In the face of an uncertain future they prefer to live on the fringes doing what they want and disregarding what others think of them. This is clearest in Irving Welsh's work where Renton and his druggy associates inhabit a nether world where the only values they hold dear are the value of the heroin they need for their daily fix. There is a bleak atmosphere of nihilism and self-loathing pervading all these writers novels which is often only made bearable for the reader by the use of humour.
In this paper I intend to focus on the work of a young Scottish writer called Alan Warner. So far he has published three novels: Morvern Callar(1995), These Demented Lands(1997), and The Sopranos(1998). Born in 1964 in the west of Scotland, Warner differs from the writers mentioned above in that he sets his novels not in the urban decay of Glasgow or Edinburgh, but mainly in the bleak backwater of the coastal area of Oban in Argyll. The significance of this rural setting will become apparent later on in this paper.
Morvern's reaction is shocking in its lack of emotion. She observes how he has killed himself, and what tools he has used, with the cool detachment usually required of a criminal pathologist. Perhaps working in a supermarket dulls the senses more than you would imagine. She looks at her dead boyfriend as if his corpse were an item on the meat counter. At the same time she decides to make the most of the new situation that confronts her. She uses his death as a chance to light up a cigarette at home. Yet she does more than just that; this seemingly insignificant act will be followed by other larger ones. She turns the tragedy of her boyfriend's suicide into the springboard for a new and more liberating life for herself.
To some people Morvern would appear callous, a typically heartless example of the society does not exist Thatcherite credo of the 1980s which exhorted the individual to look after him or herself without worrying about anyone else. She lacks compassion (or so it seems at first glance) and appears to be only interested in what is good for her. Later in the novel we get to see that this first impression of her is not wholly correct. In a hotel room in Spain one evening she hears the sound of a young man crying. She goes down to his room to ask him what is wrong. When he explains that he has just learned of his mother's sudden death, Morvern takes pity on him, and to help him take his mind off things, she seduces him. Instead of offering sympathy she does something practical that helps him much more than a trite expression of how terrible he must feel.
Clearly Morvern is somewhat lacking in what most normal people would regard as a clear sense of right and wrong. This absence of a sense of morality is nowhere more clearly visible than in her reaction to her lover's death. Described in terms simply of what she does (and does not) do, you would be forgiven for thinking she is a truly repulsive and unsympathetic character. This is what Morvern does.
She has a cigarette. She cries. She thinks about calling the police. She has another cigarette. She opens the Christmas presents her boyfriend had bought her: a Walkman and a leather jacket. She has a bubble bath and shaves her legs. She gets dressed. She gives herself a manicure. She puts on her new Walkman and sits on the toilet, smoking one cigarette after another, listening to music. She sees a message on the computer screen from her boyfriend: NOTE ON THE DISC(2). She takes out the floppy disc, turns off the computer and goes out to work. After work she goes drinking with her friend Lanna, and together they go to a party, where they end up in bed with two guys they have never met before. With Lanna, Morvern walks through the snow the following morning to visit first her grandmother then Red Hanna, her foster father. She tells Lanna that her boyfriend has gone(3), and He's not coming back(4), giving the impression that he has left her, and thereby justifying her having slept with the men at the party. She tells Red Hanna her boyfriend is away to a country(5). She spends Christmas Day and Boxing Day with Red Hanna, then returns to her flat, where the corpse is still there, untouched on the kitchen floor. This is hardly a normal Christmas, not by any stretch of the imagination.
You might try to explain Morvern's strange behaviour by putting it down to shock. By refusing to do anything about her boyfriend's corpse, she might be thought to be denying the reality of his death. By getting on with her life as if nothing untoward had happened, she perhaps is hoping that when she returns home, he will be there alive and well, as he has been for the past five years of their sharing a flat together. However Morvern is not in denial. She is simply being pragmatic; she sees his death as a chance to escape from the drudgery of her daily life. Faced with the prospect of a forty-hour week on slave wages for the rest of her life (to borrow Red Hanna's words), she seizes her opportunity.
She disposes of her boyfriend's body and substitutes her own name for his on the manuscript of the book he has written. She sends the manuscript to a publisher in London, and they like it so much they give her a large advance. Morvern uses it and money from her boyfriend's bank account to spend the next six months under the Mediterranean sun, enjoying the delights of the rave scene. Raving consists of all-night parties in blacked-out bars where everyone dances in hypnotic synchronization while getting mortal as newts on hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol. Her hedonistic lifestyle is fun while it lasts, but two things conspire to bring her freewheeling days (or perhaps daze would be more appropriate) to an end: her money begins to run out and she gets pregnant. When she realises a baby is on its way, she returns home to prepare for the birth of her child.
Morvern does what she likes when she likes, unconstrained by any sense of what she must do. Her behaviour is not conditioned by notions of conscience or morality. She is free in a way that very few of us are; she is free to make the most of the chance her boyfriend's death gives her, without being burdened by a sense of shame at what she is doing. She cuts his body into pieces and disposes of it in the mountains; she in effect steals his book, claiming it as her own, and lives off the proceeds. She is never seemingly troubled by a sense of guilt either, and appears to live in her own amoral world where cutting up the remains of loved ones is not the stomach-turning horror it would be for many.
It is precisely because of Morvern's amoral stance that she is able to not only survive but even to flourish. Until the opportunity presented to her by her boyfriend's death comes along, she is facing an uncertain future with next to no prospects for escape. Her job pays her only enough to eke out a modest living, and the town she inhabits is the proverbial one-horse town. It is bleak, remote and inhospitable. It is a port, but not a big one. It is not a place brimming with life and opportunities for its young people.
Until her six months under the Spanish sun the only escape from her dour daily life is the music Morvern listens to on her Walkman. Indeed the importance she attaches to her music is clear from the start. Whatever she is doing, be it even cutting up a corpse, Morvern never fails to tell us just exactly what she is listening to. For some it might feel odd to be reading a book with its very own itemized soundtrack, but for many readers this attention to musical detail is no doubt part of the book's appeal. By giving us information on what Morvern listens to, Warner is also giving us clues to his heroine's tastes and by extension to her character. Readers can react not just to what Morvern does, but also to what she listens to.
Morvern's taste in music is decidedly eclectic, and perhaps necessarily so. If she listened to The Doors, some heavy metal dirge or even Kenny G as she busied herself in the kitchen chopping up her boyfriend's body, we would stop believing in her. She would become merely a two-dimensional character, a cliche (the drugged-out chick; the disturbed loner of countless trashy horror flicks; the post-modern, new-age, sicko chick). Explaining his inclusion of songs that will undoubtedly be unknown to many readers Warner has said, "A lot of the songs in the book are somewhat avant-garde and strange. I like a lot of weird stuff that no one listens to and the track lists are just a way of saying that this culture exists."(6) However by including the songs, in addition to publicising some little-known musicians, he also creates a world that while perhaps not immediately familiar is yet believable. Similarly few of us know anyone like Morvern, but that does not mean we do not believe in her authenticity. Warner has succeeded in creating a heroine who is like no one else, and yet she is someone we can believe in and identify with (at least to a certain degree).
For many young people living in the cold inhospitable backwaters of provincial Britain, with its constant cloud and cold winds, its insistent rain, and long winters, the chance to escape to a place with sun and sand is a dream that for a lucky few (the ones with jobs that pay enough) comes true at most once a year in the summer holidays when they fly off to hedonistic resorts such as Ibiza. So when Morvern gets the advance from the publisher and spends six carefree months partying in the southern sun, she is doing what countless other young people would do if only they could. She lives the life that many wish were there for the taking: to go from supermarket slave to sundrenched siren in one fell swoop.
In her progress from the tedium of shacking shelves to the exhilaration of economic freedom and independence in sunny Spain, Morvern might be compared to the two main characters in the film Thelma and Louise, sometimes referred to as a feminist road movie. In it the two eponymous heroines break out of their humdrum lives and set off on an adventure where they enjoy not merely the freedom of the road as they speed along the highway, but the freedom to do what they like, with whom they like, when they like. They are in charge of their destinies, deciding what path they will take, breaking free of the narrow confines their husbands try to impose on them. But while their adventure goes sadly awry with the shooting of a rapist in a car-park, and ends in their decision to die rather than give themselves up to the police, Morvern's is less abrupt, less conclusive. Thelma and Louise pay the ultimate price for their fun in the sun, while Morvern's fate is less melodramatic: she returns home to Scotland, pregnant. Whether the pregnancy was planned or not is unclear. What she will do once the baby is born is again left unexplained. The ending is left open.
As we have seen above, one of the characteristics that sets Morvern apart from most people is her amoral stance. She disposes of her boyfriend's body and steals his book. Her lack of a guilty conscience may horrify some readers, but for others her ability to act decisively without constantly worrying about the rights and wrongs of her actions is no doubt very attractive. She is finely attuned to the needs and demands of her own body, and is able to give and take pleasure without any of the guilt and emotional baggage that often attends sex. She realises that sex is not only enjoyable but can also be therapeutic as we see in the scene where she seduces the boy who is crying over the death of his mother. Morvern seeks refuge from the pain of coming to terms with her boyfriend's demise by attending a party with her friend Lanna where they both end up in bed with two men they have just met.
What used to be called by people of my grandmother's generation common sense and decency would deplore Morvern's immorality, her lack of shame, her disrespect for the dead; she should sit in a dark room feeling miserable, wearing black, and crying her eyes out. Morvern does not need to justify herself to anyone, and her pro-active behaviour is remarkably effective: she is able to make the most of a bad situation, turning a minus into a plus, not dwelling on her grief but moving on and seeing how she can best go forward. Her only regret after her and Lanna's four-in-a-bed romp is that she caught a cold walking home in the snow. This down-to-earth, practical streak in Morvern's character is refreshing in its frank no-nonsense approach.
Morvern's ability to take pleasure in simple, animal pleasures is clearly illustrated in another scene in the book where she and Lanna go skinny-dipping while walking up in the mountains. Here we see Morvern not only at one with her own body, but also with nature. Using Morvern as narrator, Warner describes in poetic detail the sensations she feels as the cold water of the mountain pool envelops her naked body. She is not ashamed of her own nakedness nor worried that some peeping Tom might see her, and while Lanna needs some encouragement, Morvern is characteristically brisk, stripping off her clothes in an instant and diving into the pool from a tree.
Earlier in the novel Morverns dispassionate detachment from the dead body of her boyfriend on the kitchen floor might remind some readers of Meursault in Camus's L'Etranger. Indeed this is most certainly Warner's intention. He himself has called Morvern Callar "an old existential novel recast in todays colours."(7) In the scene by the mountain pool there are echoes of Meursault on the beach: the concentration on the sensory perception of the surroundings (for Meursault the sun, the sand and the sea, three elements later to be echoed when Morvern goes to Spain; for Morvern the freshness of the cold water); the overwhelming, enveloping power of the surrounding nature contrasting with the death of the Arab / Morvern's boyfriend. Morvern swims near the very place where she has recently buried her boyfriend's dismembered body, and yet her sensual enjoyment of the cool water on her body is so overwhelming she is lost to the pleasure her bathing gives her. While there may be certain similarities between the two books and their cool, detached, seemingly amoral narrators, however, it would be misleading to overstate the comparison. For while Meursault remains unmoved even by the prospect of his own execution, as he sits in his cell, Morvern shows a lust for life that remains undimmed. Indeed this affirmation of life is nowhere clearer than at the end of the novel when Morvern returns to her Scottish roots to prepare for the birth of her baby.
Warner grew up with a house with no books in it,(9) in a town where guys who read books were looked upon as effeminate(10). He worked as a railway driver and also as a bouncer on the door of a nightclub. "Ten years of having to do shit jobs gives you an edge on reality. And a lot of material."(11) Given his background, it is clear why his work strikes such a chord with young people particularly (but not exclusively) in Scotland. He is writing about a world he knows well, and he depicts it in a way many of his readers can identify with because it is their reality as well.
While his contemporaries write about the problems facing the downtrodden and disaffected youth of big cities such as Glasgow and Edinburgh, Warner remains (like Morvern) true to his roots, returning to the west coast area of Argyll as the setting for his novels. Even in his latest work The Sopranos where much of the central part of the book takes place in Edinburgh, the main focus is the Port; it is there that the teenage girls of their choir from Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School for Girls look forward to meeting the sailors from the submarine docked in the harbour; it is there they have to face their teachers, the nuns, to explain their misbehaviour in the capital. Their day trip to Edinburgh for the national singing finals is much like Morvern's sojourn in Spain: it is an escape from the everyday drudgery, a time to live it up, do what you want, and to hell with the consequences.
The choristers are a few years younger than Morvern (who makes a brief appearance in The Sopranos), and are very much following in her footsteps. They make the most of their one day of freedom in the big city, seizing their chance in much the same way Morvern does when she passes her boyfriend's book off as her own. They are all young feisty women who feel their natural lust for life (and all its forbidden joys) are being held in check by forces beyond their control. For the teenagers it is parents and teachers who hold them back. For Morvern it is more a case of her lack of financial means and perhaps her boyfriend who in his suicide note to her urges Morvern "to live the life people like me have denied you."(12) Nevertheless Warner's heroines are not backwards in coming forwards (as my grandmother used to say) and are full of an energy that knows no bounds. Warner's choice of self-possessed, dynamic young women as his central characters contrasts markedly with his contemporaries, most of whom choose to focus on the lives of Scottish men (and not Scottish women). It is also interesting to note that most of the men they describe are failing to make the most of the situations they find themselves in.
In Trainspotting Irving Welsh paints a vivid picture of a gang of young men whose daily concerns revolve around where their next fix of heroin is coming from.(13) In How Late It Was, How Late James Kelman's first-person narrator wakes up one morning to find he has lost his sight, but he is so hung over he doesn't realise at first the extent of his new dilemma. In Swing Hammer Swing! Jeff Torrington describes a week in the life of Tam Clay, a Gorbals slum-dweller who wanders the city, dodging his in-laws' jibes at his lack of a job while wondering where his dead-end life is taking him. In The Devil's Carousel (1996) Torrington depicts the squalor and drudgery of life on an assembly line in a car factory that is shortly to close, making all its workers redundant. As Morvern's foster father Red Hanna says, these are all stories about characters who "eat from the plate that's largely empty"(14). This is the world of the have-nots, the marginal figures on society's fringes whose existence is rarely if ever acknowledged by the mainstream. For them there is no easy way to escape except through the self-destructive paths of alcohol and drugs. Trainspotting ends with the main character Mark Renton setting out to forge a new life for himself in Amsterdam:
This flight away from the literally life-threatening environment of his hometown is Renton's chance to start over again with a clean slate. But his escape is only made possible by stealing money from his friends, which in a way brings us back nicely to Morvern. Her extended holiday in Spain is financed by the theft of her boyfriend's book. In neither book do the authors depict these acts of theft as morally reprehensible. Instead of Renton and Morvern being treacherous thieves willing to do the dirty on their friends if it means they can benefit, they are portrayed as the resilient, resourceful and quick-witted survivors of the dog-eat-dog world we exist in. They are street-wise, knowing when to and how to make the most of the few chances that come their way in life. Instead of sitting and moaning like her foster father who glumly remains convinced that he has wasted his life, Morvern refuses to let the world grind her down. Even in the darkest moments there's still small pleasures, though,(16) and it is Morvern who is there and is the first to take them.
Morvern Callar by Alan Warner was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1995. In writing this essay I used the Vintage paperback edition (1996). All page numbers below refer to the Vintage edition.