Morvern Callar

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Morvern Callar is a woman who goes to extremes. But then, her life is so appalling that only extreme behavior can help her survive. From the opening scene of her boyfriend's grisly suicide in their tiny depressed Scottish town to her immersion in the wild sensuousness of the European rave scene, Morvern pulls the reader with her as she takes charge of her booze- and drug-driven life. After hiding "His" body (her dead boyfriend remains nameless and capitalized throughout), Morvern takes His money and His novel and escapes. A disastrous Youth Med vacation is followed by a comical night out with her London publishers, a modicum of peace in an unnamed southern land and a nocturnal life of raves and night swimming before she finally comes full circle back to Scotland. It's easy to see why this first novel won its author a Somerset Maugham Award, a nomination for the Whitbread First Novel Award and notice as one of Scotland's new beat writers. Though not written in Scots dialect, the prose captures the cadence and pulse essential to the Scottish voice. Unlike her American 20-something counterparts, Morvern does not whine and endlessly complain, but rather acts, constantly responding to the bizarre turns that life throws her with determined purpose and her own brand of morality. Morvern is a right wild sexy Scottish rave chick tied into the pulse of everything from Zawinul to John McCormack, and Warner endows her with a powerful first-person narrative voice that conveys the sights, sounds (Morvern always tells the reader what's playing on her Walkman or stereo, providing a sort of soundtrack for the novel), tastes and scents of her experience. Film rights to BBC; author tour. (Mar.)

Charles Taylor

[O]f all the new Scottish novelists, Alan Warner seems closest to the anomic nihilism of Irvine Welsh. His first novel, Morvern Callar, opens with a deadpan shocker -- the eponymous heroine finding her boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor after he slits his own throat -- proceeds through Morvern's dead-end job; her anesthetizing binges on booze, dope, music and sex; and moves on to her prowls through the rave clubs of the Mediterranean. Morvern's reaction to the suicide is vintage blank generation amoral: She disposes of the body, plunders her dead boyfriend's bank account and submits his novel to a London publisher after putting her name on it.

But what makes Morvern Callar the best of the new Scottish writing is the inescapable sorrow of Morvern's voice. Warner has written a novel that teeters between coolly shocking hipness and a fuller, more mature sensibility. He nails the hopelessness of working-class life in the port town where Morvern lives without overdoing it or shortchanging the characters. The most touching parts of the book depict her dealings with older people: her girlfriend's gran or her own foster father. If there seems to be no generation gap here, it's because the young recognize their own fate in the wrung-out lives of their elders. The temporary escapes open to them (there's an indelible, hellish sequence detailing Morvern's package holiday to a sub-Club Med resort) only reinforce the awfulness that awaits.

The problem is that Morvern's too full of feeling for the callousness with which she treats her boyfriend's death to be believable. It's easy to see how his death (and his money) gives Morvern a chance to escape (it's a clue that one of her favorite videos is Antonioni's "The Passenger," about a man who tries to make a new start by swapping identities with a dead man). And Warner renders Morvern's no-way-out life so vividly, it's not as if we'd lose sympathy for her if she felt driven by desperation to exploit her loss. But Warner doesn't allow her any uneasiness, and that feels like a concession both to hipness and to all the clichTd editorializing about what the jacket copy calls "the vast internal emptiness" of today's youth. He's created a heroine who's anything but empty, who spends much of her time trying to deaden the feelings crowding her insides. Morvern is engaging, determined to express what she can't quite articulate, and Warner is a compelling storyteller. He's got a chance at being the next big thing. Here's hoping he becomes the next genuine thing. --Salon

Kirkus Reviews

How does a do-it-all party girl become a woman of virtue, the next best thing to the Virgin Mary? The answer, savage yet serene, is this seductive debut from Warner, one of a just-arriving group of new Scottish writers.

The shock of waking one morning before Christmas to find her man dead on the floor proves less stressful for Morvern Callar, a produce-stacker who lives only for music and the next rave, than the inconvenience of having to deal with his body. She goes to work in her seaside Scottish town, then goes to a club, then an all- night party. But when she finally comes home a few days later, he's still there. So she hauls him into the attic and opens the windows for the winter, availing herself of his CDs and bank account and sending his unpublished novel around as he requested, but passing it off as her own. When warm weather arrives, Morvern has to deal with him again; this time she chops him up and goes on a camping trip to dispose of the pieces. Then, craving a change, she abandons work for a Mediterranean resort, where she spends everything, even a publisher's advance for "her" novel. Broke and jobless, she comes home to find her foster dad making out with her best friend—who has already confessed to having gone wild with Morvern's boyfriend the night before he cut his throat. But Morvern also finds a letter informing her that the boyfriend's ample inheritance has been left to her, so she immediately heads back to the blue skies, warm beaches, and the resort rave scene—where in her splendid isolation she has an epiphany. On her next return home a few years later, much is changed, but then so is she.

Morvern is the raw, resilient voice of a generation, and if this not-quite-ironic tale of redemption and Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting are any indication, the Scottish Beats are already strong contenders for world-class literary status.