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The Simon Crimmons Trilogy #1
The Deadman's Pedal
Winner of the James Tait Black Fiction PrizeFor 16-year-old Simon Crimmons there is not a lot to do. Going nowhere, fed up with school, he leaves to work as a driver on the trains. That summer he is introduced to a world of grown-up glamour, strikes and girlfriends. When Simon falls for the ethereal, aristocratic Varie, he finds freedom and adventure but will it be at a price Too posh for the railways, too working class for Varie, Simon must navigate what it means to be a man as his world is turned upside down.
384 pages, Paperback
First published May 31, 2012
9 people are currently reading
373 people want to read
About the author
Alan Warner
80 books187 followersNote: There is more than one Alan Warner, this is the page for the award-winning Scottish novelist. For books by other people bearing the same name see Alan Warner
Alan Warner (born 1964) is the author of six novels: the acclaimed Morvern Callar (1995), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; These Demented Lands (1997), winner of the Encore Award; The Sopranos (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; The Man Who Walks (2002), an imaginative and surreal black comedy; The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006), and The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010), a sequel to The Sopranos. Morvern Callar has been adapted as a film, and The Sopranos is to follow shortly. His short story 'After the Vision' was included in the anthology Children of Albion Rovers (1997) and 'Bitter Salvage' was included in Disco Biscuits (1997). In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2010, his novel The Stars in the Bright Sky was included in the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.
Alan Warner's novels are mostly set in "The Port", a place bearing some resemblance to Oban. He is known to appreciate 1970s Krautrock band Can; two of his books feature dedications to former band members (Morvern Callar to Holger Czukay and The Man Who Walks to Michael Karoli). Alan Warner currently splits his time between Dublin and Javea, Spain.
Alan Warner (born 1964) is the author of six novels: the acclaimed Morvern Callar (1995), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; These Demented Lands (1997), winner of the Encore Award; The Sopranos (1998), winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award; The Man Who Walks (2002), an imaginative and surreal black comedy; The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven (2006), and The Stars in the Bright Sky (2010), a sequel to The Sopranos. Morvern Callar has been adapted as a film, and The Sopranos is to follow shortly. His short story 'After the Vision' was included in the anthology Children of Albion Rovers (1997) and 'Bitter Salvage' was included in Disco Biscuits (1997). In 2003 he was nominated by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Novelists'. In 2010, his novel The Stars in the Bright Sky was included in the longlist for the Man Booker Prize.
Alan Warner's novels are mostly set in "The Port", a place bearing some resemblance to Oban. He is known to appreciate 1970s Krautrock band Can; two of his books feature dedications to former band members (Morvern Callar to Holger Czukay and The Man Who Walks to Michael Karoli). Alan Warner currently splits his time between Dublin and Javea, Spain.
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Displaying 1 - 28 of 28 reviews
November 19, 2012
Oh, what a beauty. Now, it was probably inevitable that I'd be seduced by this one, given the ingredients: realism, suburban semi-rural kitchen sink-ery, The Seventies, Scotland and railways. But this is nothing as formulaic as that sounds.
This is a coming of age novel, executed as an extremely likeable, yet unsentimental and raw piece of well-paced realism.
It's also very funny - but when I see 'funny' on a coming-of-age novel, I worry you'd be thinking mistimed erections and love bites. No, this captures - so beautifully and accurately - the kind of killer Celtic banter I'd associate with a generation of slightly bitter, work-hardened old men who have now passed on. When working people could still be smart, dry, irreverent, proud (not demonised and contemptible in the way they're portrayed in art today). Brilliant put downs and snappy dialogue. Often directed at the young, siblings or longstanding colleagues. The funeral after-party scene and the union meeting is a comedy gem in this respect.
It's also a pretty effective recreation of a time and place. The creaking post-Beeching, pre-Thatcher railway. Trade Unions and three day weeks. Polarised politics. Roads v railway. Unions v Tories. Nats v Labour.
Yet it's not one-sided for this. Its politics are actually pretty complex. Our protagonist is a kind of 'middle class kid' and son of the self-made; the Bultitudes are human Tories and Alexander is a kind of young Withnail (and who doesn't love Withnail?). Varie is a sensual work of art - a really strong, dark creation (the ending-that-isn't plays on this very well) . And I have to say, the couplings and the shagging is really deftly handled: I was dreading farce, so when the odd thing comes right, it's very moving.
So, think of it as a love letter to the 1970s, perhaps. A love letter to the railway. A love letter to a time when one imagined the end of a class system, and when the future still looked progressive. Which is so very fitting in the second decade of the 21st century.
[Oh, and it turns out too that I remembered rightly: Alan Warner also wrote 'The Sopranos'. A friend of mine in publishing gave me an unproofed copy of that book when it came out in the late nineties. Sadly I never read it and seem to have lost it. So when this US telly series appeared called 'The Sopranos' (which I never watched, because I generally can't be arsed to watch telly and box sets bore the arse off me) I instantly took a dislike to the very idea of it and used to say 'You can't call a telly series that! A bloody novel's just come out called that!'. 'Sopranos' in the novel referred to singers at a Scottish school, rather than a made-up Italian surname. I shall track that novel down now].
This is a coming of age novel, executed as an extremely likeable, yet unsentimental and raw piece of well-paced realism.
It's also very funny - but when I see 'funny' on a coming-of-age novel, I worry you'd be thinking mistimed erections and love bites. No, this captures - so beautifully and accurately - the kind of killer Celtic banter I'd associate with a generation of slightly bitter, work-hardened old men who have now passed on. When working people could still be smart, dry, irreverent, proud (not demonised and contemptible in the way they're portrayed in art today). Brilliant put downs and snappy dialogue. Often directed at the young, siblings or longstanding colleagues. The funeral after-party scene and the union meeting is a comedy gem in this respect.
It's also a pretty effective recreation of a time and place. The creaking post-Beeching, pre-Thatcher railway. Trade Unions and three day weeks. Polarised politics. Roads v railway. Unions v Tories. Nats v Labour.
Yet it's not one-sided for this. Its politics are actually pretty complex. Our protagonist is a kind of 'middle class kid' and son of the self-made; the Bultitudes are human Tories and Alexander is a kind of young Withnail (and who doesn't love Withnail?). Varie is a sensual work of art - a really strong, dark creation (the ending-that-isn't plays on this very well) . And I have to say, the couplings and the shagging is really deftly handled: I was dreading farce, so when the odd thing comes right, it's very moving.
So, think of it as a love letter to the 1970s, perhaps. A love letter to the railway. A love letter to a time when one imagined the end of a class system, and when the future still looked progressive. Which is so very fitting in the second decade of the 21st century.
[Oh, and it turns out too that I remembered rightly: Alan Warner also wrote 'The Sopranos'. A friend of mine in publishing gave me an unproofed copy of that book when it came out in the late nineties. Sadly I never read it and seem to have lost it. So when this US telly series appeared called 'The Sopranos' (which I never watched, because I generally can't be arsed to watch telly and box sets bore the arse off me) I instantly took a dislike to the very idea of it and used to say 'You can't call a telly series that! A bloody novel's just come out called that!'. 'Sopranos' in the novel referred to singers at a Scottish school, rather than a made-up Italian surname. I shall track that novel down now].
November 30, 2014
The Deadman's Pedal by Alan Warner
Warner returns to the Port, the fictionalised version of Oban which was the setting for his earlier novels Morvern Callar and The Sopranos in this wonderful book. He has spooled the clock back four decades to the early 1970s and given us a male narrator: 15 year old Simon Crimmonds. His family relatively affluent; his father is a Yorkshireman running a fleet of 10 red and cream liveried haulage lorries, he has a small brother Jeff and his mother endlessly tends the grounds of their large modernised house in the village of Tulloch just outside the Port. Tulloch Villa is 'a large, two-storey, Victorian dwelling with hardly a whisper of Gothic' on the shores of the sea loch.
Simon finds first love and sex with 'little ray of golden sun' Nikki Caine, escaping together on his 50cc Yamaha motorbike, 'wenching' where they can, be it dark lanes or the back green behind her council house, outside the tiny bedroom she shares with her older sister Karen.
Simon is not sure what he wants from his life, but it isn't the life his father - who left school without qualifications - has planned for him. Idly wandering into the Labour Exchange one day he ends up applying for what he thinks is a job at the hospital where Karen is a nurse, but turns out to be a trainee railwayman working with the new diesel engines in direct competition with his father. Despite his best efforts he gets the job and is pitched into a world of older men, men with bodies shattered by decades of hard manual work, hands immune to pain from endless hours shovelling coal as firemen for the steam trains they served on.
The Deadman's Pedal is in some ways a coming of age novel, we witness Simon grow as learns to handle the engines and haul passengers and goods from the Port blindly over the moors to link with the Glasgow trains, to drink heavy with the railwaymen and fend off rampant socialist Red Hannan's imprecations to join the cause. He meets Alexander, English boarding school educated scion of the great house at Broken Moan high above the port, his restless sister Varie and their ex army officer class father, Commander of the Pass, Andrew Bultitude. Alexander introduces Simon to the addictions of foreign literature and vinyl music, Varie to lust after a girl moving into the world of university beyond the Port and smoking dope.
But this book is much more that a simple bildungsroman. What shines, as ever with Warner, is his precise detail and dialogue. The evocation of provincial Scottish life in the early 1970s is utterly compelling and meticulous, from the characterisation of war-raised conservative parents versus their more sexually liberated but still emotionally conservative children, to the particulars such as ownership of colour tv to mark out the more affluent families. Warner's exquisite passages of Simon and the other railwaymen on the trains could in less able hands have easily been pedantic, but are here infused with the freshness of Simon experiencing it for the first time, a gone world of mechanical manual railways, signalmen and paraffin lanterns. Warner metonymically uses touches such as cigarettes smoked: the old railwaymen smoke roll ups, Simon and his friends Embassys, perhaps symbolic of wartime frugality versus 70s convenience, or a move from the values of hand work and craft to consumerism. Warner's writers craft is there in the difference in the feel of Nikki and Varie's hair, the way that one when riding pillion lays her head on Simon's back turning from the road ahead while the other looks over his shoulder to see it, in bare feet with red nail varnished toe nails, in the colour of a pair of eyes. It is in the fact that the date roundel at Tulloch Villa, built in 1881, has never been engraved.
Warner also uses his usual darkly humourous flair for gifting names and nicknames: John Penalty is paying the price for a life on the railways, hips crumbling; Shoutin' Darroch rarely speaks; and English educated Varie bears the only obviously Scottish name among the younger generation, but her name is an Anglicized phoenetic translation of the Gaelic name Mhairi so English people will not have trouble pronouncing it. Gaelic is a language in which word sound and visual appearance have at best a passing acquaintance and Varie's parents' insidious act of exchanging a language accessible only through local knowledge for transparency and obviousness appears symbolic of her obvious poor little rich girl version of wild child and her lack of mystery and opacity.
And always behind everything is the landscape and its ability to alter people: the desolate lands above the Port that Simon travels through on train and motorbike; the den he and friend Galbraith construct high above the Port; the hydroelectric dam loch Andrew Bultitude commissioned which drowned a village and his mother's home; and the streams that cut through the hills which bring about the dramatic events that end the novel as Simon takes a good train over the moors with and increasingly ailing Penalty.
This is the book Warner has been speaking of for years, and it was worth the wait.
Warner returns to the Port, the fictionalised version of Oban which was the setting for his earlier novels Morvern Callar and The Sopranos in this wonderful book. He has spooled the clock back four decades to the early 1970s and given us a male narrator: 15 year old Simon Crimmonds. His family relatively affluent; his father is a Yorkshireman running a fleet of 10 red and cream liveried haulage lorries, he has a small brother Jeff and his mother endlessly tends the grounds of their large modernised house in the village of Tulloch just outside the Port. Tulloch Villa is 'a large, two-storey, Victorian dwelling with hardly a whisper of Gothic' on the shores of the sea loch.
Simon finds first love and sex with 'little ray of golden sun' Nikki Caine, escaping together on his 50cc Yamaha motorbike, 'wenching' where they can, be it dark lanes or the back green behind her council house, outside the tiny bedroom she shares with her older sister Karen.
Simon is not sure what he wants from his life, but it isn't the life his father - who left school without qualifications - has planned for him. Idly wandering into the Labour Exchange one day he ends up applying for what he thinks is a job at the hospital where Karen is a nurse, but turns out to be a trainee railwayman working with the new diesel engines in direct competition with his father. Despite his best efforts he gets the job and is pitched into a world of older men, men with bodies shattered by decades of hard manual work, hands immune to pain from endless hours shovelling coal as firemen for the steam trains they served on.
The Deadman's Pedal is in some ways a coming of age novel, we witness Simon grow as learns to handle the engines and haul passengers and goods from the Port blindly over the moors to link with the Glasgow trains, to drink heavy with the railwaymen and fend off rampant socialist Red Hannan's imprecations to join the cause. He meets Alexander, English boarding school educated scion of the great house at Broken Moan high above the port, his restless sister Varie and their ex army officer class father, Commander of the Pass, Andrew Bultitude. Alexander introduces Simon to the addictions of foreign literature and vinyl music, Varie to lust after a girl moving into the world of university beyond the Port and smoking dope.
But this book is much more that a simple bildungsroman. What shines, as ever with Warner, is his precise detail and dialogue. The evocation of provincial Scottish life in the early 1970s is utterly compelling and meticulous, from the characterisation of war-raised conservative parents versus their more sexually liberated but still emotionally conservative children, to the particulars such as ownership of colour tv to mark out the more affluent families. Warner's exquisite passages of Simon and the other railwaymen on the trains could in less able hands have easily been pedantic, but are here infused with the freshness of Simon experiencing it for the first time, a gone world of mechanical manual railways, signalmen and paraffin lanterns. Warner metonymically uses touches such as cigarettes smoked: the old railwaymen smoke roll ups, Simon and his friends Embassys, perhaps symbolic of wartime frugality versus 70s convenience, or a move from the values of hand work and craft to consumerism. Warner's writers craft is there in the difference in the feel of Nikki and Varie's hair, the way that one when riding pillion lays her head on Simon's back turning from the road ahead while the other looks over his shoulder to see it, in bare feet with red nail varnished toe nails, in the colour of a pair of eyes. It is in the fact that the date roundel at Tulloch Villa, built in 1881, has never been engraved.
Warner also uses his usual darkly humourous flair for gifting names and nicknames: John Penalty is paying the price for a life on the railways, hips crumbling; Shoutin' Darroch rarely speaks; and English educated Varie bears the only obviously Scottish name among the younger generation, but her name is an Anglicized phoenetic translation of the Gaelic name Mhairi so English people will not have trouble pronouncing it. Gaelic is a language in which word sound and visual appearance have at best a passing acquaintance and Varie's parents' insidious act of exchanging a language accessible only through local knowledge for transparency and obviousness appears symbolic of her obvious poor little rich girl version of wild child and her lack of mystery and opacity.
And always behind everything is the landscape and its ability to alter people: the desolate lands above the Port that Simon travels through on train and motorbike; the den he and friend Galbraith construct high above the Port; the hydroelectric dam loch Andrew Bultitude commissioned which drowned a village and his mother's home; and the streams that cut through the hills which bring about the dramatic events that end the novel as Simon takes a good train over the moors with and increasingly ailing Penalty.
This is the book Warner has been speaking of for years, and it was worth the wait.
March 14, 2014
yippee another Alan Warner. And one - says the Guardian - not merely by far his best work to date, it is an exceptionally fine novel by any standards. His best to date! Better than Morvern Callar, the Sopranos or The Stars in the Bright Sky? I must drop everything and read straight away...
..umm, not quite straight away, but started this morning on the train, and there's that rich, Warner-like density to the writing which tells me I'm going to like this very much.
..I did like it very much. Review coming..
It took me back to 1973/74, when I was almost the same age as the protagonist - he's 15/16, I was 18/19. Carrying around LPs under your arm, wearing CND badges, having luxurious longhair. It is a beautiful, meticulous, sensitive evocation of small town Britain at that time.
Being a short story writer, and one who likes the excision of everything unnecessary I should bemoan Warner’s relentless piling up of details. For example do we need to be told that the phone lay on its side when the hero, Simon Crimmons, comes downstairs to answer it or the fact that an LP crackles when it is played? Well yes here we do, the novel is all about the texture and detail of the time.
This is a book filled with love and observation, and complex characters and politics. There is a lot of union and boss rhetoric/three day week/ Hannan the socialist, but it is not crudely drawn, there is comedy and understanding on both sides. There is respect for characters bent by their working lives: Penalty the train driver, Simon’s mentor when he gets a job – by accident – as a trainee driver, is rough and broken, hips gone, but too proud to use a stick. It reaches back to the second world war and a respect that crosses class barriers for the sacrifices made. Simon too becomes a bit of a hero for his part in a train accident (caused by water flooding away the ballast beneath the track!). But ultimately lines are drawn when he becomes involved with the Bultitudes, the local landowner and grandee who is visited by the Queen.
There are some excellent reviews on goodreads already, and they cover much of what I want to say. This one in particular. And also this very short and totally accurate one.
Just to add that this book is wonderful on dialogue, character, and insight into character;the writing is beautiful, involving, particularly description and in set pieces. I have to take the book back tomorrow to the library, but I know I’ll go and buy it soon. It is Warner's best so far and that is really saying something (copyright The Velvelletes).
..umm, not quite straight away, but started this morning on the train, and there's that rich, Warner-like density to the writing which tells me I'm going to like this very much.
..I did like it very much. Review coming..
It took me back to 1973/74, when I was almost the same age as the protagonist - he's 15/16, I was 18/19. Carrying around LPs under your arm, wearing CND badges, having luxurious longhair. It is a beautiful, meticulous, sensitive evocation of small town Britain at that time.
Being a short story writer, and one who likes the excision of everything unnecessary I should bemoan Warner’s relentless piling up of details. For example do we need to be told that the phone lay on its side when the hero, Simon Crimmons, comes downstairs to answer it or the fact that an LP crackles when it is played? Well yes here we do, the novel is all about the texture and detail of the time.
This is a book filled with love and observation, and complex characters and politics. There is a lot of union and boss rhetoric/three day week/ Hannan the socialist, but it is not crudely drawn, there is comedy and understanding on both sides. There is respect for characters bent by their working lives: Penalty the train driver, Simon’s mentor when he gets a job – by accident – as a trainee driver, is rough and broken, hips gone, but too proud to use a stick. It reaches back to the second world war and a respect that crosses class barriers for the sacrifices made. Simon too becomes a bit of a hero for his part in a train accident (caused by water flooding away the ballast beneath the track!). But ultimately lines are drawn when he becomes involved with the Bultitudes, the local landowner and grandee who is visited by the Queen.
There are some excellent reviews on goodreads already, and they cover much of what I want to say. This one in particular. And also this very short and totally accurate one.
Just to add that this book is wonderful on dialogue, character, and insight into character;the writing is beautiful, involving, particularly description and in set pieces. I have to take the book back tomorrow to the library, but I know I’ll go and buy it soon. It is Warner's best so far and that is really saying something (copyright The Velvelletes).
June 29, 2012
First can't-put-down read-walking-along-the-street of the year
April 7, 2017
There is a lot to love in this novel, but I cannot understand the structural decisions that Warner has made with it. It's starts with a disconnected, poetical description of someone driving a train, but without any connection to the driver or any context, I found that quite dull. We will come to care about that character, and, indeed, to be interested in one of a large cast featured in the first proper chapter, but as presented at first, he's lost in an unexplained forest of details. The chapters then shunt back and forwards in time for no discernible reason. The first chapter was the least integrated and least interesting of all of them as far as I was concerned, so it all made for a very slow opening. I just can't see any reason why the whole story couldn't have been told chronologically from Simon (the main character's) point of view, with events which happened when he wasn't present being told to him by the characters he knows (as indeed some other stories are). Apart from the first chapter which could easily have been cut altogether without the story losing anything.
The characters, the place and the period are all described both beautifully and evocatively, and very engagingly. I ended up caring about everyone a lot. The old railwaymen were very recognisable as members of a dying breed of British working man. By the end I could see them as individuals, though they were introduced en masse which was confusing and delayed my engagement and sympathy. Simon's social position (too posh for some, too common for others, fighting to find his place, unsure about accepting the strictures of the class system) was very familiar to me, and so were many aspects of the '70s.
Some of the description is sharp and well-observed, some poetically beautiful, which sometimes comes off very well, but sometimes becomes obscure and/or long-winded. The sex was well described without getting silly, which isn't always the case. There are some great, memorable characters: Simon's father, John Penalty, Karen, Red Hannan, and a host of others. The Bultitudes, with whom Simon becomes fascinated, however, felt a bit two-dimensional and cliche, though at the end of the day, they were probably trying to appear more interesting by aping those cliches, so maybe that in itself was a character trait.
There's a lot of interesting coming-of-age story here, but I don't understand how or why Warner made the decisions he did about what to include and what to leave out. I particularly felt that the really interesting story was just about to start right after the point at which he chose to end the novel.
The characters, the place and the period are all described both beautifully and evocatively, and very engagingly. I ended up caring about everyone a lot. The old railwaymen were very recognisable as members of a dying breed of British working man. By the end I could see them as individuals, though they were introduced en masse which was confusing and delayed my engagement and sympathy. Simon's social position (too posh for some, too common for others, fighting to find his place, unsure about accepting the strictures of the class system) was very familiar to me, and so were many aspects of the '70s.
Some of the description is sharp and well-observed, some poetically beautiful, which sometimes comes off very well, but sometimes becomes obscure and/or long-winded. The sex was well described without getting silly, which isn't always the case. There are some great, memorable characters: Simon's father, John Penalty, Karen, Red Hannan, and a host of others. The Bultitudes, with whom Simon becomes fascinated, however, felt a bit two-dimensional and cliche, though at the end of the day, they were probably trying to appear more interesting by aping those cliches, so maybe that in itself was a character trait.
There's a lot of interesting coming-of-age story here, but I don't understand how or why Warner made the decisions he did about what to include and what to leave out. I particularly felt that the really interesting story was just about to start right after the point at which he chose to end the novel.
April 18, 2025
It was an easy enough read and did a great job establishing the setting and tone. But overall the themes felt a bit too muddled, and the narrow perspective of only one central character left me wanting more.
May 11, 2020
There was something very fitting about finishing this lovely coming-of-age novel on a train, traversing the snow-clad Oregon Cascades. Our protagonist, the bookish Simon, is fed up with school; he wants to work for his father's haulier firm, but can't drive lorries for another couple of years, until he turns 18. In the meantime, he hooks up with Nikki Caine, a serious minded young lady, taking her to the very scant "winching spaces" The Port has on offer on his inadequate Yamaha motorbike.
As an act of defiance, he puts his name down at the Jobs Board at the Labour Exchange for two jobs: traction assistant at the hospital where Nikki's beguiling elder sister works as a nurse, and a job on Scottish Rail.
Simon's other preoccupation becomes the children of the Bultitude Family, hereditary Commanders of the Pass. He stalks and eventually befriends Andrew, the scapegrace elder son who is perpetually being gated from various Continental Prep schools, and his alluring younger sister Varie, who will be studying Geography at Edinburgh University: he becomes the Marwood to Andrew's Withnail, and something more complex with Varie. Complications ensue, even as he becomes an engineer on the rail line between The Port and Glasgow, and finds himself thrust into the concerns of the ancient men who have worked on that line in the decades before he was born.
All in all, Warner weaves his deft, comic hand throughout the narrative, and as usual manages to pack an emotional wallop towards the end of the book.
As an act of defiance, he puts his name down at the Jobs Board at the Labour Exchange for two jobs: traction assistant at the hospital where Nikki's beguiling elder sister works as a nurse, and a job on Scottish Rail.
Simon's other preoccupation becomes the children of the Bultitude Family, hereditary Commanders of the Pass. He stalks and eventually befriends Andrew, the scapegrace elder son who is perpetually being gated from various Continental Prep schools, and his alluring younger sister Varie, who will be studying Geography at Edinburgh University: he becomes the Marwood to Andrew's Withnail, and something more complex with Varie. Complications ensue, even as he becomes an engineer on the rail line between The Port and Glasgow, and finds himself thrust into the concerns of the ancient men who have worked on that line in the decades before he was born.
All in all, Warner weaves his deft, comic hand throughout the narrative, and as usual manages to pack an emotional wallop towards the end of the book.
September 21, 2016
I think this is worth three and a half stars, probably, because in some places I loved the writing. It took me a while to get into the story, and I am still not convinced that it needed to jump forwards and backwards as it did in the first part of the novel. Why? was it just too dull to tell the tale chronologically? I found I had to keep checking on what date each chapter was supposed to take place, and I was relieved when I worked out that from 18 June 1973 the story was just told as it happened. I was also very puzzled by the wonderfully written introductory passage in italics about railways, and then we went straight into 19 April 1961. By the time I reached Simon and Andy Galbraith in June 1973 I had forgotten that it was Simon who had been 'moving through the night' on page 1. So all of this stopped me getting carried away - it was only once I had got past the beginning that I began to work out what it was all about and settle into the book and enjoy it. I don't mind working hard at a book, if I can see why I was made to work so hard, but in this case, I am not so sure that all that effort was really worth it!
I loved the funeral scene, the union scene, and Simon's interview at the station - brilliantly told, very convincing.
I loved the funeral scene, the union scene, and Simon's interview at the station - brilliantly told, very convincing.
June 23, 2013
Very much enjoyed this book. I found it really evocative, and the dialogue throughout is (mostly) brilliantly natural and believable. My only criticism, if it even is a criticism, is that the young female characters all seem to have a slight alien quality which is mildly disturbing. Maybe it's supposed to be? I don't know. But anyway. VG!
June 12, 2020
Given up at p72. Just couldn't get into it, and longing to return to reading female voices.
April 2, 2024
A 3 star Warner book is probably equal to 4*. Only compared with my 4 other outings with Warner it felt a tad flat. There are still spades of that free wheeling Scots punk energy; landscape and local lore. It seems Warner tactirun energy is more at home he writes female protagonists, Simon our main man here feels like he would be more at home in a William Mcilvaney novel.
Morven Callar, These Demented Lands and The Man Who Walks, three of AW's last jaunts remain some of the best literature not only to come out of Scotland but to have ever have been written.
Morven Callar, These Demented Lands and The Man Who Walks, three of AW's last jaunts remain some of the best literature not only to come out of Scotland but to have ever have been written.
November 25, 2017
Set in 1970's, 15 year old Simon Crimmons is finished school for the Summer holidays. He has a new girlfriend, his first, and is longing to get a job and a motorbike. With his father running a haulage company, this would seem an opportunity for a job. However his father is adamant that he should stay in school and when he is 18, he can come work for him. Much to his father and mother's dismay, Simon eventually near the summers end, gets a job as a trainee train driver (his father's main competitors for carrying stock).
From Simon's considerably wealthy background, his girlfriend Nikki is from the nearest town's estate so her family is somewhat poorer.
While out with friends and his wee brother (coming from a country where wee is also, along with Scotland, used as a term meaning small, I'm used to using the word. My own county's nickname is The Wee County), he becomes enchanted with Varie Bultitude. The daughter of the aristocratic landowner ( In relation to this, the first chapter of the book is to do with the Queen's visit to the Bultitude's house back in the 1960's and the preparations). After a chance encounter in a book shop in town with Varie's brother, Alexander, he becomes friends with her and her brother. This is why I brought up the class difference between Simon and Nikki because this is another contrasting class difference.
The dialogue between the different character's is very good, particularly with Simon's new colleagues at the train station and enjoyable with some good comic touches.
I found the central theme to be "With independence comes responsibility".
I don't think the ending was wholely conclusive to the storyline but I might be blinded with Warner's previous book "The Stars in the Bright Sky" where he revisited the characters from "The Sopranos" so there could be that expectation of a follow on to this in 10 years time.
For me, Warner has furthered his reputation as an excellent writer with this book.
From Simon's considerably wealthy background, his girlfriend Nikki is from the nearest town's estate so her family is somewhat poorer.
While out with friends and his wee brother (coming from a country where wee is also, along with Scotland, used as a term meaning small, I'm used to using the word. My own county's nickname is The Wee County), he becomes enchanted with Varie Bultitude. The daughter of the aristocratic landowner ( In relation to this, the first chapter of the book is to do with the Queen's visit to the Bultitude's house back in the 1960's and the preparations). After a chance encounter in a book shop in town with Varie's brother, Alexander, he becomes friends with her and her brother. This is why I brought up the class difference between Simon and Nikki because this is another contrasting class difference.
The dialogue between the different character's is very good, particularly with Simon's new colleagues at the train station and enjoyable with some good comic touches.
I found the central theme to be "With independence comes responsibility".
I don't think the ending was wholely conclusive to the storyline but I might be blinded with Warner's previous book "The Stars in the Bright Sky" where he revisited the characters from "The Sopranos" so there could be that expectation of a follow on to this in 10 years time.
For me, Warner has furthered his reputation as an excellent writer with this book.
November 12, 2019
Read as October Choice for Thurso Book Club. Enjoyable, easy read that didn't seem to go anywhere. Loved the echoes of my own childhood, the non conquest parts anyway lol. A few surprises along the way, not sure how believable, would have liked a more conclusive ending.
June 29, 2021
Hoping for a sequel
February 16, 2022
Everything this man writes is marvellous in a dour, grindingly west of Scotland way.
October 25, 2012
Alan Warner is an extraordinarily talented writer: that's the first thing I've been reminded of in reading this, the first time I've read any of his books for a long time. Seemingly, his writing skills are without weakness, equally masterful of character, character development, atmosphere, language, landscape, plot and set-pieces. Is this his best book yet, as The Guardian reviewer suggested? I'm not sure.
This is manifestly Warner's most personal book yet: pointing to a misalignment in chronology when asked if it's autobiographical is clearly evasive but equally it would be idiotic to suggest that this novel is entirely autobiographical; life is rarely black and white and this novel exists firmly in the shades of grey in which we must perceive it. It's also the author's most ambitious novel to date: the first in a projected trilogy exploring the politics of late twentieth century Britain.
So what of those shades? The first book Warner ever wrote was one set on the railways (on which, like the protagonist here, he had worked) conceived as an exploration of the political struggles which marked British industry in the 1970's and 80's. He never found a publisher for it, however, and eventually dropped it to write Morvern Callar . Finally, twenty to twenty five years later he has returned as a more mature writer to that book and this one is the first of a projected trilogy to emerge from it.
Unions and industrial politics do figure high in the text but they never really come to the fore here (perhaps they will in a later novel) in a book that is in many ways a classic coming of age story. Explored far more fully is the not unrelated theme of the British class system; this is done in a very nuanced rather than overt way, without obvious bias or judgement - a difficult trick when the story is written from the perspective of one character (albeit in the third person) but made believable by that character's own development.
The class system then, forms the flesh of the story - the meaty themes that can be explored but have to be hung upon another body for support - and it is set at a time when the system was under scrutiny as perhaps never before or since. The skeleton is that coming of age story. Simon Crimmons develops emotionally through the story and is clearly far more a man by the end of it. He does not, however, walk off into the sunset a wiser and happier being. One wonders whether he will ever be content in the Port.
At the end then, as in real life, we are left knowing that this is not the end of the story, just a chapter. For me, Alan Warner can not write the next book quickly enough.
This is manifestly Warner's most personal book yet: pointing to a misalignment in chronology when asked if it's autobiographical is clearly evasive but equally it would be idiotic to suggest that this novel is entirely autobiographical; life is rarely black and white and this novel exists firmly in the shades of grey in which we must perceive it. It's also the author's most ambitious novel to date: the first in a projected trilogy exploring the politics of late twentieth century Britain.
So what of those shades? The first book Warner ever wrote was one set on the railways (on which, like the protagonist here, he had worked) conceived as an exploration of the political struggles which marked British industry in the 1970's and 80's. He never found a publisher for it, however, and eventually dropped it to write Morvern Callar . Finally, twenty to twenty five years later he has returned as a more mature writer to that book and this one is the first of a projected trilogy to emerge from it.
Unions and industrial politics do figure high in the text but they never really come to the fore here (perhaps they will in a later novel) in a book that is in many ways a classic coming of age story. Explored far more fully is the not unrelated theme of the British class system; this is done in a very nuanced rather than overt way, without obvious bias or judgement - a difficult trick when the story is written from the perspective of one character (albeit in the third person) but made believable by that character's own development.
The class system then, forms the flesh of the story - the meaty themes that can be explored but have to be hung upon another body for support - and it is set at a time when the system was under scrutiny as perhaps never before or since. The skeleton is that coming of age story. Simon Crimmons develops emotionally through the story and is clearly far more a man by the end of it. He does not, however, walk off into the sunset a wiser and happier being. One wonders whether he will ever be content in the Port.
At the end then, as in real life, we are left knowing that this is not the end of the story, just a chapter. For me, Alan Warner can not write the next book quickly enough.
November 9, 2024
I’ve previously read three of Alan Warner’s novels, and all have been about or narrated by girls or young women. This is the first one about a boy and, as such, swerves into Ian Banks territory, the story of a young man veering between the working men of the railway and the children of the local laird, the lower middle class person finding where he fits in.
It’s also very much about transport: our protag, Simon, works on the trains yet his dad owns a haulage business. In the first chapter, there a long discussion between schoolboy Simon and his friends about getting the bus or not getting the bus back from school to their homes that so reminded me of my own experience of living in a village and commuting by local authority bus to another village to go to school that I could almost smell the sweaty trainers and hear Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 1 (ditto the John Menzies in the town being bookshop, record shop and newsagent). If trains are socialised transport and haulage represents capitalism, then Simon’s 50cc motorbike that he uses to get from the village to the town is freedom.
The prologue about the local train from Oban is as good as – better – than Night Mail by W.H. Auden. I love this sentence: “Short, rust-topped checked rails on the inside of the running rail strengthen the cant on the tightest curves, and the wheel flanges grate” – tension and release. There are more sexual images in the book, Simon taking, but not eating, the peach that hottest girl in the fifth form, Nikki, offers him; his other love interest, Varie, holding onto her horse with strong thighs.
I expect that Warner is basing this book on his own experience (he was once a train driver’s assistant) and I wonder if he wrote it to explore what his life may’ve been like if he’d stayed in the Port, rather than moving to Glasgow and London. Although he’s set the book not in the '80s when he was young, but the early ‘70s, possibly to take advantage of the strikes that beset that era and to have a character who remember the days of steam as well the time before health and safety. Warner wrote sequels to his most popular books, Morvern Callar and The Sopranos (Simon passes the Catholic Girls school at one point but Our Ladies are not born yet), I’d be interested to know what happened to Simon when punk broke, when Thatcher was elected, if he ever left the Port.
Edit: It's just occurred to me that Simon and Varie might be Morvern Callar's parents - the timing would be about right.
It’s also very much about transport: our protag, Simon, works on the trains yet his dad owns a haulage business. In the first chapter, there a long discussion between schoolboy Simon and his friends about getting the bus or not getting the bus back from school to their homes that so reminded me of my own experience of living in a village and commuting by local authority bus to another village to go to school that I could almost smell the sweaty trainers and hear Steve Wright in the afternoon on Radio 1 (ditto the John Menzies in the town being bookshop, record shop and newsagent). If trains are socialised transport and haulage represents capitalism, then Simon’s 50cc motorbike that he uses to get from the village to the town is freedom.
The prologue about the local train from Oban is as good as – better – than Night Mail by W.H. Auden. I love this sentence: “Short, rust-topped checked rails on the inside of the running rail strengthen the cant on the tightest curves, and the wheel flanges grate” – tension and release. There are more sexual images in the book, Simon taking, but not eating, the peach that hottest girl in the fifth form, Nikki, offers him; his other love interest, Varie, holding onto her horse with strong thighs.
I expect that Warner is basing this book on his own experience (he was once a train driver’s assistant) and I wonder if he wrote it to explore what his life may’ve been like if he’d stayed in the Port, rather than moving to Glasgow and London. Although he’s set the book not in the '80s when he was young, but the early ‘70s, possibly to take advantage of the strikes that beset that era and to have a character who remember the days of steam as well the time before health and safety. Warner wrote sequels to his most popular books, Morvern Callar and The Sopranos (Simon passes the Catholic Girls school at one point but Our Ladies are not born yet), I’d be interested to know what happened to Simon when punk broke, when Thatcher was elected, if he ever left the Port.
Edit: It's just occurred to me that Simon and Varie might be Morvern Callar's parents - the timing would be about right.
March 3, 2015
Alan Warner takes the brilliantly observed realism of writers like James Kelman and manages to stir into it a great, drunken, yearning, smutty romanticism.
In this, as always, he writes about being young. With Morven Callar and The Sopranos series, he fictionalised that dangerous time girls become women. There's no one better at capturing the giddy, strange moment when everything's possible, when lethal things happen and when you still believe in the extraordinary.
This time though, he's writing about a boy. Deadman's Pedal is set at the end of the British social experiment. In the last days before, Thatcherism Simon, the teenage son of a Tory road haulier drops out of school and gets a job with the heavily unionised BR, falls in love, has his first sex and and becomes, in some ways, much older than many of those around him.
There are so many pleasures to this read. At the top, though, are the bits in quotation marks. Nobody writes dialogue better than Alan Warner. He has a real genius for spoken language. It's a delight.
In some ways he's a bit like Nicola Barker; everyone he creates is strange and unpredictable. Characters do exactly what they want, constantly confounding the reader, creating tension from the chaos they strew. But while Barker's character's exist in disembodied hotels, cut off by the tide, Warner's people are set in a plausible, real landscape.
Increasingly though, he's woven more thickly descriptive language into his work. You alternate between the filthy - not just dirty - realism of the dialogue and the lushness of his metaphors. I found that an awkward leap in books like The Stars in the Bright Sky but either he's got better at it, or I'm just getting used to the gear shifts.
This time the best descriptive language is about trains. No, really. Warner seems to know so much about them and their physicality.
As a novel, this is his most satisfying arc yet. It ends as reality is about to crash in around the lovely young man, Simon Crimmon, just as the ugly 80s are about to settle over Scotland. Its a mature book. Morvern Callar was a brilliant, creatively electrifying shock - in the same way as McEwan's The Cement Garden was - but this is a grown up writer who is increasingly building a much bigger world in each book. Bloody loved it.
In this, as always, he writes about being young. With Morven Callar and The Sopranos series, he fictionalised that dangerous time girls become women. There's no one better at capturing the giddy, strange moment when everything's possible, when lethal things happen and when you still believe in the extraordinary.
This time though, he's writing about a boy. Deadman's Pedal is set at the end of the British social experiment. In the last days before, Thatcherism Simon, the teenage son of a Tory road haulier drops out of school and gets a job with the heavily unionised BR, falls in love, has his first sex and and becomes, in some ways, much older than many of those around him.
There are so many pleasures to this read. At the top, though, are the bits in quotation marks. Nobody writes dialogue better than Alan Warner. He has a real genius for spoken language. It's a delight.
In some ways he's a bit like Nicola Barker; everyone he creates is strange and unpredictable. Characters do exactly what they want, constantly confounding the reader, creating tension from the chaos they strew. But while Barker's character's exist in disembodied hotels, cut off by the tide, Warner's people are set in a plausible, real landscape.
Increasingly though, he's woven more thickly descriptive language into his work. You alternate between the filthy - not just dirty - realism of the dialogue and the lushness of his metaphors. I found that an awkward leap in books like The Stars in the Bright Sky but either he's got better at it, or I'm just getting used to the gear shifts.
This time the best descriptive language is about trains. No, really. Warner seems to know so much about them and their physicality.
As a novel, this is his most satisfying arc yet. It ends as reality is about to crash in around the lovely young man, Simon Crimmon, just as the ugly 80s are about to settle over Scotland. Its a mature book. Morvern Callar was a brilliant, creatively electrifying shock - in the same way as McEwan's The Cement Garden was - but this is a grown up writer who is increasingly building a much bigger world in each book. Bloody loved it.
January 24, 2016
A three and a half, were that possible. This Scots bildungsroman was frequently beautiful, but very inconsistent all the same - the story is that of a young lad leaving school, taking work on the railway, and learning life lessons of work and romance. Warner's descriptions were very good indeed, people and places and situations rendered with clarity and colour, but I ended up dissatisfied with the plot. Too little actually happened in order to sustain the spell cast by some delightful prose, the strands of the story seemed too disconnected for my liking (chapters about teenage lovers were touching and real, chapters about working class men bantering and spouting of politics were uninteresting) and I was particularly irked by the frequency of a chapter taking place some weeks after the preceding one - but with little exploration or explanation of the intervening events.
March 6, 2015
Thanks to Morvern Callar and The Sopranos , Warner is an author I cherish and this is another enjoyable depiction of small town Scottish life albeit nowhere near the standard of those earlier novels. While the aforementioned books included nods to the dance music scene of the 90s and other counter cultural elements, Warner, like Iain Banks before him, seems to have mellowed with age - although the funereal black humour first exhibited in an early short story from The Children of Albion Rovers once again rears its head and is most welcome. That tendency is exhibited in the book's highlight set piece which is carried off with brio towards the end and we are reminded that railwaymen of the time had the choice between radical and less radical unions.
May 8, 2013
I'm ashamed that I've not discovered Alan Warner before this, and grateful, once again, to Tam's bookshop in Stromness for having several in stock. (Too many English bookshops ignore Scottish writers)
Having not long finished Iain Banks 'Stonemouth' I was drawn to this by the 'hymn to teenage innocence' and 'snall-town Scotland' blurb.
And was far from disappointed.
Uplifted by the language, drawn into the story of Simon Crimmons and utterly fascinated by the workings of the 1970s railway world, 'Amazing' not the word I'd use, but 110% satisfying in every way. I'm intending lookig out for more by Alan Warner
Having not long finished Iain Banks 'Stonemouth' I was drawn to this by the 'hymn to teenage innocence' and 'snall-town Scotland' blurb.
And was far from disappointed.
Uplifted by the language, drawn into the story of Simon Crimmons and utterly fascinated by the workings of the 1970s railway world, 'Amazing' not the word I'd use, but 110% satisfying in every way. I'm intending lookig out for more by Alan Warner
April 9, 2016
Went to the library looking for this and it stood out to me on the display shelf, I was just back from The Port - it's my hometown. I write that to frame my view of the book. I think it's better than Morvern Caller in that there's more insights into he workings of the core character and the narration carries a great many knowing character-building details. Pleased to see where the story will go - I'm only learning now, on GoodReads, that it's the first of a trilogy. Shades of Iain Banks and Sunset Song, as you'd maybe guess from the blurb, and comes at a good time to chart the earlier events that led to the political debates of 2016 Scotland.
January 9, 2013
This is one of those books that I know, somewhere in my being, is a great book but I couldn't love it. Unsentimental and entirely believable though it is, the realism left me cold.
There was a time I couldn't bear a "proper" ending and, perhaps, had I read this in my teens along with Hesse, Kafka and Kerouac I would have accepted the way the book ends as fitting and philosophically urgent in some way. But, as it was, I felt the book had simply been guillotined at an arbitrary point in time without sufficient justification.
Bleak.
There was a time I couldn't bear a "proper" ending and, perhaps, had I read this in my teens along with Hesse, Kafka and Kerouac I would have accepted the way the book ends as fitting and philosophically urgent in some way. But, as it was, I felt the book had simply been guillotined at an arbitrary point in time without sufficient justification.
Bleak.
February 17, 2014
My first goodreads post. I've enjoyed several of Alan Warner's books but Deadman's Pedal far exceeded my expectations. Wonderful characters, compelling plot, great setting (the Port and environs). This book gets at Scottish history and culture in a very human way. I highly recommend it.
October 1, 2012
Very good evocation of growing up.
May 21, 2013
A little slow getting started but a great story once we get into it, and descriptions of the Highlands so good it makes me want to visit some pretty random places up there.
May 23, 2013
This is the best Scottish novel I've read for a good while. Come to think of it, this is the best novel I've read for a good while.
Beautifully written; precise, yet dreamlike. Brilliant.
Beautifully written; precise, yet dreamlike. Brilliant.
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