Readers Place

Alan Warner interview/review

random house With his first novel, Morvern Callar, Alan Warner has created a rich and vibrant work. The eponymous Morvern is one of the more unforgettable protagonists to come along in recent years, remarkable in that unlike the recent clichéd portraits of disaffected youth, she is a survivor. Rather than recede into self-pity because of the turns her life takes, Morvern is resilient and never loses her lust for life.

Morvern’s shivery voice and bleak perspective epitomize the trademark anomie of the rave generation, and yet there is a strange gentleness about her that hints at something deeper than a mindless, amoral party chick. At first glance she’s all hedonistic raver, but on closer inspection, you feel that there is some substance to her, some hope behind that lack of affect. It’s almost as if she’s motivated by a vague search for salvation, as if she’s zeroing in on an awakening—some kind of 90’s nirvana.

An astute chronicler of Scottish subculture, Warner calls Morvern Callar “an old existential novel recast in today’s colors.” What becomes clearly evident as we follow Morvern on her search for self is the author’s love of language, and he achieves, at times, a poetic grace rare among young authors. The author seamlessly reconciles Scottish slang and the lyrical vernacular with beautiful prose.

Warner, a native of Argyll, Scotland, was not born into a family that valued reading. “I grew up in a house with no books in it.” says the author. “I remember that sleeve notes on jazz records were the first bits of literature I ever encountered.”

He and his contemporaries stem from, and seem to be reaching an audience that doesn’t normally read literature. “Where I came from is a small, backwards town. The whole culture was pretty repressive; guys who read books were looked upon as effeminate, so reading instantly became kind of an underground act. There was a reaction against the culture I was in, which was small town, philistine, patriarchal, sexist, violent,” and, he adds, “full of sheep-shagging.”

A couple of the books that made a strong impact with the author early on were Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton and The Immoralist by Andre Gide. “Cry, the Beloved Country was the first book that ever made me cry,” says Warner. “I just couldn’t believe a book could make me cry, I’d never read anything like that before.” His reasons for reading The Immoralist were not purely literary. “To be honest, I used to go into the book shop and look at the blurbs on the back of the books and anything that mentioned sex, I’d buy. And on the back of The Immoralist it said ‘sexual nonconformists’ so I went right up to the counter and bought that sucker. I read it expecting to get a hard-on and ended up crying. It was pretty confusing! Mind you, it’s been the other way around as well.”

Warner started writing fiction when he was in his early teens. “I think writing for me is an extension of play,” he states. “Like when you’re a kid you play and you have this incredibly active imaginative life and then suddenly, society demands that we stop and that we start thinking about getting a job and stuff. I always found it difficult to keep the imagination down. All I want in life is to be involved in some creative process.”

After attending school in London and Glasgow he got a job driving trains, but his focus remained on his writing and social life. “It was a good life, but hard work and long hours. Weekends were just mad with drinking and drugs and dances. Ten years of having to work shit jobs gives you an edge on reality. And a lot of material,” he says with a sly grin. Warner attributes part of the recent renaissance in Scottish literature to similarities between the writers and their audience. “The thing that’s happened in Scotland is, the gulf between writers and readers has gotten smaller. Writers feel divorced from the whole literary world and have more in common with the people who actually read the books than they used to. In the past there was this sort of ivory tower thing, but now some sort of democratization of literature is going on, whereby it’s becoming more open as an art form.”