So I read 'Morvern Callar' and must say I wasn't all that impressed, what with it being written in a very unfamiliar, odd writing style (couldn't be bothered with all that 'Used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut' patter), and I punted it to a guy I knew for a fiver and probably bought a sausage supper and bottle of Irn Bru or some cheap booze with it. I followed Warner from book to book over the next few years, before getting more into 'Callar' in later years, coming to be a fan of the man's work, and 'The Sopranos,' (nothing to do with the TV series) his 1999 classic about small Highland town Scottish Catholic high school girls on a big city booze binge, is one of my all-time favourite works.

As I read Warner, something became apparent to me. Warner is a man with a real love of language, and crafts many poetic, dense, beautiful lines in his work. He is also a very uneven writer, as his books tend to start off well ('The Man Who Walks,' his last before 'Worms,' which ends up likewise) and then go off the rails. Or, well, be off the rails from the start and just stay there ('These Demented Lands'), throwing up dark brooding poetry, odd affecting defective images and nothing else. He has, an, ah, how shall we say, eye for much younger females. He worked on the railways and there would always be sometimes-too-detailed scenes involving trains in his book. The novels would have a different, interesting, close-to-nature-and-death feel about them at odds with the city-based work of Warner's contemporaries, with landscape being just as important as characterization, coming as the author does from the small fishing village of Oban in the Scottish Highlands. They could get slightly pretentious and existential and arty and the author clearly has a sick streak a mile wide in him, throwing in deeply creepy disturbing images that, often, had no clear context to or reason for their existence, seemingly thrown into the wordmix as an afterthought or for cheap nausea-inducing schlock value(less) reasons.

Unsurprisingly enough, 'The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven' (an oddly poetic, slightly disturbing title which comes from something a character says on their deathbed, and which could almost be used to microcosmically encompass Warner's text-effect-agenda) is mostly no different, in certain key ways, than the author's previous works. Not for nothing does Warner wax lyrical about writing about your obsessions, as one of his main literary influences, JG Ballard, wholeheartedly advocates, so it's hardly surprising to see a few of the old theme favourites - trains, poetry, deeply sick passages - in amidst the newer headtrips and quandaries and wordriffs.

'Worms' is the first of the author's works not to be set in Scotland. The setting here is Spain, scene of some of 'Morvern Callar' and a place where Warner has spent some time living in the past. It concerns wealthy 40-year-old businessman Manolo Follana, a man whose playboy bunny ears have just been packed away with the devastating news that he is suffering from The Condition (as HIV is euphemistically referred to in the book). He befriends an illegal immigrant Moor, Ahmed Omar, and unfolds the story of his life to his newfound confession-receiving companion, the women he has loved and the Spanish lives and deaths of his hotel-owning parents. He is searching through the faded existential debris of a virus-truncated life, trying to make some sense of it all and trying to figure out who infected him. Interesting concept, and there wouldn't be many of us who wouldn't do the same if we received the same horrible news.

Follana is an excellent, detailed creation, and I could thoroughly believe in him as a character from a Spanish seaside town, masterfully evoked, spewing chiaroscuro dissolution nightmares as he wanders the streets looking for clues to or absolution from or an absolute solution to the terminal illness that has come upon him 'like a new political regime.' Warner has clearly spent a lot of time in Spain and the amount of research he has put into his main protagonist's character and environment shows through in the small parochial details only a local to an area would notice.

However, this doesn't make Follana a particularly interesting character - he comes across as being somewhat pretentious and prissy and slightly effete (the 'picked last for the football team' geeky archetype) , with the usual sniffy, expensive bon viveur tastes affected by his affluent societal strata. His life, as presented, comes across as not being particularly event-filled or stylish, and much of the reading about him just isn't all that enthralling. Though I dare say, were any of us to contract The Virus That Dare Not Speak Its Name, that we might look back and be somewhat mortified at the impoverished content of our already-lived-most-of existences. But that's nobody's fault but our own.

The (American) English language colonization of the world is a major theme in this work. Follana cannot speak English and curses it as a word language for its homogenizing effects on global communication and destruction of colloquial dialects. Whilst presented in English, the text is meant to be read as the internal monologue of a Spaniard thinking in his own language, replete with stumblings over words in other tongues. This is a neat touch, which allows Warner to take catty swipes at the language you're reading right now. Follana loves the choice of words describing his region in old tourist guides, which he collects, and you can almost imagine the author entering Spain in real life and being confronted by this kind of inadvertently poetic new word salad to feast upon.

However, Warner's thinking on the written word sometimes comes across as being oddly ambivalent for somebody who clearly loves the medium as much as he does. He complained years after publishing 'Morvern Callar' that he was almost embarrassed that he came to be published with a novel taking a swipe at the mechanics of being published (Callar sends her dead boyfriend's work off to a publisher and gets paid for it without writing a word), and this shows through again here, when he has Follana proclaim reading as being 'self-important' and get rid of all the books he has collected as a youth to do something more worthwhile with his time than read him.

Warner does present an extremely interesting textual correlation, though, in talking about Follana's accountant, a man inadvertently in his own right writing biographies more detailed than any a person would write about themselves, replete with all their receipts from purchases and financial documentation and whatnot, tell-tale signs of a mindset on a particular day or through a particular period of time, down to the amount of money spent during it. Maybe the writer should consider a job as a maths teacher if writing doesn't ever suit him!

Follana sits and draws up a list of the women he has been with to try and ascertain who could have infected him with HIV (much more difficult for a man getting it from a woman than vice versa, of course), and tells Ahmed Omar of his adventures in the realm of the opposite sex. And it has to be said, Warner really doesn't treat his female characters well in this book. One has a nervous breakdown. One gashes herself and dies covered in blood having sex. One of Follana's wives in a bikini is horrifyingly raped by two men under the beating boiling conspiratorial Spanish sun on the open deck of a boat, going insane after it, her sunburned skin sloughing off like she wishes she could slough off the memory and scares and scars of the attack. She subsequently commits suicide by jumping off a building leaving it open, in a facile redemption scenario, for a guilt-wracked Follana (feeling like this because he couldn't save his poor wife) to have to try to redeem himself in a scene near the end of the novel involving him having to try and catch and save a teenage girl in a fire.

Speaking of teenage girls. Like any obsessive writer, you can almost guess when Warner has found some new obsession to carry his head on its internal wee riptides to odd new experiential realms of desire and fulfillment, because the event/person/people/whatever appears multiple times in the text. In 'The Sopranos' it was Catholic high school girls, in 'The Man Who Walks' it was golden showers, and in 'Worms' it is virgin defloration and threesomes. Hymen-blood-soiled hotel sheets get mentioned a couple of times in the text. Follana improbably deflowers two Vietnamese girls (losing his virginity to them at the same time) when he is in his mid-teens, and has a tasty threesome with two women in their 30s when he is that age. It could even be argued that the rape of his wife is a threesome too.

The 16-year-old girls are deflowered in a water tank on the top of the hotel Follana swims in with them supplying the water to the building, their hymens tearing in twin sanguinary underwater mushroom clouds to be drained off to be consumed by the guests in their food and drinks. A disgusting image, and, as usual, Warner does not hold back on the creepy, sick imagery: a foreskin rips, a woman drunkenly accidentally sits on a corpse's face at a funeral, the caul Follana's head was encased in when he was born is crumbled into the same water tank - and on and on. Take this for example, when Follana is swimming with the teenage girls:

“I looked up to stars, circling seagulls, their underbellies cast with the sodium lights from the docks, the clouds above stained brown.

The girls made me lie on my back, long and stiff like a canoe they escorted me inwards, their salvage, one on each side they swam and steered me towards shallows and we laughed as the surf carried me that final distance and I stood trembling back on sand, a swimmer, exfoliative water gushing down my thighs like runny diarrhoea from a desperately sick person.”

A desperately sick person, hmmm. Look at those two paragraphs. Warner has the wordflow going, some nicely sketched imagery, and then he jams a vile image at the end to make us recoil and knocks us back out of the text. He does this time and time again in this book, with a weird necrophiliac equation of sex with death throughout, and it really grates. The schlock shock scenes were, as usual, stuck in for no clear reason, almost as a way of adding some juice to a not-particularly-interesting story, and they really stood out in their pointlessness and gleefully sneeringly sadistic intent towards the headshaking disgusted reader. And I personally didn't appreciate it one bit. However, I expected no less, because Warner has done this in every single book he has written now.

It's just a shame that in this, his most adult book to date (and make no mistake, this is a new, adult voice the writer is using, quite unlike anything else he has ever written), he had to resort to cheapshit gross-out tactics to try and (yawn) shock and awe the reader into submission. You know what I preferred? Take this, when Follana is talking about his first marriage and having sex his wife in a building scheme still under construction with concrete dust covering the newlyweds:

“When we sweated as we made love, we could have solidified into gray statues we were so coated in concrete. It speckled our coffee in the mornings and alkalined our salad in the evenings. As a symbol, concrete dust, with its flat, chalky taste, its oddly sharp smell, was a celebration of our progress, a drawing under of our past. Instead of flowery wafer, our city should have formed a new consecrated Host for Mass from its concrete powders, for we worshipped only the future. The Phases Zone 1 concrete apartment had been built using Father's compensation money from the huge concrete motorway twisting down our coast. I was a first-year Town Planning student who dreamed of concrete's possibilities - its living chemical warmth as it sets, and I would lick this dullness, the base material matt of our speculative world, from my young wife's arms to see the true burnish of her living skin resting beneath. Our pale tan of concrete dust was a celebration. Verona and I were physically becoming part of our concrete future, part of the voracious coastal development and the determination of our new society to range us all in a hierarchy of sea views.”

Now isn't that just beautiful? This is what I look for in Warner's work. He grabs an odd, poetic concept, and goes with it until it has run its surreal, slightly disturbing course. The voice of JG Ballard can be detected in there (some of the material in this book seemed to me Ballardian, but that was partly because Warner deals with same societal and geographical regions that Ballard has been dealing with for his last few books now), and in chapter names like 'Notes Towards My Own Obituary.' Overall the book is extremely well written, and I found myself stopping every page or two to admire the way the words lay side by side on the page, or even at onomatopoetic words like “skreeked” (when somebody drags a metal chair across a floor) or stuff like (when Follana is with the two teenage girls and an electric fan is blowing over them):

“Inevitably we shifted position, rolled over, paused on one elbow for a fascinated moment as the fan added a fourth presence, spraying us with bulletins of goose-bumping air; it was after some time I frowned and saw the substance on their bare bodies.”

“...bulletins of goose-bumping air,” how amazing is THAT? Though the voice of Omar is far too poetic for an illegal immigrant drifter, the whole book is chock full of beautiful wee resonating wordriffs, and I could go on and on, but you get the general point. It's gorgeously crafted, though a few words like “sweeties” or “dosser” or a few others sound too British to be Spanish. That's pure nitpicking, but hey - that's what I'm here for.

Overall, though, the substance of this book simply can't triumph over the style. When the gory, sleazy scenes aren't rudely crudely intruding, there are frankly ridiculous plot twists and points that really take the breath away with their audacious stupidity, especially one towards the end of the book involving Follana's doctor. When I read it I sighed and shook my head and wondered what the hell had been going through the author's head when he wrote it, because it wasn't shocking, only stupid, and Follana's reaction to it afterwards was far too cool calm collected. I could have done without the endless descriptions of hotel furnishings too, though I knew Warner had done this because his parents used to own a hotel in Oban and it thus bore the weight of nostalgia and real-life experience. But endless descriptions of paintings only carry so much weight before you start skipping over them to get to the next paragraph or page.

It was four years between Warner's last book and this new one. If it is to take him another four years to write the next one, which is starting to edge into Joseph Heller writing-length territory (not that that's necessarily a bad thing, of course, if it assures quality wordwork results), I would hope that he could at least temper his juvenile urge to assault and batter and disgust his readership. Because they deserve better than somebody getting their cock out (of content context) every few pages to try and nauseate them and, to be perfectly honest, such a talented, occasionally visionary, writer does too. Because he's simply too old for this 'shocking' crap, and he lowers himself by doing it.

And that's all there is to it.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.