NICHOLAS WROE meets a wary member of `this Scottish literary renaissance thing’
ALAN WARNER was a driver for British Rail in Edinburgh when his first novel, Morvern Callar, was accepted for publication. “They’d just phoned me at 1am asking me to work at eight the same morning,” he says. “So I went in, told the boys that my book had been bought, and told the supervisor that he could find me in the bar next door.”
Warner’s decision to give up the day job was vindicated when Morvern Callar became one of the hottest books of 1995. His brilliant and original study of a supermarket skivvy’s strange odyssey from the Highlands to the Balearic rave scene garnered both critical adulation and impressive sales. Warner was quickly thrust to the forefront of modern Scottish writing as a rural counterpoint to the urban agonies of Irvine Welsh.
Warner’s second novel, These Demented Lands (Jonathan Cape paperback original), again showcases his extravagantly charged prose and weirdly luminous imagination. But he expresses unease at his new status as an established novelist.
“I considered myself an avant-garde writer,” he explains. “So it’s bizarre that my novel has been so successful. I thought it would sell 300 copies over 15 years and be recognised as a masterpiece after I died …”
Born in Oban on the west coast of Scotland, Warner left school at 16 to work on the railways despite really wanting to do that “literature and art thing”. Night-school was followed by a degree in London and a postgraduate year at Glasgow. But the only job he could get was back on the railways.
“And I still didn’t tell anyone that I was writing,” he says. “To admit that in the culture I came from was to say you had a second penis or something. It just wasn’t done.”
The importance of his Argyll upbringing cannot be overstated. The Oban setting of Morvern Callar lent it an enthralling mystical freshness and the reworking of Mull as the location of his new book provides a disturbing authenticity.
“I think my work will always be set there,” he says. “When I was younger I didn’t think literature could be created up there. I thought you had to live in Paris or London, which is incredibly sad. I get tearful thinking of me sitting up in the Highlands reading Brideshead Revisited and feeling inadequate. But then came Jim Kelman.”
Exposure to Kelman’s work in the early Nineties – as well as that of Duncan Maclean, Janice Galloway and Welsh – encouraged Warner to break cover as a writer. But having joined this select group he is now increasingly wary.
“This Scottish literary renaissance thing gives the impression that we’re a group and no writer can stand on his or her own. Kelman has already distanced himself because I think he sees himself as a writer, not a Scottish writer. But while it’s all a bit Braveheart and tartan, it’s still great to see Scottish writing doing better than AS Byatt or Julian Barnes,” he grins.
While Barnes and Byatt don’t get the Warner seal of approval, he cites JG Ballard as the greatest writer and prose stylist in England. “The first day I was in London I went out to his place with a bottle of whisky because I’d heard he was a scotch drinker. I was pissed and 19 years old and he just invited me in. He said, `Don’t worry, always follow your obsessions even if they turn out to be shit.’ There was this deck-chair in his front room and a fake palm tree covered in silver foil.”
The decaying hi-tech of a rundown airfield is a nicely Ballardian touch among a cacophonic broth of literary echoes in These Demented Lands. Joseph Conrad, The Tempest, RL Stevenson (the book opens with quotes from Kidnapped as well as a Black Grape song) and the New Testament all swirl around in a darkly intoxicating brew. Set at the end of the century, the book has a desperate cast of damaged characters who work out their – and the century’s – histories and obsessions against a backdrop of a huge millennial rave.
“I know this is a weird, weird book,” he says, “but I write books for me. It sounds indulgent but I couldn’t possibly do anything else.”