Morvern Callar (Alan Warner)

Literary history is filled with infamous, confrontationally beautiful opening lines. Who could forget "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" from 'Nineteen Eighty Four', "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" from 'Metamorphosis', "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles" from 'Less Than Zero' or "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know" from 'The Outsider'. Well, to that hallowed company you can add the first line of Alan Warner's 1995 debut 'Morvern Callar': "He'd cut his throat with the knife." With that stark statement, we are introduced to a new existentialist narrator, the laconic, amoral Morvern, a twenty-one-year-old shelf stacker for whom the suicide of her older, upper middle class boyfriend is an opportunity to be grasped rather than an occasion for mourning.

Indeed, it seems that her dead boyfriend, who is never named, intended Morvern to be set free from the fences her class and location have put up around her, given that he leaves her everything he has. He asks only that she sends off his novel, so that he can gain some posthumous fame. In a moment of blind inspiration, Morvern deletes his name and substitutes her own, gaining herself a nice little advance cheque in addition to all the money in the deceased's account. She also disposes of his body in a rather unique fashion, never telling anybody of his demise. They have, she says, "broken up". In the early part of the novel, Warner paints an especially bleak portrait of life in a port town in the extreme north of Scotland, from the supermarket where Morvern used to have to wade through blood and bone in the butchery department to the archaic pubs and working men's clubs Morvern tours with her friend Lanny. Existence here seems to exude a kind of sinister desperation reflected by the inclement weather. This is small town life at its most insular, and Warner paints it in a vivid and convincing manner throughout. The fact that Morvern is utterly indifferent to everything- sex with strangers, her boyfriend's horrifically grisly suicide, the love of her foster father, her friendship with Lanny- adds to this feel, making every page of stark prose entirely fascinating. She is truly a worthy successor to the likes of Meursault in the line up of great existentialist characters. The fact that her attitude does not change when her windfall leads her to two extended, extravagant tours of the Med show that she is completely dead to joy, but equally, not depressed in any way...she just exists.

I was utterly absorbed in Morvern throughout as she has so many obsessions that speak of control. She endlessly lists songs she listens to in a new cassette walkman, going so far as to give the reader full tracklistings of various compilation tapes. She continually refers to her cigarette lighter with the alarmingly specific choral refrain "I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut" (a technique also used in 'Fight Club' where the narrator has several of these stock phrases, for example "I know this because Tyler knows this"). One of her Christmas gifts from Lanny is a pedicure kit, which she uses to continually re-paint her toe nails throughout the novel, and several times a day during her Mediterranean excursions. As she spends more time on holiday she develops an addiction to tanning (a control motif familiar from Ian McKewan's 'The Cement Garden'). Her decisions are so hard-edged and pragmatic, instinctive and amoral, never clearly explained to the reader.

I've read various opinions on this book around and abouts, and I must say, I think a lot of people have missed the point when they say that 'Morvern Callar' is some kind of bildungsroman, with Morvern "learning about her womanly soul" and "going on a journey of self-discovery". For me, the whole point of the book is that she has no desire to learn about herself or the world around her. She does not care about anything at the beginning of the book, nor at the end. The absurdity of human existence is laid bare throughout, and our attachment to possessions and places is questioned with a forensic, critical eye. This is brilliant book, with Warner equally assured in both Scottish and Spanish settings. He does something many authors strive to do but few truly achieve: he creates an original, charismatic and memorable voice for a literary character.