Alan Warner
THE WORMS CAN CARRY ME TO HEAVEN
390pp. Cape. Paperback, £11.99.
0 224 07129 7
In this life, objects alone remain faithful, have mercy on us and survive our ruined relationships. Our emotion is shallow and we have forgotten what we once felt, then an object from the past – a butter dish – the existence of which we had forgotten, is sighted and it all flips us backwards in time, to broken promises.
So muses Manolo Follana, Alan Warner’s latest narrator-protagonist, as he ranges over the forty years of his life, a life which suddenly appears not to have so far to go. Diagnosed as HIV-positive at the beginning of the novel, Manolo has good reason to seek out and caress the texture of his memories; but he is only the most recent of Warner’s studies in what it means to live surrounded – and sometimes thwarted – by objects, bric-à-brac and debris of all kinds. From the heroine’s troubles with the grisly practicalities of her boyfriend’s corpse in Morvern Callar, 1995 (“I came back towards the scullery then took a running jump over the dead body”) to the Aircrash Investigator’s emotional need for material evidence in These Demented Lands (“All else becomes secondary and we live those moments again and again, until we’ve become part of the thing we investigate”), Warner’s fiction has repeatedly focused on his characters’ picaresque psychological travels as they bounce off the hard surfaces of the outside world, and The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven marries this running concern to his creative reworking of the “confessional novel”, one which moves, for the first time, entirely outside his chosen territory of The Port. And, appropriately enough given its Mediterranean location, the new book offers a lengthy meditation on various kinds of souvenir.
Oscillating between the aftermath of Manolo’s diagnosis and the formative stages of his past, Warner’s narrative springs from the list of past lovers Manolo types on his computer, only to delete it immediately afterwards; given his reputation as a ladies’ man (and his newly discovered medical condition), one might expect the list to be significant, but he also knows that such acts of melancholy self-aggrandizement are common: “every man has sat down far too soon – long before the full sunset of their days – to make a mental inventory of the women or girls and the things which have been practised on them and by them. Only a liar would deny such a weakness”. A successful architect and town planner, Manolo still lives in the Spanish resort city where he grew up, initially in his parents’ hotel; however, he has long become disillusioned with the benefits of travel (“Rwanda for back-packers . . . exotic edits of the world and part-time reality”), and time appears to be the space in which he feels most comfortable. The idea of a list may have sprung from a flash of macho vindictiveness, but his journey back through the relationships that go with the names is a richer, if more chastening business, and it is to Warner’s credit that they read more like sentimental educations than an inventory of bedpost-notches.
As Manolo runs over the catalogue of his experiences, one reason for this becomes clearer: from the furtive, formative trysts with his parents’ housemaid to his two marriages, it seems that his bravado is as much a refuge, a desire “to hide from the true horror of the world in the company of the fairer sex”, as anything else. Nevertheless, this might still feel like an unlovely roué’s confession, were it not for the counterbalance of the second narrative thread that Warner weaves into Manolo’s present. While pondering his hyperactive past and diminishing future (and failing to avoid being sexually attracted to a potential new employee), Manolo happens across Ahmed, a polyglot Somalian refugee who becomes his audience and confidant, and whose traumatic memories of his own dangerous journey set Manolo’s privileged existence into uncomfortable relief:
There was an explosion of white right in front of my eyes or I would not have seen it. Brazil was the only word I saw. The boy had not parted with his leather football with Brazil written on it and I grabbed it and held on to it tight. I was astonished – not to be sunk but at how all others had vanished in seconds. As if they had been made invisible. Since everything had been thrown from the boat, nothing floated or could be seen.
A child of the Franco years, Manolo may on the surface be a comfortable enough functionary of the modern Spanish-global economy – witness his handing out photocopied McDonald’s employment applications to the local beggars – but his experience has clearly also left him with an anxious scepticism about this and other matters (“I find today’s popular radio stations sinister. They remind me of the fascist days”). In between the chapters of his memories (a sequence increasingly scarred with arbitrary violence, loss and mortality), prompted by Ahmed’s alternative perspective and by the new understanding of time his illness has given him, Manolo almost imperceptibly finds himself moving on a forward trajectory which eventually sees him back in the old hotel of his childhood, the place from which so many of his own souvenirs have been dispersed, rescuing an unknown teenager from the fire which finally consumes the place.
However, as witnessed by the surprise ending of The Man Who Walks (2002), plots in Warner’s novels do not always work in quite the ways his characters imagine; and if the terminal-twist ploy feels more than a little shopworn, Manolo’s sudden realization of the true facts of his and Ahmed’s plight is at least more comfortably integrated with the rest of the novel than the Nephew’s epiphany in its predecessor. Nothing, it seems, is beyond the reach of petty cruelty.
Although Warner’s two previous novels, The Sopranos (1998) and The Man Who Walks, make use of a mobile, but often heavily personalized mode of style indirect libre, he is at root a skilful imaginer of dramatic monologues, with all the risks that such imagining entails. On the one hand, a writer’s skill in imagining the contours of another consciousness can lull readers into a false intimacy, as they presume an interiority which may not be borne out by the details (see, for instance, some of the more negative responses to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas); on the other, a writer may simply stand accused of making all the characters sound like versions of himself or herself (Warner doesn’t do this, but he does give many of them versions of his own record collection). With The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven, Warner is setting himself a challenge which would seem to demand a certain abstemiousness with his own characteristic gifts: Manolo’s story is not just geographically distant but linguistically distanced from the world of the Port novels. The central stylistic conceit is that what we are reading is a miraculous simultaneous translation of the thoughts of a character who, by his own sarcastic admission, has only the most nodding acquaintance with English:
The English language! What a complete soup. Why have one word when seventeen will do? Every English word seems to mean several different things through obscure changes in pronunciation. It was the ultimate diplomatic tool for politely expressing neither one thing nor the other. Also the size of the vocabulary was alarming; even if one had an understanding of basics, how on earth to choose the word from so many when it is the word that counts? Especially for meeting tourist girls.
This is hardly a new technique, but the occasional slight awkwardnesses of idiom in Manolo’s narration form part of a larger atmosphere of distancing in the novel. From the beginning of his career, Warner has shown the influence of Camus; but here, the debts (at least in terms of mood and motif) to L’Étranger and La Chute are more palpable. While this is often effective in establishing a coolness of tone, an ironic cordon sanitaire around Manolo’s actions and opinions, it sometimes pushes too hard away from Warner’s earlier successes. The bitchy knockabout of The Sopranos may disguise the technical accomplishment which makes it his most fully realized novel to date: a style which builds up into exactly the choric performance that the main characters are unable to perform themselves. In comparison, in parts of the new novel, identity – deliberately, but not always edifyingly – becomes as attenuated as in the cloned concrete buildings that are taking over Manolo’s coast.
However, it is in the treatment of souvenirs of all kinds that Warner’s geographical and stylistic departures work best. In his 1931 essay on Proust, Samuel Beckett described memory as a “thoroughgoing democrat” who “makes no distinction between the ‘Pensées’ of Pascal and a soap advertisement”; seventy-five years later, Warner explores the contemporary implications of such “democracy”, and its limitations in a world where even memories can be owned. The Man Who Walks ended with the image of the Nephew, horribly wounded, crawling through a plastic film-set recreation of the Battle of Culloden, and the problematic overlaps between the lived past and its manufactured imitations are all over the new novel as well. Manolo, a collector of quaintly out-of-date tourist guides, living in a city full of his parents’ sold-off hotel furniture, is especially sensitive to the resonant power of such objects, but it is also a power, he notes, which can reduce his country into so many prefabricated wrecks (“our country . . . excels as no other in producing tracts of wasteland! It is a national art form”).
As a study of true and false memory, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven goes further and deeper than Warner’s earlier work, marking him out in the process as one of the few contemporary novelists capable of sensing fully the effects of pop-cultural touchstones. All too often, they are used simply as a lazy shorthand for contemporaneity (see Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons) or as satirical notations for commodity fetishism (as in Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis and their diminished successors). Warner is not immune to this temptation – the budgies named after the Stone Roses in The Man Who Walks may be an in-joke too far – but in the new novel, the tangible, material location of memories can lend them an awkward and unexpected poignancy, notably in Manolo’s sharply rendered recalling of a teenage rite of passage during a viewing of Jaws (“The shark suddenly stuck its head out of the water and grinned at us. Both girls screamed. I screamed.”) Nevertheless, The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven doesn’t fully come off; it reads like a transitional work, which doesn’t quite cohere like the Proper Novel it seems (perhaps rather anxiously) to want to be, but which doesn’t have the stirringly improper energy of Morvern Callar or The Sopranos. And a novelist of Alan Warner’s talents doesn’t need to have Manolo lapsing into moments of sub-DeLilloism (“Hotels nurture like no other buildings the feeling of human absence”), as if this were the only permissible way for contemporary fiction to “do” cultural anatomy. There are enough pointers here to a new phase in his writing that should be worth the wait; but if the Port novels unfolded to an inescapable soundtrack of Can and techno, this one could easily have someone crooning “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” in the background – and that can’t be a completely healthy state of affairs.
