18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliantly Unique Heroine, October 21, 2000
By A Customer
Of all the "new" Scottish novelists, Alan Warner is absolutely the very best. This, his first novel, opens with the title heroine, Morvern Callar finding her boyfriend dead on the kitchen floor after slitting his own throat.
Morvern is someone no one would want to be, a member of the Scottish "working class," a woman for whom life holds no promise other than sex, music and liquor, and, in time, even those will fade. So, in a life devoid of hope, Morvern does what might seem illogical to someone not caught in her circumstances: she buries her boyfriend's body, cleans out his bank account and even submits his novel to a London publisher under her own name. All this before quitting her own dead-end job and heading down to the Spanish Mediterranean for more sex, music and liquor. That's all. There is no "hopefully more," in Morvern Callar's world.
Although Morvern may appear callous and amoral she is anything but. Warner, who captures the "voice" of his protagonists so perfectly (see These Demented Lands and The Sopranos) has captured the very essence of Morvern Callar. There is an inescapable sorrow in Morvern that all of her coolness and hipness cannot hide. This is a real person, one who is gentle and caring with her girlfriend's grandmother and her own foster father. Morvern sees herself reflected in the wrung-out lives of her elders. Her temporary escape to the warmer, more sunny climes of the Mediterranean are a desperate attempt to grab what little escape she can, and, because of this very desperation, these scenes take on a hellish, almost surreal quality. We know, as does Morvern, that whatever release she is feeling at the moment will only magnify the emptiness of her life in the long run. A clue to Morvern's personality is her favorite video: Antonioni's "The Passenger," a tale about a man who tries to make a new life by switching identities with a dead man.
A master writer, and a master at characterization, Warner never resorts to melodrama in portraying the bleakness of Morvern's life or in her reaction to it. He simply tells it like it is...exactly. And that is part of what makes this novel so perfect. Although Morvern's life is filled with hopelessness and despair, she, herself, is a woman filled with feeling, a true heroine in the finest sense of the word. Even though Morvern tries desperately to deaden the feelings that are killing her, she fails to do so.
Obviously, Morvern Callar is a character-driven novel and Morvern, herself, is fascinating enough to carry us along. There really is very little plot in the book to speak of, although Warner does hide some obtuse symbolism here and there. If Morvern, herself, weren't enough to intrigue even the most jaded reader, Warner's writing is so good that it alone makes this book worth reading even if, by some strange chance, you don't like Morvern.
Ultimately depressing and without hope, Morvern Callar will no doubt sadly appeal only to a very limited, and very literary, audience, those who read and love Irvine Welsh, for instance. This is too bad, since Warner is a brilliant and polished writer and one whose work deserves a much more widespread readership.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You've missed the point!, June 18, 1997
By A Customer
Everyone sees Morvern Callar as a singular tale of hedonism and the drug culture, but that's not quite it. I may be predjudiced by living in the town that the book is supposed to be set in but I see it being so much more.
The book has as much to do with the place as with the people - unless you've lived on the west coast of scotland all your life like I have maybe you don't get the point - Warner is trying to create the image of 'running away' that everyone likes to do up here. The book deals with Morvern's will to escape from her own mixed up, impersonal life there to the spanish costa's and the rave culture , a sterile but individualistic, contrast to the closely knit community she was brought up in. (A lot of the book mirrors warner's life - leaving home, living it up in the spanish raves for a few years and then back to the UK where he worked on the railways for a while)
So when you read it - look for the little things, the town, the people, the battle between the sterility but excitment of the 'outside world' and the friendly but mentally stifling small town.
Because I find it special that way the only score I could ever give it would be a 1
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's about language, music, escape, and life being handed on, September 1, 1998
By A Customer
It seems that readers (see above reviews) saw the depressing table setting here and looked no further. Actually, the book is exhilarating. Morvern's tongue is a potent cocktail of Scots, slang, and autodidactic poetry, and it's more erotic in and of itself than anything since the motels sequence of Lolita. Her character, far from blank or emotionless, is wanton, savage, but with great depths of wisdom--she's a changeling, and her story is almost mythic, beginning with its premise. This book has a pulse you can nearly dance to, but, like some great undiscovered piece of trance dub, it has symphonic undercurrents, with a strange and terrible beauty.
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