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Overview
An air-crash investigator haunts the hinterlands of an island - around the isolated honeymoon spot, the Drome Hotel - gathering the debris from fallen planes that the islanders have fashioned into makeshift sheds and fences; but what kind of jigsaw is he really assembling as he paces the runway? A young woman makes landfall on the island, crossing the interior to arrive at the Drome Hotel: desperate, strange - and strangely familiar. Meanwhile, DJ Cormorant is trying to organize The Big One, a rave on the adjacent airstrip, and from all over These Demented Lands come twisted characters, converging for one final Saturday night at the Drome Hotel.Synopsis
After the critical success of his first novel, Morvern Callar, Alan Warner has written an extraordinary, stirring sequel to Morvern's odyssey, confirming him as one of the most original, uniquely gifted writers to have appeared this decade.
An air-crash investigator haunts the hinterlands of an island—around the isolated honeymoon hot spot, the Drome Hotel—gathering the debris from fallen planes that the islanders have fashioned into makeshift sheds and fences; but what kind of jigsaw is he really assembling as he paces the runway?
A young woman makes landfall on the island, crossing the interior to arrive at the Drome Hotel: desperate, strange—and strangely familiar.
Meanwhile, DJ Cormorant is trying to organize The Big One, a rave on the adjacent airstrip, and from all over These Demented Lands come twisted characters, converging for one final Saturday night at the Drome Hotel.
Publishers Weekly
Readers who remember Warner's debut, Morvern Callar, may recognize the mysterious heroine in his second novel as she wanders about an isolated island populated by lunatics, losers and the lost. Fellow eccentrics include a hippy salvager known as the Argonaut; the existential Aircrash Investigator, who searches for the remains of a long-forgotten plane wreck; and John Brotherhood, sinister proprietor of the Drome, a seamy resort hotel for honeymooning couples. The landscape that these characters inhabit is also eccentric but familiar, invoking Homer, Shakespeare and Warner's fellow Scots R.L. Stevenson and James Kelman. After Warner's jaded but willful heroine clashes with Brotherhood, she winds up indentured as a housemaid to pay her hotel bill. Her escape from the Drome, like her hidden motive for going there originally, is less absorbing than the heavy brogue, deadpan dialogue and surreal imagery of Warner's prose. Even if plot matters less to Warner than trippy atmospherics, he earns praise for finding poetry in a parade of whelk-pickers, a sinking ferry, a psychedelic beach-rave and even a propeller blade. (Mar.) FYI: Morvern Callar, winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize, has been filmed by the BBC.