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Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was macabre, bizarre and brilliant. This, his fifth, is equally macabre and bizarre, but less brilliant. So I first thought. Then I realised that it doesn’t lack heart, but only hides it. That in itself, I suppose, is rather brilliant.
The first pages hook us in a simple way: Manolo (Lolo) Follana, aged 40, is told by his doctor and best friend that he is HIV positive. For the next fortnight we follow him while his life replays before him, as for a drowning man.
After the opening, however, nothing is simple. Mercifully, Lolo and his friends have names. But his city doesn’t, nor does his country; from the rare references to its history (a long fascist period) and geography (a pair of co-ordinates), you guess it’s southern Spain. But the co-ordinates point inland, while the unnamed city is on the sea; and though we’re in the present, the neighbourhood names suggest a futuristic fantasy (Phases Zone 1, Kilometre 4).
Time and space are pretty weird here in other words, and so is our main guide, language. Italics and exclamation marks run wild; chapter titles are often arch (eg ‘Last Chapter: Titled: Last Chapter’). Odd words and phrases abound — ‘gremial’, ‘benthic’, ‘frownsome’, stopping you in your tracks like the italics. All of this is not fun, at least to me!
And yet there is wonderful writing here too. Warner is particularly good on light, and on weird, macabre images: the trays of departed waiters jammed into the palm tree at a café, borne aloft by the growing tree; a naked, dead old man in his bath, plunging through the ceiling of the Imperial Hotel to crash among the diners.
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