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Anna Goodall
posted 19 April 2006

Alan Warner's first novel, Morvern Callar, was a revelation. I didn't know that a first-person female voice (never mind that that voice is penned by a male author) could glitter with such richness. Lyrical, sexy, raw, empathetic, yet also at times cold and hard and most of all, powerfully intimate, the character of Morvern is a testament to Warner's acute abilities.

As is his funny and bittersweet novel The Sopranos, set on the day a group of convent girls (who display distinctly unchaste tendencies) go to the capital city for a major choir competition. Told through a series of first person, again only female, voices it's a moving, erotic, and comic novel. And it's set in the same remote Scottish town as Morvern Callar, with Morvern even making a brief cameo appearance in one of the town's notorious nightspots where the underage girls end up.

I'm still convinced that Warner is one of the most talented authors writing now; it's just that his prodigious gift is not so clearly on display in his fifth novel, The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven. It may even have got a little lost in transit from Scotland, where all his other work is set, to Spain. Worms is also written using a male rather than female first-person voice. The story is told by Manolo Follano - Lolo to those who know him - an architect, twice married and now living a comfortable single life in a small coastal city in Spain, a place he has never really left and has never really wanted to leave. He inhabits what one imagines to be a slightly soulless, expensive top-floor apartment overlooking the ocean. He keeps his fine clothes precisely folded, has décor that is just a bit too studied and generally keeps everything in perfect order. Despite the intricacies of his love life and two marriages which he is about to tell us all about, Manolo Follano displays all the fusspot symptoms of a confirmed bachelor.

Follano's story starts abruptly with a shocking discovery. Tenis, Lolo's doctor and best friend tells him that he has 'The Condition', an unmentionable disease, which we are given to understand is HIV/Aids. One imagines that this will be the devastating blow that shapes the ensuing narrative, but the spectre of certain death fails to hang over Lolo's story. Instead, after his meeting with Tenis and an aimless stroll through the city, he returns home and draws up a list of all the people he has ever had sexual relations with concentrating, for the sake of a diverting theme, on how they kiss. The list is not obscenely long, in fact it's perfectly reasonable for a middle-aged man who, frankly, has still got it. He intends to contact each person on the list with the awful news, but like the coward he is, he deletes it almost immediately and says nothing. The following narrative lets Lolo travel through these relationships from his new, frustrated vantage point of enforced celibacy.

From the start, Follano seems disingenuous. Despite admitting that he finds it 'impossible to remember clearly a single time I made love - even the more outlandish incidents have become fragmentary in my recollection' and that, 'what seemed like momentous landmarks have faded and reduced down to a few vague, poorly lit erotic scenes which are increasingly subjective and possibly inaccurate', his memory seems, for the purposes of his confessional-style narrative, crystal clear.

The stories he tells us are compelling and often funny, like his breathless, adolescent encounter with two beautiful Vietnamese girls with whom he cannot communicate due to an insurmountable language barrier, or the curiously famished sex he has with two strangers in a back alley. (Warner is a master of the erotic scene. He is never unconvincing or reliant on the prurient, which is a rare skill). A particular gem is a moment with the Vietnamese girls when all three are in the cinema watching Jaws and completely terrified: 'I pointed down to the floor beneath our seats. We looked up. Night had fallen on the screen! […] My shivers of fear subsided to be replaced by new ones as I was the kisser and toucher of both.'

The city, his city, reveals all the different scenes of his life: the Imperial Hotel his parents ran for years, the foundations of which are riddled with - if not, he now imagines, built from - his childhood memories; the beach front where he worked as a lifeguard; the non-stop development and new buildings covered in dust in the Phases neighbourhood where he lives; the wasteland surrounding these new builds full of stray cats and hopeless undergrowth. All is described and re-described in detail. Yet why does it not build into the novel and serve to enrich the main character and his story? Is it because Warner has stepped into unfamiliar territory? Perhaps. But it is more that the fundamental narrative premise cannot keep itself above water and Lolo is not strong enough to carry its faults, as he himself with his dubious self-deprecating air would, no doubt, be the first to admit.

So this endless love song to place doesn't quite come off. Warner may be gently parodying Lolo: his precision, his love for space and form rather than people, his architect's eye tracing over the bodies of the lovely young things in his city. But, neither an affection for, nor a real understanding of the place and therefore the character is conveyed. In the end these descriptions become only cumbersome and self-conscious. There is no sense that these memories have been induced by the fateful news, which would again add clarity to his situation. It seems rather that Lolo is over-familiar with these thoughts; he has touched and turned them a million times. After all, he sees reminders of things that have occurred daily as he walks through his town, and so one feels it is just business as usual, this remembering.

An immutable sense of place is an insidious and complex subject for Warner: the claustrophobia and the comfort of a place never left or always returned to, and its power to mould the self. Everything goes in to the place you have been born and live: blood, sweat, tears, sputum, spunk… the lot. For Morvern it is both in the wild, almost forgotten, hills around her and the mundane, urban poverty of the port town where she lives, the freezing sleet pouring down onto the dark train climbing up through the pass, the hills and beyond. The recurring descriptions in Worms focus particularly on the Phases Zone 1 - the modern district where Lolo lives - and again, the progress of a train (the diminutive 'lemon express') that takes him from the city centre to his home there. The city is rapidly becoming more developed and Lolo tells us the story of his father's village, and how the land around it was decimated to make way for a new runway to accommodate the ever-growing tourist trade. He muses:

'Our city, our model country, our country, excels as no other at producing tracts of wasteland! […] A perfect piece of forlorn wasteland for me must always lie near the sea for a direct visual corroboration of sublime nature contrasted with human decay.'

He even uses his obsession as a paltry chat up line, 'I led a bewildered, frownsome Teresa across to the edge. "This is my favourite bit of wasteland," I smiled.'

Follano's confessional tone implicitly needs a listener and one is provided in the form of an outsider, Ahmed. He is a homeless, illegal Moor immigrant who travelled over to the coast in a perilous sea voyage in which all the other passengers died. Follano invites him into his swanky apartment and opens up to him. He seems to be asking Ahmed, and by proxy the reader, for some sort of forgiveness or acceptance - but why?

Lolo is slightly cold, yes, that is true. He also likes beautiful women, but not in too salacious a way. His life has had tragic moments in it. He is sometimes cruel, like a lot of people in fact. Besides, you start to sympathise with the distance he keeps from the world when you learn about the people he's been hanging out with all his life. There's not a sympathetic one amongst them really. His father cruelly berates him from his deathbed, his mother is always remote, and his mathematician first wife gets turned on by death - but only when she isn't working on oblique formulae. Tenis is equally vacant and unappealing. The false set-up of his home with his beautiful wife, peacocks wandering in his grounds, his specially built house that is a convoluted design and his bullying and slightly immoral manner lead us to mistrust him, but also to be essentially uninterested in him.

Ahmed is, I think, intended to be the most morally unblemished character and he is wrapped up in Lolo's 'salvation', but instead of adding meaning and emphasis, this thread again seems confused and not quite workable, and Ahmed as a character is pretty faceless. You start sympathising with Lolo for wanting to keep his schedule uninterrupted, have nice clothes and bedlinen, and occasionally have sex: there doesn't seem to be anything much deeper on offer. These characters don't come alive on the page. A character like Tenis could perhaps have been the dynamic best friend who has always bullied and bothered Lolo but who is charismatic, charming. He just seems a drag and a fake, though Lolo's part-realisation of this later is significant.

At the end of the Lolo's story Ahmed leaps up and exclaims, 'What is ever going to happen to you, man?' and then as they return home, Lolo notes, 'Something was uncomfortable when we returned from Heaven Hill to my apartment out at the Phases Zone 1. I presume he [Ahmed] was suffering the oppressive Follana Effect that got to everyone in the end - including my poor ex-wives.' It's all rather puzzling as this oppressive 'Effect' is never really transmitted to the reader.

The awareness of the listener/reader throughout the text is also peculiar. It could be seen as a symptom of Lolo's pedantic manner that the text has occasional points in parenthesis embedded in the flowing text, and that the final chapter is even called, 'Last chapter: Titled, Last Chapter". But this ungainly stylistic decision, rather than drawing us into the novel's conceit serves to distance us further from its protagonist and his actions. Perhaps problems with communication, which certainly inform Follano's life, are intended to bog down the story's form. But, just as Follano doesn't really desire to get closer to people, we don't really want to get to know him any better, and feel nothing when he constantly refers to how soon he will be up on Heaven Hill - the city's graveyard.

Throughout the novel it feels as if Warner's intentions have got lost in translation. Indeed, Lolo is at pains to denounce words as a means of communication. He sells his entire book collection and often notes the uselessness of the written word. He doesn't even listen to music. Significantly, his most powerful sexual experiences have taken place where there is no meaningful verbal communication. Sadly the lack of coherence in the novel does not translate any unspoken intensity to the reader. And in the dramatic final scenes of destruction and the possibility/hope of renewal, the potential power is taken away by the structural weaknesses that have dogged the story throughout.

But look, I'm ripping this thing apart partly because I was extremely excited about reading Alan Warner's new book, and I wanted it to be better than it is. But despite any disappointment, it's still full of the trademark brilliance that makes me know there is more to come from Warner. The most successful episode concerns Lolo's second wife, Aracelli, whose story is the highlight of the book: moving, terrible, funny and tragically pointless. It demonstrates how life can turn, almost mundanely, on a knife-edge. Warner deals us blow after blow with exquisite timing and pitch and it is by far the most gripping section of the book. It's interesting that the most successful passages involve detailed descriptions of women and that the stand-out story deals with the disintegration of a young woman's life. Warner seems to have an incredible affinity with female sensibility, and an ability to write about women better than almost anyone.

I read an interview with Warner quite recently where he mentioned that he spends a lot of time in Spain with his family. He obviously knows the area well, but as far as writing about it goes he is an outsider, and not in the way that such a position can be beneficial creatively. Warner writes best from the inside and I can't wait for him to get back from the long vacation.

Anna Goodall is one of the editors of Pen Pusher, a new free literary magazine.