A Letter from Alan Warner
The renowned Scottish novelist attempts to persuade Anna Goodall of the charms of his latest work
Dear Anna,
I’m sorry you didn’t like The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven as much as my earlier novels – I read your review in Culture Wars. I suppose it’s a change of flavour novel but there is a definite continuity and I thought the form of a man immersed in one language while we read it in another was interesting – like Morvern in a way.
1. Place and identity are inextricably linked in your fiction. Do you think you can ever escape from the place you were born?
I think it’s important to question those terms and what you mean by ‘linked’. Almost every character in my novels is also in some way alienated from their ‘place’ and therefore struggle with their ‘identity’. Alienation and struggle with identity for me are givens in the post-Beckett novel anyway. (In life too I think!). While I’m at it: I know I sound like an old snot nose and I can understand it with readers – but it always amazes me how many semi-professional critics don’t seem to conceive of the novel beyond Samuel Beckett. Some critics of today are like the Town Councillors of Literature, they hate any risk-taking with the conventions of characterisation, plot and ‘readability’. They are lazy and hopelessly conservative. They complain, ‘Oh there’s no plot in this novel, it just meanders along.’ As if they haven’t read and understood Beckett’s position in the history of the novel, which I would define as essentially the destruction and the active mocking of narrative itself. Most British middle-class critics define themselves by being happily stuck in 1947 as far as formal innovations in the novel go. It’s a bit like a train arriving at a station in 2006 and all the passengers shouting, ‘My god. It isn’t a steam train; how does it work?’
Without being pedantic, by the ‘place you were born’ I guess you mean the culture or place/s where you grew up? Or in my case the West Coast of Scotland/Oban area. Even by rebelling against your culture and experience, you are of course affirming its potency at least as far as it influences you. Some Scottish media and critics, awarding themselves and their world an undue importance as usual,
always assume I left Scotland for ‘cultural reasons’. As if I even take myself that seriously. There are scores of reasons why I’m not in Scotland at the moment. I did not sit down and write, ‘ten cultural reasons to leave or stay in Scotland’. If I had a great Aunt Jemima who’d left me a four bedroom flat in Edinburgh I might well have stayed! I find this constant determination to drive a scar of a simulacrum between an author’s work on the page and his or her life, increasingly worthless to meditate upon.
If I were to write a historical novel set during the Napoleonic Wars or a science fiction novel set on a distant planet, I can still envisage themes and formal or stylistic qualities that come from my complicated culture. To cut to the chase, I mean I still feel like a Scottish novelist.
2. Your first four novels are interlinked via a shared population (eg, Morvern making a brief cameo in ‘The Sopranos’; the girl in the pub who suggests Morvern go to the island where she ends up in ‘These Demented Lands’, etc), and, more importantly, a shared landscape that is a constant and mysterious presence. Was this intentional from the moment you started to write Morvern or something that evolved gradually?
I’ve always admired individual novels or novel sequences that are set in a sealed universe with a recognisable geography and also, I like your phrase very much, ‘a shared population.’ It’s in some science fiction I used to read, like Bob Shaw, it’s in Faulkner, Don Quixote, Michael Moorcock, Juan Carlos Onetti, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Jean Paul Sartre, Joyce, the Beckett trilogy: where characters move across the geography of the novel/s; where there’s a sense of characters being linked – even tenuously.
As such, are you consciously working from a literary tradition of creating a landscape that is part-fact/part-fiction?
Sometimes it’s hard to define between a ‘literary tradition’, and simply, ‘All the novels I have loved’!! I certainly adhere and consciously work from the latter rather than the former tradition though I’ve read and I’m fascinated by the latter.
3. ‘The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven’ is a completely different book to all your others. What led you to write about such a different type of person as Lolo: cold and detached, privileged and self-conscious, unmoved by language and music (sources of great comfort to other characters in your other work), irritating and apparently unlovable?
I don’t agree at all that it is a completely different book. What about it in relation to These Demented Lands which you do not mention? Similarities between Brotherhood and Tenis for instance? I think that is to overlook the formal and thematic things going on in those earlier novels. I’ve written about unsympathetic male characters from the start. I believe there are many similarities with the other novels; the same distrust and questioning of the
language through which the novel is being mediated, the same sense of mystery and the intangible. Surely Morvern is as open to criticism as ‘cold and detached’ as is Follana? Both are in what appears to be Spain. (Incidentally, I don’t think Morvern is cold or detached anyway and I don’t think Follana is either.)
I wanted to write about the contemporary bourgeois in action – the person with the power and the money but those who still manage to absolve themselves of guilt in their daily lives. But surely Follana’s journey is towards compassion and
solidarity and redemption: all of which he possibly achieves? Does he die in the end, or does Ahmed, or do neither, or do both? Was Ahmed in fact a fantasy, in Follana’s grief-mad guilt-ridden mind?
At the start of the The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, the clear implication is that Follana is celibate and appears to have been since (we finally learn) what happened to his second wife. (I thought of calling the novel, The Celibate at one point). He endures and ends the novel as a celibate. I think he’s quite a complicated but admirable man – almost monk-like when we join him. He’s sad, because like Morvern he’s in his own sort of mourning. And he’s unpredictable. I think you’ve missed aspects of this novel though of course you are free to enjoy or not enjoy – but sometimes I like struggling and being made uncomfortable with/by novels. Some of the novels – like some of the food – I now love the most, are those I did not instantaneously get seduced by.
4. You often write from the perspective of girls and women, and do so with immense power and sensuality: the tragedy of Aracelli; Morvern; Fionnula (the Cooler) and the others. What is the source of this affinity do you think?
As a writer I just try to make things work on the page. If I was writing a novel about a vicar leaping out a plane sky-diving, or a medieval knight on a white horse, I’d attempt to make it work on the page the same way as any female character I write – as best as I could. I just try to write characters as best as I can according to my literary tastes.
5. In relation to this, the sex scenes you write are the most sensual and convincingly erotic I have read. I think it is due to your affinity with the female perspective. Why do you think it is?
In The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven there is a scene where Follana sits and watches as a waiter in a café makes a coffee […] In all honesty I can say that scene and a sex scene are written with the same dedication and intent. For me it is as important that the coffee making is as well written as the lovemaking! In life (sometimes) sex seems more reactive and interesting than coffee! The sex, for complicated socio-reasons is what some readers remember, but for me working on the page there is no difference at all. Every scene is the nuts and bolts of the overall tapestry, not just sex scenes. People forget how much writers live on the page alone. They make assumptions about the writers off the page but it is a falsehood. Writers only exist on the page; they are lost, flighty beings away from it. A morally ugly writer can describe the most beautiful thing. A sex scene always serves a formal function in a novel, usually a dramatic narrative one – or at least they do in my novels.
6. There is a strong, if latent, religious theme in your work. It seems both ever-present and significant, and yet almost an anachronism in the protagonists’ experiences. How is religion meant to function in the novels? What is its significance to you?
I agree that’s there, but it is as difficult for me to say how it functions as it is for me to say how drowning, which features in nearly all these novels, might function. I see it more as a perfume rather than a function. The accoutrements of the social church appear in the novels – priests recur [for example] – yet that church has not brought the characters the peace on earth it promises. I am not religious, yet when you look at the rotted state of the body politic in Britain today, I am not so sure that agnostics like I have a right to think any church a more corrupt institution than the stinking world of contemporary politics.
I am interested in good and bad in all my characters and in humanity around me. I am aware that murder and turning our backs on murder – such as the current war in Iraq – is a daily event for all of us, but I do believe that some of us (politicians) are more culpable than others – so of course the brightening and fading filament of morality fascinates me. People will think me facetious and trite when I insist there is something crushingly ironic about a government considering a smoking ban to protect human life, whilst this same UK government are part of a military operation where thousands upon thousands of civilians and children (The Lancet suggests 100,000) have been slaughtered in the city of Fallujah – and in other cities. I don’t think these events are unrelated in the field of morality at all.
Like Follana, we believe these horrors of the world are far from us but they are very close to us, just hidden …
7. Did you fall in love with Morvern as you wrote her?*
No. It’s important to separate business from pleasure.
8. Which book do you wish you had written?
In the Skin of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje or The Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy or Wuthering Heights, or Airships by Barry Hannah or anything by Denis Johnson, or A Slipping Down Life by Anne Tyler, or Close Range by Annie Proulx or anything by Mark Richard, etc etc ad infinitum, and they are just off the top of my head.
9. Which author’s use of the English language do you most admire?
Shakespeare or James Joyce or Samuel Beckett or James Kelman.
10. Which novel has made you laugh the most?
I recall Seven Men by Max Beerbohm and The Poor Mouth by Flann O’Brien and First Love by Samuel Beckett, all bringing up serious guffaws and the inability to see through tears.
11. How is your work received in the area of Scotland about which you write?
The mystery of what readers are experiencing is a sacred one for me. A writer can never truly know what each individual experiences as they read a novel. It’s unknowable but exciting. Okay, I believe in parts of Miller Road, Oban, the books go down well and not so well at some of the more genteel addresses.
12. When did you realise you wanted to be a writer, and when did you feel you really were one?
I suppose those amazing weeks when I was first deeply moved by novels; I was around fourteen or fifteen years old. I read a Penguin Classic: The Immoralist by André Gide and my hands started to shake on the last pages. That was it. Though you won’t believe it, I honestly still do not feel like a writer. Sometimes I’m sat somewhere on a train or bus and it hits me: I jump with surprise. I think of myself more as a reader who writes.
*NB In an interview […] you said that if anyone reread a novel you had written in this short life you would be glad. Perhaps, then, it may be pleasing for you to know that after I first read ‘Morvern Callar’, I immediately turned back to the first page and began again (something I have not done before or after), and I have since read the novel many times.
That’s wonderfully pleasing Anna and I am glad! If I send you a hardback copy of The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, will you promise to reread it again in a few years?
Have a good summer.
Alan Warner
The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven by Alan Warner
(Jonathan Cape 2006)
