Morvern Callar
Book Review of Alan Warner's First Novel
After twenty-one-year-old Morvern finds her boyfriend lying on the floor dead with his throat slit by a butcher knife on Christmas Eve, she is momentarily afraid, but goes about business as usual. She lights a cigarette, makes tea, pops a tape in her Walkman, and gets ready to go to her low-paying job at a nearby supermarket. The opening scene sets the tone of apathy for the whole novel, and her boyfriend is never referred to by his first name, only "Him."
Immoral Acts
That night after work, Morvern goes to a sleazy club, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, and engages in sexual acts with her best friend and two guys they have just met at a party. No one ever knows throughout the novel, of her boyfriend's suicide - she simply tells people that he has left her without giving a forwarding address.
Morvern arrives home two days later to find his body, not even rotting, on the floor. She goes on to dismember his body and bury parts of him in the sand at the beach, erase his name and put hers on a novel he wrote and send it off to a publisher, where they decide to publish it, take the money out of his bank account because she has access to his pin number, and spend the money he left her from his father's inheritance on drugs and raves in the Mediterranean.
But of course, the money can't last forever.
Setting and Dialect
Set in a working-class port town in west Scotland, Warner does a brilliant job of capturing the sense of bleakness and the hopelessness that the citizens try to cover up, mostly through vices. Many of the characters drink and use drugs for the sheer amusement of the crazy events that ensue after they take them, and Morvern's best friend Lanna enjoys one-night stands, including one with Morvern's foster father who is about thirty years older than her. Spousal abuse and broken marriages are commonplace.
Warner peppers his novel with colorful Scottish dialect and slang (for example, "greet" means to cry; "mortal" means drunk) and describes in detail the lochs, the beaches, and the pubs in the town. The reader gets the feeling that few people leave the town, which is why Morvern's departure to other parts of Europe is important. She wants to leave her stifling life of menial work and the struggle to pay rent while the villagers are content having little money and drinking for fun. Of course she continues to party, mostly in the Mediterranean, but on a more glamorous and ultimately more costly scale.
Tone
Warner carefully extracts much of the sentimentality from the novel but does not completely strip his characters of emotions. When Lanna tells Morvern that she slept with her boyfriend, Morvern gets angry and refuses to talk to Lanna for awhile, and Red Hanna, Morvern's stepfather, goes into a depression when his pension is suspended from his job on the railroad. But Warner's storytelling is matter-of-fact almost to the point of being detached. This makes for a subtly disturbing novel that makes valid points about the apathetic youth of today.
Warner, Alan. Morvern Callar, Anchor Books 1995, ISBN 0-385-48741-X
Morvern Callar
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