Warner

Here's a piece i just wrote for Blowback on Alan Warner. Buy his new book here

it's incredible, a stunning departure from The Port that's freed him up to let loose in a whole new setting. As usual, it's eerily convincing.

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Allan Warner should need little introduction. His debut novel about the existential journey of a vivid, unforgettable young woman, ‘Morvern Callar,’ stunned readers on it’s publication in 1997. Quickly followed by ‘These Demented Lands,’ an astonishing amalgamation of mythology with Scottish grit, Morvern found herself being played by Samantha Morton in a feature film, and Warner went on to create equally vital characters in the school girls of ‘The Sopranos’ and the intellectual, crazed nephew of ‘The Man Who Walks.’ It might be a surprise then, to learn that most of the time he introduces himself as ‘someone who works in computers.’

‘Morvern Callar’ was a hopeless title for taxi drivers,’ he laughs, comically detailing some of the mispronunciations he’s encountered. ‘When you say, “ooh, I’m a writer,” it’s embarrassing y’know?’ But a writer he is, his fifth novel ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ having just been published. His introduction to the book? ‘It’s literary stuff, don’t bother with it!’ he quips. The cover of the novel shows a gleaming pool, with the novel’s talismanic model aeroplane, the DC-8 Stretch Series, afloat within it. ‘You can’t say anymore, “I want some guys on a beach, playing pool on a table that’s submerged in the water” anymore. The publishers say “Oh fuck off, we spent the budget on Salman’s last novel. They shot the swimming pool in LA!’ he says, ‘they were going on about the light.’ It’s a light hearted, funny, conversational style that will continue throughout our interview, revealing Warner to be as compelling to talk to as to read.

His thoughts on the book’s reception reveal a philosophical side that forms another trait, coming with the first of many enthusiastic references to other writers. ‘Ken Kesey once said about reviews, and this allows me to sleep at night, that “the bad stuff still hurts, and the good stuff doesn’t teach me anything.” You only learn things from other writer’s books.’ The current state of literary criticism is definitely a concern. ‘It’s very hard for literary fiction these days, the bottom feeders have been let loose. I call ‘em the town councillors of literature, “ooh, I don’t like him because his lawn has grown too long.’ Again, he comically draws out his vowels in a lilting fashion that has us both laughing out loud. It’s not always a funny though. ‘The most wonderful books can get destroyed, for example Andrew O’Hagan’s just written a storming new novel, and I just hope it gets the respect it deserves. My heart goes out to the new writers.’

‘The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven’ is a departure for Warner in more ways than one. It centres around his first character, Manolo Follana, to come from the middle classes, but more noticeably, it’s his first book to be set outside of the Scottish port of his previous four. As Follana’s name suggests, this is a novel set in Spain. ‘I suppose in some ways the Port did feel limiting. I think any artist is trying to push into new territory, if you’ve got any balls I guess. I thought it’d be interesting to write about a character who has power and economic security, but who still suffers from the same existential problems that schoolgirls do in the sopranos.’

Like Morvern or the nephew, Manolo feels extremely real and vividly imagined, and it’s the characters that Warner thinks up initially, before their meaning. ‘I think the characters and their situation come first, then it very much happens on the page. You can have has many ideas as you want but you work through them in writing. I abort novels all the time, and sometimes I use bits that didn’t fit in one book in a different book.’ These aborted novels come when a dramatic idea doesn’t prove practical in the actual writing. ‘If you decide to write a novel called ‘Climbing Everest,’ and it’s about a husband and wife who decide to climb Everest and work out their marital problems. You think “wow, what an exciting and dramatic idea.” Then you find out your novel is actually called ‘two people talking in a tent.’ You couldn’t talk on a cliff face, there’d be these huge tracts of silence!’

Warner pinpoints his passion for the dramatic back to extensive reading of the modernist icon Samuel Beckett. ‘I think because of him, I have these really dramatic ideas, but when I get to the page it becomes slow and meditative.’ He asks if I’m familiar with the infamous trilogy, which unfortunately I’m not. ‘People think he’s very intellectual, but he’s so fucking funny y’know? There’s a bit where Mallone is freezing, so he wraps himself in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, which he says are “excellent for concealing the pungency of his farts.” It’s fantastic stuff.’

Whilst Spain has featured as a promised land in previous novels, a bright counterpoint to the cold darkness of The Port, I wonder why Warner decided to set an entire novel there. ‘I have no pretensions of being an Espanicist, the Spain I know is very much one of the pint and the full English breakfast. Beach Spain.’ There is a rather close connection however. ‘My wife is from down here and grew up here, so that’s a big influence, she’s my muse. A lot of the stuff from the Sopranos is from her!’ Anyone familiar with that book will know that its detailing of the lives of a group of energetic, rowdy, tender teenage girls is astoundingly rendered.

‘I think what I try to do is put a character into a situation that’s very unfamiliar to me. I write what I don’t know, try to make it difficult for myself. People just assume you’re an expert.’ That said, the psychology of the provincial, proud Manolo seems highly convincing. ‘I watch a lot, I’m one of those creepy guys that sits in cafes watching,’ he laughs warmly, ‘so I guess that’s where that comes from. Manolo spends a lot of time doing that too.’

Perhaps the main trait of an Alan Warner novel, one which is difficult to express simply, is the odd mixture of darkness and light, or purposeful, keenly felt intellectualism opposed to brutal lack of thought. ‘I guess personally there’s a struggle for identity in a sense. I’ve always been a very big reader, but I would never call myself a down the line intellectual, although some of my friends see me as one. I’m not quite sure where I stand. But I think it’s a good thing for a writer to live on the margins, I’m not sure an Oxford degree in critical theory is a perfect thing for a novelist. It’s too much information, you know?’

‘I’ve always been kind of uncomfortable about books that are too intellectual, but at the same time I’m very uncomfortable with things that are dumbed down. For example I don’t like genre fiction. I know that’s shooting myself in the foot and sounding like a terrible snob, but I wonder what the motivation of the writers must be. A genre is like tying both hands behind your back.’ But this isn’t to say that linguistic gentility is something he approves of. ‘I think Scottish writers of the last ten to twenty years have been questioning the power structures of English literature, that idea that all great writing should be like Henry James. I think James’ prose is terrible, and I believe he spoke the same way he wrote, so I’m glad I never had a conversation with him! That idea that ‘fuck you’ can not be in a work of great art, I’ve always been suspicious of that.’

This leads to a meditative discussion on the nature of language itself. ‘Language controls everything, but language has great inadequacies. I’m trying to question the medium through which the novel is transmitted. It’s true in life as well, the feelings we have are never encapsulated perfectly linguistically. There’s a world within us that’s none linguistic; ‘I am in love, I feel fear, I feel disgust,’ whatever it is we wish to discuss, there’s always an element of doubt, but through the language you’re trying to reach some kind of truth of the human condition.’

Warner doesn’t re-read his books, and his warmest enthusiasm is reserved for the discussion of other writers’ work, be it the short stories of James Kelman, the wonderful, overlooked novels of the German W.G Sebald, the philosophical realism of John King’s ‘Football Factory,’ the youthful British talent of Gwendolen Riley, even the ex-Hawkwind member Michael Moorcock’s modernist, mystical novels. And of course, he’s interested to know my favourites, having read David Foster Wallace and Italo Calvino. When he hears I’m reading Phillip Roth, he recommends ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’ ‘It’s very difficult to write a novel about wanking that becomes tragic!’ His friend Michael Ondaatje is also high on the list, the crystalline prose of ‘In The Skin of a Lion’ in particular. Like Warner, he writes and removes huge tracts in his novels, reducing what remains to something of enormous power.

So many books and so little time. ‘There’s so much art out there, there’s not enough time to absorb it all. There’s something quite inhuman about that,’ muses Warner. ‘As Follana says, “there wasn’t enough time in a human life to read all of great literature. What a swindle.’ Luckily, there’s plenty of time to read this best of British novelists, time very well spent indeed.