Morvern Callar by Alan Warner

"The Tree Church on the sgnurr above where he lay back upon the land."

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (1995)

I found it! And then I read it. And isn't it brilliant.

One thing I'm finding, as I read and then write, is that each book speaks to the next, even when that might be unexpected. Mycorrhizal interpolation, perhaps. Or confirmation bias. The Boss Baby problem.

So coming to this after The Solitudes, what struck me first was a sense that this too might amount to a secret history, of a sort; the novel behind the Proper Novel. Because perhaps the Proper Novel here is the one that ends as this begins. The troubled life of the troubled boyfriend, who wrote a novel, who maintained a complex model railway in the attic, who took his own life with a kitchen cleaver. That sounds like Literature.

In fact, Warner did start writing that book… and then he didn't like it, so he wrote this one instead, and the world is better for it. Morvern Callar, bereft girlfriend, and what she did next. Which, after finding his body, goes something like: has a Silk Cut, cries, slows down the lights on the Christmas tree, puts on the immersion and the bar fire, takes her pill, jumps over the body, boils the kettle and has a wash, jumps back over the body, slips in the blood, then goes to the toilet. "Sitting there I saw I'd locked the door even though He was dead."

What she doesn’t do: call an ambulance, call Strathclyde’s finest, tell anybody. Later she swipes his debit card and hides his body.

More or less the only description of Morvern in the novel, apart from a few scenes that mention the glitter embedded in her knee, is that she has the "face of an angel". Being thoroughly internet-poisoned, for me this naturally refracted through all those ‘biblically accurate angel’ pictures: a terrifying mass of unlidded eyes, with nails of Dusky Cherry.

Kind of works, though. You don't ever know what's going on inside Morvern's head — instead the novel watches her watching, tasting, smelling, eating; perceiving. Her lighter is always goldish. At times the novel even slides out of the first and into the second person, and the reader and Morvern become simultaneous observers. "You saw the Panatine was over at a waiting taxi then he climbed up onto the roof, buckling it all in and with a boot sent the plastic mini-cab sign flying over the sea wall." 

Meursault fails to mourn his mother appropriately, and is ultimately condemned by his failure. But here in the early nineties, a few years after the abolition of society, the failure to properly mourn your dead boyfriend — or, indeed, to mention his death to anybody — passes unpunished, either by characters or author. Perhaps her friends all think she's being a bit weird, with Him suddenly gone away, but hey, they thought that before.

According to the quote from Time Out on the front of my copy — Vintage, 1996 — this novel "defines the 90s as clearly as Ian McEwan defined the 70s and Jay McInerney the 80s." Being an underread philistine I can't comment on the comparisons, but Morvern Callar truly does stink of the 90s. That's not just a question of up to the minute cultural references, although Morvern is very good at letting us know what she's listening to.

Rather, it's that intersection between, on the one hand, atomised precarity — Morvern makes not very much in her local supermarket, in a port town that makes not very much all told — and on the other the promise of hedonistic escape. Cheap flights to the Balearics, and the endless abstract promise of house music in the hot nights. She gets a bit of cash, she goes on a package holiday; she gets a bit more cash, and she disappears. 

AWAY RAVING. DONT BE WORRYING ABOUT ME. SELL EVERYTHING HERE. MORVERN.

Things can only get better.