled up on period pain tablets, brandy and lager, 'bare-naked' apart from a pair of gloves, a tight fleshy coloured swimming cap, reddish-tinted swimming goggles and with nose clips on a fluorescent string clamped to her nostrils, she sets about chopping the stinking body up into manageable pieces for burying, whilst listening to her Walkman through earplugs sellotaped to her ears.
Warner's trips into the macabre however are often of the blackest, hallucinatory, nightmarish kind which might make some readers wince with distaste. Examples of this are in Orla's attempt to have sex with a young man dying of cancer in The Sopranos, the death of Brotherhood's father from AIDS, Brotherhood's experiences ('Nails travelling at 300 m.p.h. can make quite a decoration of a child's body') or his ripping apart of a live stag using a rope and a Land Rover.
His use of language is extremely rich and varied. His characters often use very informal, local speech patterns: the exclusion of the word 'of' for example as in 'a favourite pair trainers', 'four them were locked inside' or abbreviated questions 'Long ago that happen?'; modern slang ('cool', as in great, or 'Don't scum us out!' as in don't be disgusting); and dialect. The use of dialect gives an added dimension to the text, for who can resist the plumy, poetic richness, the hint of the long-lost origins of our present-day language in words like 'keened' (peeped), 'skelf' (splinter), 'chuddy' (chewing gum) 'oxter' (armpit), 'coory' (cower, snuggle) 'grallocking' (disembowelling) or 'jaloused' (suspected). The dialect is never as broad however as, say, Irvine Welsh's, and rarely interferes with meaning or makes the text difficult to read, though it must make the novels difficult to translate into other languages (without having to invest in expensive bi-lingual volumes, I found the pocket-sized Collins Gem Scots Dictionary (Harper Collins) very useful for some of the less known vocabulary). Warner also uses repetition of words or strange inflexions of familiar words for emphasis: 'There was an anticipatory hushedness', 'trick-trickled away', 'freezing and freezinger'. It is difficult to know whether this is a hangover from the language of his origins or an individual trait - it may indeed be a mixture of the two - but it certainly adds texture to the narrative.
To conclude, Warner's books are poetic, linguistically stimulating, comic, macabre and, above all, haunting and startlingly original. They stimulate with their exotic, manic descriptions, details tumbling over one another, and their snappy, feisty dialogue, then calm with more straightforward narrative passages and delight with their poetic language, but one thing is certain - they are never boring.
Amanda Thursfield, 2003
Author statementWhy do I write? Because I can't stop. But what were the strange
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