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Morvern Callar Cycle #1
Morvern Callar
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern's reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape-from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene-we experience everything from Morvern's stark, unflinching perspective.
Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.
In much the same way that Patrick McCabe managed to tell an incredibly rich and haunting story through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed boy in The Butcher Boy , Alan Warner probes the vast internal emptiness of a generation by using the cool, haunting voice of a female narrator lost in the profound anomie of the ecstasy generation. Morvern is a brilliant creation, not so much memorable as utterly unforgettable."
Morvern is utterly hypnotizing from her very first sentence to her last. She rarely goes anywhere without the Walkman left behind as a Christmas present by her dead boyfriend, and as she narrates this strange story, she takes care to tell the reader exactly what music she is listening to, giving the stunning effect of a sound track running behind her voice.
In much the same way that Patrick McCabe managed to tell an incredibly rich and haunting story through the eyes of an emotionally disturbed boy in The Butcher Boy , Alan Warner probes the vast internal emptiness of a generation by using the cool, haunting voice of a female narrator lost in the profound anomie of the ecstasy generation. Morvern is a brilliant creation, not so much memorable as utterly unforgettable."
229 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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8169 people want to read
About the author
Alan Warner
80 books186 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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November 24, 2018
A lonely, beautiful novel whose narrative voice will wow you and unsettle you in equal measure. Morvern Callar is a twenty-one-year-old girl who works in a supermarket in a run-down Highlands port town (probably some version of Oban); she wakes one morning before Christmas to find that her boyfriend has killed himself in their apartment. The distant, carefully-described way she reacts to this event is, in a sense, at the heart of the novel's fascination, certainly its initial pull on the reader. Like someone from an Icelandic saga, she describes her actions but not her emotions; ‘a sort of feeling went across me’ is about the most we are ever given.
You might see her as numb or in shock; you might with equal justification find her psychotically detached. But she is riveting. By turns naïve and knowing, undereducated but sure of what she wants, her voice is direct, colloquial, dialectal, instantly believable.
It was a dead clear freezing day with bluish sky the silvery sun and you saw all breath.
Uninterested in art or literature (her dismissal of novels is one of the many ironies of this, a first novel), she is however encyclopaedic on contemporary dance music; the text is shot through with track titles and mixtape listings, and there are several hypnotic scenes in clubs that made me feel exhausted and about a hundred years old. When the book came out, Warner was pegged with Irvine Welsh as part of some imagined new wave of Scottish ‘rave novelists’ but, really, it's James Kelman's quotidian, Scots-inflected narrative voices that are the more obvious influence here.
The narrative voice in this case is amazingly unreflective for a novel, focused only on facts and descriptions. These come out in a patois all her own that makes heavy use of blurring suffixes like -ish and -y and nominalisations in -ness. ‘Stars were dished up across all bluey nighttimeness,’ she says, looking at the sky. But this idiom is still capable of all kinds of gentle insights:
I woke and felt queerish. I could tell it was nighttime by the type of voice on telly.
The ‘cross-writing’ in particular hasn't worked for everyone – Warner has been criticised in some quarters for lacking the skill, or even the moral right, to adopt the voice of a young woman. I don't agree, but I do think Morvern's obsession with her own anatomy, clothing and personal hygiene might lead you to guess that her author is a man. In some books this can be charming, but I confess here I did find it a little unsettling. Still, in general I would maintain that this kind of ‘appropriation’ or ‘colonisation’ is really the whole point of fiction, and it's certainly one of the central themes of this novel.
A film adaptation from Lynne Ramsay in 2002 did a great job of capturing the poetic beauty of the novel, but it committed the cardinal sin of making Morvern herself English, which I couldn't understand – it's not just that you lose the Scottishness of the central voice, it's that part of what the book seems to be about is quite specifically being Scottish, growing up there, leaving Scotland, how Scotland relates to Europe. These themes make it an appealing novel to revisit at the moment, though its qualities are likely to speak to you any time, anywhere.
And this despite the fact that Morvern Callar herself is rather a quiet presence in the book: another of its ironies is that her story can seem so articulate, and of something that could not be expressed in standard English, while she as a character is almost mute at times – numb with shock, overwhelmed by friends, silenced by society. ‘Callar,’ Morvern is told by a receptionist at a Spanish resort – ‘ah, it means, ah, silence, to say nothing, maybe.’ Maybe not.
July 6, 2011
You come home one day. You find the mutilated body of your dead boyfriend strewn in a minor gore-fest across the floor of your kitchen. You are calm and you gather together loose change and head out to the local phonebooth to call the police and the ambulance.... and then you stop.
Do you
a) have a mini-break down, collapse on the floor of the phone box convulsed with grief screaming your beloved's name?
b) Realise you have the wrong change and head off to the shops to buy a packet of silk cut in order to make change?
c) Stop, go back inside, take your boyfriends money and unpublished novel and head off to live the high life, but not before stopping to dispose of the body?
If you answered A; congratulations - you're a normal, emotionally stable individual acting in a completely understandable way when faced with the tragic and unexpected death of a loved one.
If you answered B; you might be paddling at the end of the pool marked "sociopath" or you might just be so logical it hurts.
If you answered C; you are Morvern Callar. This is your story.
This book is recommended for people who are ready to move onto Part 2 of Shovelmonkey1's guide to learn yerself Scotch. For Part 1 see my review of A.L Kennedys Looking for the Possible Dance. For part 3 buy a copy of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Appallingly good for a debut outing.
Do you
a) have a mini-break down, collapse on the floor of the phone box convulsed with grief screaming your beloved's name?
b) Realise you have the wrong change and head off to the shops to buy a packet of silk cut in order to make change?
c) Stop, go back inside, take your boyfriends money and unpublished novel and head off to live the high life, but not before stopping to dispose of the body?
If you answered A; congratulations - you're a normal, emotionally stable individual acting in a completely understandable way when faced with the tragic and unexpected death of a loved one.
If you answered B; you might be paddling at the end of the pool marked "sociopath" or you might just be so logical it hurts.
If you answered C; you are Morvern Callar. This is your story.
This book is recommended for people who are ready to move onto Part 2 of Shovelmonkey1's guide to learn yerself Scotch. For Part 1 see my review of A.L Kennedys Looking for the Possible Dance. For part 3 buy a copy of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh.
Appallingly good for a debut outing.
March 8, 2016
Last night, I saw the friend who lent me Morvern Callar. "It's a strange sort of a book," she said, guardedly. "What did you think?"
Morvern Callar, a young-ish 21-year-old from an unnamed Scottish seaside town, comes home a week before Christmas to discover that her boyfriend - a weird, troubled man 14 years her senior - has slit his own throat in their flat. What's the first thing she does? Opens her Christmas presents from him. What does she do then? The blurb says he left her his novel to publish, so she publishes it under her own name, and then goes a bit crazy. I mean, he does leave the novel, and she does publish it under her own name, but the blurb lies about the last bit.
"She seemed quite reasonable to me," I said, "on the whole. I mean, it was odd, and I wouldn't have behaved like that, but you led me to believe she was a psychopath, and I don't think she was."
"I know," said Friend. "I agree with you. I was actually surprised by how much I empathised with her."
If this means I am a terrible person, therefore, then I am terrible in excellent company.
Morvern Callar the person is extremely self-sufficient, extremely comfortable in her own skin, or that's the impression I got. She goes camping by herself. (It's hiding a body, but you know.) She can spend ages, just staring out into space, concentrating on the little things and setting the big things to one side. I actually, worryingly, found myself not only very much on her side, but empathising with her quite a lot. Would I chop my boyfriend's body to pieces, lie to everyone about where he's gone, and go on holiday with his life savings? Probably not, but I followed her logic, even if she has terrible taste in holidays.
Morvern Callar the book is a weird one. I can't tell if it empathises with Morvern - I kind of think it doesn't. I think Alan Warner has a weird kind of can't-look-away fascination with her, but he doesn't actually like her. Somehow I find myself more on her side than his. What're you going to do, Alan Warner? In a way, I wish I was as brave as Morvern is. She certainly has a stronger stomach than me.
This isn't the first time I've read a book where everyone else seems to have gone, "The main character is incredibly unrelatable!", and I've gone, "I know that feel." There's an introverted young woman archetype, who is apparently very unfeeling, very self-sufficient, who spends most of the time bouncing gently around the inside of her own head. The one I think of most right now is Moira from Susan Fletcher's Oystercatchers , which I still privately hold up as one of those books that's hit home the hardest for me. Either I am deluding myself, or these kinds of books have a very specific intended audience and I am them. Did I care that I'd not heard any of her music? Not a bit. This is what I found in Morvern Callar, and knowing what the soundtrack was like - and there's quite an extensive soundtrack, Morvern likes her 90s raves - wouldn't have changed things at all.
Given all that, why the three stars? Partly because it took me a very long time to get to. Partly because I would have liked a little more sympathy to it. This is a very desolate book: it doesn't hold your hand, it takes you somewhere quite bleak and leaves you there, standing a little way off, watching to see what you do. There's no heart to it, and that's uncomfortable. Or rather, I think there's a heart to it, but Warner wouldn't let me get deep enough touch it, and I wanted to. He probably thinks that's a feature. I still say it's a bug.
P.S., if you're reading this, and aren't Scottish, "greeting" means "crying". You're welcome.
Morvern Callar, a young-ish 21-year-old from an unnamed Scottish seaside town, comes home a week before Christmas to discover that her boyfriend - a weird, troubled man 14 years her senior - has slit his own throat in their flat. What's the first thing she does? Opens her Christmas presents from him. What does she do then? The blurb says he left her his novel to publish, so she publishes it under her own name, and then goes a bit crazy. I mean, he does leave the novel, and she does publish it under her own name, but the blurb lies about the last bit.
"She seemed quite reasonable to me," I said, "on the whole. I mean, it was odd, and I wouldn't have behaved like that, but you led me to believe she was a psychopath, and I don't think she was."
"I know," said Friend. "I agree with you. I was actually surprised by how much I empathised with her."
If this means I am a terrible person, therefore, then I am terrible in excellent company.
Morvern Callar the person is extremely self-sufficient, extremely comfortable in her own skin, or that's the impression I got. She goes camping by herself. (It's hiding a body, but you know.) She can spend ages, just staring out into space, concentrating on the little things and setting the big things to one side. I actually, worryingly, found myself not only very much on her side, but empathising with her quite a lot. Would I chop my boyfriend's body to pieces, lie to everyone about where he's gone, and go on holiday with his life savings? Probably not, but I followed her logic, even if she has terrible taste in holidays.
Morvern Callar the book is a weird one. I can't tell if it empathises with Morvern - I kind of think it doesn't. I think Alan Warner has a weird kind of can't-look-away fascination with her, but he doesn't actually like her. Somehow I find myself more on her side than his. What're you going to do, Alan Warner? In a way, I wish I was as brave as Morvern is. She certainly has a stronger stomach than me.
This isn't the first time I've read a book where everyone else seems to have gone, "The main character is incredibly unrelatable!", and I've gone, "I know that feel." There's an introverted young woman archetype, who is apparently very unfeeling, very self-sufficient, who spends most of the time bouncing gently around the inside of her own head. The one I think of most right now is Moira from Susan Fletcher's Oystercatchers , which I still privately hold up as one of those books that's hit home the hardest for me. Either I am deluding myself, or these kinds of books have a very specific intended audience and I am them. Did I care that I'd not heard any of her music? Not a bit. This is what I found in Morvern Callar, and knowing what the soundtrack was like - and there's quite an extensive soundtrack, Morvern likes her 90s raves - wouldn't have changed things at all.
Given all that, why the three stars? Partly because it took me a very long time to get to. Partly because I would have liked a little more sympathy to it. This is a very desolate book: it doesn't hold your hand, it takes you somewhere quite bleak and leaves you there, standing a little way off, watching to see what you do. There's no heart to it, and that's uncomfortable. Or rather, I think there's a heart to it, but Warner wouldn't let me get deep enough touch it, and I wanted to. He probably thinks that's a feature. I still say it's a bug.
P.S., if you're reading this, and aren't Scottish, "greeting" means "crying". You're welcome.
March 24, 2011
The film version of Alan Warner's Morvern Callar is one of my most loved favorites (the leading actress, Samantha Morton, is my favorite actress ever). The film is better than the book. The choice of first person narrative in Warner's book does not work as well to convey the connections and disconnections of Morvern. It's not just the constant mentions of nail painting in the book (what was that? an effort to sound feminine?) that didn't work to reveal or conceal anything. Morton is my favorite actress because of her ability to express what is inside her head and heart, something Warner's writing couldn't quite reach in its empty white lines and between spaces diary writing. Morvern is an orphan like Morton herself kinda was. I don't think that fact is an important one, but I do feel that the way that she watches everyone is. I know exactly why they do that because I had to do it too. You watch for those subtle changes in moods because you have to know when to get the hell out of there. Morvern being alone makes sense to me that she does it too. It's like trying to find some kind of anchor. Morton's acting showed how Morvern saw the world around her, even as she couldn't always process what those thoughts and feelings were. Maybe it's because of how I process things myself. I find that I watch how someone says something more than what the words they use because I'm paranoid about hidden messages I'm probably not getting. Morton is the best because I feel I can read her the way I can only read those I know best in the world.
Morvern wants to find some place beautiful. Lanna (Morvern's friend) thinks one place is the same as anywhere else. I think it's beautiful to watch people in all different places and find the beauty there. It's weird to read goodread reviews that it was fucked up story. Yeah, she does chop up a dead body and hide the parts. I guess I find it fascinating the way that people can disassociate themselves from what is happening... Then they come back from that.
I don't think it was bad that Morvern took her dead boyfriend's novel and passed it off as her own. It was pretty funny, actually, because he meant leaving this great novel as some grand gesture of his life. He crapped out on that life. Morvern deserved better than that. I'm glad she got the money and the credit. The boyfriend also left her with a mixed tape. Yeah, well he didn't write the songs. I loved how Morvern listened to the songs and got what she was gonna get out of them herself (whatever he thought she was supposed to get). I like to think of her listening to her music and looking for something more out of her life. (Another thing the film had going for it: reading a tracklist is nothing on hearing it. I loved this film soundtrack. Boards of Canada, Mama and the Papas, Can, Lee Hazlewood featuring Nancy Sinatra...)
Lynne Ramsay directed and wrote the film screenplay for Morvern Callar. (I also love her film Ratcatcher, and her short films too.) There's something about the way she uses all of her resources to tell a story... Whatever it was that was missing about the book... I don't know if it was because Warner was a man. I mean, it's not really an exclusively female drive, to look for home and love and understanding. I think it was probably that Warner wasn't adept enough at first person narrative to get everything across. Some authors are more than good enough to do it (like Bronte's Jane Eyre. Morton also starred in my favorite version of that, come to think).
(I did read the book first. I don't know why I didn't mention that already. I saw the movie and went "So that was what was missing.".)
I bought Morvern Callar and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle the same day in 2002. My twin wanted to read 'Castle' first so I read Morvern. Anything else that happened that day (that week or month) I can't remember. Books are my life pretty much.
Thanks to Eh I know about the web archive site and could look up my old *coughs* (Dork!) Samantha Morton fansite from when I was in my early twenties. No one else had pictures of my favorite Morvern Callar scenes but me. Now I grabbed them again yay *coughs* (Dork!).
Goodreads authors might not sympathize. I totally think she should have taken credit for that book.
The watching the ants and burying a dismembered body of evidence scene.
She's being abandoned (again) and time still stops... (I related to this film too much, maybe.)
What, no music scenes? That's every day.
Morvern wants to find some place beautiful. Lanna (Morvern's friend) thinks one place is the same as anywhere else. I think it's beautiful to watch people in all different places and find the beauty there. It's weird to read goodread reviews that it was fucked up story. Yeah, she does chop up a dead body and hide the parts. I guess I find it fascinating the way that people can disassociate themselves from what is happening... Then they come back from that.
I don't think it was bad that Morvern took her dead boyfriend's novel and passed it off as her own. It was pretty funny, actually, because he meant leaving this great novel as some grand gesture of his life. He crapped out on that life. Morvern deserved better than that. I'm glad she got the money and the credit. The boyfriend also left her with a mixed tape. Yeah, well he didn't write the songs. I loved how Morvern listened to the songs and got what she was gonna get out of them herself (whatever he thought she was supposed to get). I like to think of her listening to her music and looking for something more out of her life. (Another thing the film had going for it: reading a tracklist is nothing on hearing it. I loved this film soundtrack. Boards of Canada, Mama and the Papas, Can, Lee Hazlewood featuring Nancy Sinatra...)
Lynne Ramsay directed and wrote the film screenplay for Morvern Callar. (I also love her film Ratcatcher, and her short films too.) There's something about the way she uses all of her resources to tell a story... Whatever it was that was missing about the book... I don't know if it was because Warner was a man. I mean, it's not really an exclusively female drive, to look for home and love and understanding. I think it was probably that Warner wasn't adept enough at first person narrative to get everything across. Some authors are more than good enough to do it (like Bronte's Jane Eyre. Morton also starred in my favorite version of that, come to think).
(I did read the book first. I don't know why I didn't mention that already. I saw the movie and went "So that was what was missing.".)
I bought Morvern Callar and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle the same day in 2002. My twin wanted to read 'Castle' first so I read Morvern. Anything else that happened that day (that week or month) I can't remember. Books are my life pretty much.
Thanks to Eh I know about the web archive site and could look up my old *coughs* (Dork!) Samantha Morton fansite from when I was in my early twenties. No one else had pictures of my favorite Morvern Callar scenes but me. Now I grabbed them again yay *coughs* (Dork!).
Goodreads authors might not sympathize. I totally think she should have taken credit for that book.
The watching the ants and burying a dismembered body of evidence scene.
She's being abandoned (again) and time still stops... (I related to this film too much, maybe.)
What, no music scenes? That's every day.
May 9, 2021
(First of all: I would probably never have came across this one if not for Warwick's review, so thanks!)
On first reading:
I texted a colleague yesterday, some forty pages before the end of the book, saying it is quite different from anything I remember having read before. Morvern's life is banality itself: poverty, being stuck in a dead-end job, in a small town, since the age of thirteen - but the first thing we learn about her is that one day before Christmas she comes back home to a dead body of her much-older boyfriend. In an attempt to tune out the tragedy, she turns to familiar pleasures - partying, drugs, casual sex - and then, when opportunity arises, to near-religious search for pleasure and oblivion (queerer, weirder (...) mental times) - and her taste here proves more refined than one might guess from the raves-mentioning blurbs.
Update on the second reading:
Morvern's language develops in the last section, after she returns from her journey: she seems to have more passive (ornithologist) and active (peninsula) vocabulary, the sentences are longer and even more detailed, although fundamentally her way of expressing her thoughts remains the same. And she writes now!
On her connection with Couris Jean, Lanna's grandma: the connection with another person who had no language: sadness upon her death and learning she spoke in Gaelic before her death that her family did not understand.
Strange how I remembered this book to contain episodes that weren't there on rereading:-)
On first reading:
I texted a colleague yesterday, some forty pages before the end of the book, saying it is quite different from anything I remember having read before. Morvern's life is banality itself: poverty, being stuck in a dead-end job, in a small town, since the age of thirteen - but the first thing we learn about her is that one day before Christmas she comes back home to a dead body of her much-older boyfriend. In an attempt to tune out the tragedy, she turns to familiar pleasures - partying, drugs, casual sex - and then, when opportunity arises, to near-religious search for pleasure and oblivion (queerer, weirder (...) mental times) - and her taste here proves more refined than one might guess from the raves-mentioning blurbs.
I closed my eyes there in the quietness just breathing in and breathing in. I hadnt slept for three days so I could know every minute of that happiness that I never even dared dream I had the right.It is evident Morvern does not pause to think about the results of her actions - she appropriates her boyfriend's novel and spends any amount of money as if she were burning through a stash of drugs. Some reviewers say she is a psychopath, or a sociopath, but she does read people's behaviours very correctly, reacts when she's hurt, and shows empathy. She is intensely vital, sexual, open to experience, living to the soundtrack of rave and ambient music:
I knew all the music. I was trying to be ahead of the beat. My legs followed bass and drums while my arms and body were guitar and other noises. A whirling arm was a guitar solo.And yet the trauma, beauty and vitality are expressed is a first-person narration that is strikingly non-literary.
There were bad sinking feelings.A reviewer here said Morvern Callar is like Trainspotting, but for girls. I disagree. The effects Welsh and Warner aim for are different; Warner succeeds in creating (mostly) beautiful prose with very limited means, creating a Hemingwayesque female character, which I think is quite an achievement. I'll probably never show it to my students for fear they start adding "-ness" and "-ish" to everything, but it works in this novel.
Update on the second reading:
Morvern's language develops in the last section, after she returns from her journey: she seems to have more passive (ornithologist) and active (peninsula) vocabulary, the sentences are longer and even more detailed, although fundamentally her way of expressing her thoughts remains the same. And she writes now!
On her connection with Couris Jean, Lanna's grandma: the connection with another person who had no language: sadness upon her death and learning she spoke in Gaelic before her death that her family did not understand.
Strange how I remembered this book to contain episodes that weren't there on rereading:-)
November 19, 2012
If you look at photographs of Alan Warner's face you can quickly spot the contrition of a man who has written Morvern Callar. It does not suffice. Books seemingly centred on emptiness do not necessarily succeed by being soulless pits of mediocrity. Books centred on soulless pits of mediocrity do not succeed based on emptiness. Furthermore, men writing female characters do not convince by displaying their knowledge that women have to wipe from front to back after going to the toilet etc. In the truncated words of one woman, if 'It is a truth universally acknowledged' then we can skip to the unacknowledged truths with great delight. I would prefer understanding to knowledge or the mere mouth-frothings of a disheartened man-creature such as Ally Wary. The foam is almost visible in many of the aforementioned photies. Have a look.
March 13, 2011
Morvern is a troubled young woman from a fictitious Highland fishing village who walks into an inheritance after her boyfriend slashes his wrists in her front room.
She goes abroad, goes to the pub, gets a book she didn't write published, works in the supermarket, goes abroad again and goes clubbing very many times both home and abroad. She remains as inscrutable and strange as possible, allowing the reader little window into her semi-psychotic mind, leaving them entertained but bemused. Same thing in the film.
It's good.
She goes abroad, goes to the pub, gets a book she didn't write published, works in the supermarket, goes abroad again and goes clubbing very many times both home and abroad. She remains as inscrutable and strange as possible, allowing the reader little window into her semi-psychotic mind, leaving them entertained but bemused. Same thing in the film.
It's good.
November 16, 2011
I love this book. One of my favourites from the 90s.
I had yesterday (10/11/10) off to do some writng, a new story I thought, as I haven't done anything new this year, I must get on. But for some reason both daughters were home. Why aren't you in London I said demonstrating against tuition fees? (One's at Uni, the other's waiting to go.) I should have been there as well, occupying the Tory headquarters. Anyway I couldn't concentrate on anything new (small house), so read through an old notebook from 1995 and came across some notes on books I was reading then.
Morvern: - a fantastic book about a shopgirl in the Scottish highlands, a raver, her friends inject malt whisky into their temples and drop LSD in their eyes... starts with her strange boyfriend's suicide in the kitchen, a chopped wrist. She lights a Silk Cut and goes to work, opens the Christmas present he left for her. She goes to a night club then on to a party and ends up in a foursome with John and Paul. And on. A wild and fantastic story which will haunt me because I feel it all.
Have to write down some lines from it. She goes to Spain:
The path from my hired apartment to the beach front was like out the Bible under the feirceness of such sun.
When I stubbed out the butt you saw the loveliness of colours: my nails, the glittery gold Sobraine filter in the ashtray with the bright, tousled strips of orange peel among. I used the new lighter on another Sobraine cause of the alternative taste of smoke then orange.
You saw a girl with an awkward looking bottom but the face of an angel.
Children formed a parade along the surf edge, running backwards and forwards as waves came in, the water carrying lifebelts and toys up towards the sandcastles getting built.
Finished MC, and was with her down to the sun-blasted coast, the rave scene like some religious rite, the connections boosted by the Catholic/Spain imagery, the festival, visits to church. The scene with the publisher's agents, Tom and Susan, absolutely hilarious. You agree with the novelist boyfriend - he's sacrificed his life for her to have a good time and you feel he was right.
Also finishing off another mad Scot - Irvine Welsh's The Acid House, not half as good but pretty funny, reading the novella A Smart Cunt. It has chapter titles like 'Jellies and Cock Sucking', 'Christams with Blind Cunt'. Drugs seep through the pages, hallucinations, breakdowns in the new park attendant's life.
I had yesterday (10/11/10) off to do some writng, a new story I thought, as I haven't done anything new this year, I must get on. But for some reason both daughters were home. Why aren't you in London I said demonstrating against tuition fees? (One's at Uni, the other's waiting to go.) I should have been there as well, occupying the Tory headquarters. Anyway I couldn't concentrate on anything new (small house), so read through an old notebook from 1995 and came across some notes on books I was reading then.
Morvern: - a fantastic book about a shopgirl in the Scottish highlands, a raver, her friends inject malt whisky into their temples and drop LSD in their eyes... starts with her strange boyfriend's suicide in the kitchen, a chopped wrist. She lights a Silk Cut and goes to work, opens the Christmas present he left for her. She goes to a night club then on to a party and ends up in a foursome with John and Paul. And on. A wild and fantastic story which will haunt me because I feel it all.
Have to write down some lines from it. She goes to Spain:
The path from my hired apartment to the beach front was like out the Bible under the feirceness of such sun.
When I stubbed out the butt you saw the loveliness of colours: my nails, the glittery gold Sobraine filter in the ashtray with the bright, tousled strips of orange peel among. I used the new lighter on another Sobraine cause of the alternative taste of smoke then orange.
You saw a girl with an awkward looking bottom but the face of an angel.
Children formed a parade along the surf edge, running backwards and forwards as waves came in, the water carrying lifebelts and toys up towards the sandcastles getting built.
Finished MC, and was with her down to the sun-blasted coast, the rave scene like some religious rite, the connections boosted by the Catholic/Spain imagery, the festival, visits to church. The scene with the publisher's agents, Tom and Susan, absolutely hilarious. You agree with the novelist boyfriend - he's sacrificed his life for her to have a good time and you feel he was right.
Also finishing off another mad Scot - Irvine Welsh's The Acid House, not half as good but pretty funny, reading the novella A Smart Cunt. It has chapter titles like 'Jellies and Cock Sucking', 'Christams with Blind Cunt'. Drugs seep through the pages, hallucinations, breakdowns in the new park attendant's life.
May 14, 2011
It is unfortunate that this came completely soundless to me when its reading is supposed to be accompanied by music. Music playing either in Morvern Callar's ubiquitous Walkman or elsewhere (a radio nearby, or a stereo, etc.). I don't know what effect it would have had on me if I just had any idea what these tracks sounded like, or even just what their lyrics say:
You Got Me Rockin'
Take Cover
Ma Rainey
Crack Butter
Panzer Be Bop
Last Exit: Straw Dog
Miles Davis: Great Expectations
Sonny Sharrock: Dick Dogs
Luciano Berio: Visage
Ronald Shannon Jackson: Taboo
Bill Laswell: Assassin
Challenge to Manhood
Lee Perry: De Devil Dead
FSOL: Room 208
Kraftwerk: Computer Love
Weather Report: Cucumber Slumber
Eno: Here Come The Warm Jets
Czukay Wobble Liebezeit: Full Circle
Zawinul: The Harvest
Scritti Politti: A Little Knowledge
Hunters & Collectors: Dog
John McCormack: Come my Beloved
Hardware: 500 Years
Robert Calvert: Ejection
Leisure Process: A Way You'll Never Be
to name just a FEW. Not one I recognize. Morvern Callar calls them "rave stuff." The setting is a desolate town in Scotland, maybe around the early 1990's (a computer here still has floppy discs). I was already very much alive and kicking at that time, yet I do not know her music.
It was therefore very much like watching a silent movie, without a soundtrack and its dialogues given as mere subtitles below the screen. Still, I was very much tempted to give it 5 stars. The unfortunate limitation simply could not transform this ingenious novel into a bad one.
Morvern Callar is a 21-year-old employee of a local supermarket. She was an orphan who was raised by foster parents. She narrates AND writes this novel. From her prose one can readily sense her lack of, or limited, formal education, with her repetitive expressions, grammatical lapses, mispellings and unnecessary capitalizations. I suspect she speaks some kind of a Scottish slang. Very difficult to understand at first but eventually I got the hang of it. She's a chain smoker ("...used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut" she often says), a hard drinker and party-goer, and into casual sex and occasional drugs.
One day, near Christmas, she saw her 34-year-old boyfriend of 5 years lying dead on her kitchen floor, a suicide. He had chopped of his hand with a meat cleaver and slit his throat with a knife. That's the scene which opens this novel. The guy was apparently the complete opposite of Morvern Callar. He had written a book kept in his computer. He had left ample money. In his suicide note, he professed his love for her, instructed her to get his book published, but remained vague on why he had decided to take his own life, and in such a gruesome manner. What Morvern Callar did after this, what she did to her boyfriend's body, to his money, to the book he left, and to her own self, are what you'll find out as you continue reading, and reading, and reading, unable to put down the book, your mouth wide open in disbelief, amazed that a guy--Alan Warner--can go deep inside the mind of a girl and create one of the unforgettable literary characters I had ever known.
And this, even without the music.
You Got Me Rockin'
Take Cover
Ma Rainey
Crack Butter
Panzer Be Bop
Last Exit: Straw Dog
Miles Davis: Great Expectations
Sonny Sharrock: Dick Dogs
Luciano Berio: Visage
Ronald Shannon Jackson: Taboo
Bill Laswell: Assassin
Challenge to Manhood
Lee Perry: De Devil Dead
FSOL: Room 208
Kraftwerk: Computer Love
Weather Report: Cucumber Slumber
Eno: Here Come The Warm Jets
Czukay Wobble Liebezeit: Full Circle
Zawinul: The Harvest
Scritti Politti: A Little Knowledge
Hunters & Collectors: Dog
John McCormack: Come my Beloved
Hardware: 500 Years
Robert Calvert: Ejection
Leisure Process: A Way You'll Never Be
to name just a FEW. Not one I recognize. Morvern Callar calls them "rave stuff." The setting is a desolate town in Scotland, maybe around the early 1990's (a computer here still has floppy discs). I was already very much alive and kicking at that time, yet I do not know her music.
It was therefore very much like watching a silent movie, without a soundtrack and its dialogues given as mere subtitles below the screen. Still, I was very much tempted to give it 5 stars. The unfortunate limitation simply could not transform this ingenious novel into a bad one.
Morvern Callar is a 21-year-old employee of a local supermarket. She was an orphan who was raised by foster parents. She narrates AND writes this novel. From her prose one can readily sense her lack of, or limited, formal education, with her repetitive expressions, grammatical lapses, mispellings and unnecessary capitalizations. I suspect she speaks some kind of a Scottish slang. Very difficult to understand at first but eventually I got the hang of it. She's a chain smoker ("...used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut" she often says), a hard drinker and party-goer, and into casual sex and occasional drugs.
One day, near Christmas, she saw her 34-year-old boyfriend of 5 years lying dead on her kitchen floor, a suicide. He had chopped of his hand with a meat cleaver and slit his throat with a knife. That's the scene which opens this novel. The guy was apparently the complete opposite of Morvern Callar. He had written a book kept in his computer. He had left ample money. In his suicide note, he professed his love for her, instructed her to get his book published, but remained vague on why he had decided to take his own life, and in such a gruesome manner. What Morvern Callar did after this, what she did to her boyfriend's body, to his money, to the book he left, and to her own self, are what you'll find out as you continue reading, and reading, and reading, unable to put down the book, your mouth wide open in disbelief, amazed that a guy--Alan Warner--can go deep inside the mind of a girl and create one of the unforgettable literary characters I had ever known.
And this, even without the music.
January 11, 2021
Iconic 90s debut that nails the voice of its young, female shopworker narrator with laserlike precision. Morvern's blank-eyed amorality makes her a herione well-suited to that confused yet weirdly gorgeous time.
April 17, 2018
Method: A straight-up lyrical novel with a dead body at the center. The vast majority of its pages are direct sensation—minimal exposition, little dramatic engagement—but the corpse hovers over every quiet moment.
Voice: Scots vernacular; first-person but unreflective.
Heroine's motive: Obscure. Simple animal comfort, or an epic exercise in killing the pain—it’s hard to say. In Spain, blowing all of the deceased's money, she’s so happy she stays awake for three days because she doesn’t want to be asleep for any of it.
Likability of heroine: This seems to be a sticking point for some readers, but you and I are beyond all that.
Warner’s eye: Sharp, painterly. An old woman sits next to a white wall, a cicada lands next to her on the wall, and you see it—woman, wall, insect. Morvern watches a fishing boat sail up the channel; at one point it’s close enough that she can see the small mounds of new-fallen snow on its deck. A rundown pub with the pool table in the meat locker—one guy holds a frozen side of beef out of the way while another makes a shot.
Male gaze: Substantial. Warner unquestionably eroticizes Morvern. What can I say, young women are vessels. But those details are a side effect of a larger effort to make her vivid physically (if emotionally opaque).
Playlist: Pounding club music relieved by Walkman mixtapes of postwar jazz and near-jazz (Miles, Can, Salif Keita). A taste for the abstract unites all of it. Here, listen: https://tinyurl.com/y7rx2xb8
Case for Morvern Callar as a classical British novel: For all his rave-culture orientation—not to mention the postmodern implication that the novel the deceased was working on, and which Morvern sells as her own, is the novel we're reading—Warner is very much in the tradition of the naturalistic novel. Acceptance letter from publisher, notice of inheritance from lawyer, suicide note—all arrive with the swift life-changing thud of a secret letter from a Thomas Hardy story. The blue-collar characters that suddenly materialize—engine drivers, fishermen, barmen, power-station blokes who emerge from the night—are as sturdy on the page as a coal miner out of Sons and Lovers.
Worst scene: Morvern hoists the body into the attic and ceremoniously drops it on a model-train landscape of their hometown. Symbolically crude, emotionally disorienting, and physically implausible.
Second worst scene: An en masse bathing-suit exchange between males and females. Kind of a wet-tshirt contest vibe. The debasement obvious; the author should have just moved on.
Quality of sex with the grieving guy a floor below at the singles hotel who just lost his mother: Great but finite.
Alleged superiority of film version to novel: Debatable.
Overall significance: Elusive; but Warner has created a myth whose central, inexplicable event communicates more than just the strangeness of human behavior. Deserted by her God, Morvern Callar is a wandering angel, both wasting and rejoicing in all His bounties.
Voice: Scots vernacular; first-person but unreflective.
Heroine's motive: Obscure. Simple animal comfort, or an epic exercise in killing the pain—it’s hard to say. In Spain, blowing all of the deceased's money, she’s so happy she stays awake for three days because she doesn’t want to be asleep for any of it.
Likability of heroine: This seems to be a sticking point for some readers, but you and I are beyond all that.
Warner’s eye: Sharp, painterly. An old woman sits next to a white wall, a cicada lands next to her on the wall, and you see it—woman, wall, insect. Morvern watches a fishing boat sail up the channel; at one point it’s close enough that she can see the small mounds of new-fallen snow on its deck. A rundown pub with the pool table in the meat locker—one guy holds a frozen side of beef out of the way while another makes a shot.
Male gaze: Substantial. Warner unquestionably eroticizes Morvern. What can I say, young women are vessels. But those details are a side effect of a larger effort to make her vivid physically (if emotionally opaque).
Playlist: Pounding club music relieved by Walkman mixtapes of postwar jazz and near-jazz (Miles, Can, Salif Keita). A taste for the abstract unites all of it. Here, listen: https://tinyurl.com/y7rx2xb8
Case for Morvern Callar as a classical British novel: For all his rave-culture orientation—not to mention the postmodern implication that the novel the deceased was working on, and which Morvern sells as her own, is the novel we're reading—Warner is very much in the tradition of the naturalistic novel. Acceptance letter from publisher, notice of inheritance from lawyer, suicide note—all arrive with the swift life-changing thud of a secret letter from a Thomas Hardy story. The blue-collar characters that suddenly materialize—engine drivers, fishermen, barmen, power-station blokes who emerge from the night—are as sturdy on the page as a coal miner out of Sons and Lovers.
Worst scene: Morvern hoists the body into the attic and ceremoniously drops it on a model-train landscape of their hometown. Symbolically crude, emotionally disorienting, and physically implausible.
Second worst scene: An en masse bathing-suit exchange between males and females. Kind of a wet-tshirt contest vibe. The debasement obvious; the author should have just moved on.
Quality of sex with the grieving guy a floor below at the singles hotel who just lost his mother: Great but finite.
Alleged superiority of film version to novel: Debatable.
Overall significance: Elusive; but Warner has created a myth whose central, inexplicable event communicates more than just the strangeness of human behavior. Deserted by her God, Morvern Callar is a wandering angel, both wasting and rejoicing in all His bounties.
November 18, 2021
So… there's realism, and then there's squalor porn. There's sympathetic depiction of the limitations of, and imposed on, the underprivileged and disadvantaged, and then there's depicting working-class people as little more than hare-brained, perennially rutting animals. There's discussion of the casual exploitation of women and of the challenges that come with female sexuality in our society, and then there's sensationalist exaggeration of the same that is itself exploitation by way of a superior male gaze. Perhaps if I shower long enough, I'll be able to forget that I read this.
April 4, 2014
Isn't there some institution somewhere that can hold journalists responsible for their book reviews? On the cover of Morvern Callar I read that it is “dazzling,” “brilliantly original,” “vivid” and “stunning” and that it “defines the 90s.” The author is described as “one of the most talented, original and interesting voices around.” Really? Really?
If this book defines the 90s then the 90s are characterised by mindless sex, mindless alcoholism and mindnumbingly stupid people doing mindnumbingly stupid things. They were therefore, based on the evidence of other novels in the same vein, no different from the 60s, 70s or 80s. Now, during the 90s I was the same age as the eponymous character of this book, and let me tell you, I recognised nothing in it. Not a thing. My nineties were defined by pizza parlours, cinemas, protest marches and university lectures. The changes in Europe after the end of the Cold War were widely felt and the influx of refuges from former Yugoslavia presented a challenge to society. My friends and I were interested in postmodernism, interfaith dialogue, feminist linguistics, liberation theology, multiculturalism, cognitive psychology, the fair trade movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the future of socialism etc etc. There was the second Gulf War and the row over university reform. There was a lot going on in our lives, but not once did we wax our bikini lines or paint our toenails. Morvern's life is dominated by beauty routines and binge drinking. This is called by the reviewers a “voice with […] many angles.” It just goes to show that something as comprehensive and complex as a decade in history cannot be “defined” by a single viewpoint, especially not one as provincial and intellectually limited as Morvern's.
The characters in the book are, without exception, dull and one-dimensional. But of course someone had to call Morvern “impossible to forget.” Let me tell you, the only reason I would not forget her is because she bored me so much. Vivid? Tiresome, more like. The plot would fit into fifty pages, and the rest is filled up with long, rambling, tedious descriptions of trivial details. Now, I appreciate good description and good detail but the operative term here is “trivial.” Life is full of trivial stuff, the order in which we put on our clothes or the way we clean out teeth, but why would I want to read about this in a novel? Giving us one description of Morvern doing her pedicure is enough to establish the pertinent character traits; we do not need to hear this again, and again, and again. I skipped whole paragraphs of this rubbish.
The character voice is so contrived it annoyed me pretty much on every page. Usually, highschool drop-out Morvern cannot string a correct sentence together and uses “disappointedness” instead of “disappointment” and “silentness” instead of silence.” But every now and then she goes all lyrical, meticulously puts in those commas she normally doesn’t bother with, and uses complex syntax and words like “luminous,” “pivoted” or “insinuate.” She even speaks of genuflecting and of the Eucharist, and it's not because she's a Catholic (she doesn't know how to genuflect.) Yes, this uneducated ignorama casually identifies saxifrage, mimosas and pomegranate trees in passing, while at the same time all foreign nations to her are simple “a country.” What's going on here? I think the author forgets from time to time what persona he has taken on and becomes all middle-class. For example: Morvern has no problems saying “arse” but all of a sudden she is too refined for “boobs” and instead speaks of her “bosoms,” plural. Innocent little words like “the,” “to,” “as” or “of” are randomly used sometimes and omitted at other times, and similarly without rhyme or reason contractions are sometimes written with apostrophes and sometimes without (there's/theres).
Morvern always refers to McCaig's Tower as the “circular folly.” Who talks like that? She also makes repeated reference to the “Central Belt,” a term I have never heard used outside the traffic news and weather forecast. She says she takes a train to the Central Belt. Again, who talks like that? Anyone I've ever met would say they were taking a train to Glasgow. Likewise, I've never met anyone who refers to their cigarettes by their brand names all the time. The normal thing to say is “I lit a cigarette” or “I lit a fag.” What does Morvern say? “I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut.” And not just once, twice, thrice, no, dozens of time we are plagued with this tedious and unnatural statement. All just so that towards the end we can hear that she is now using a new lighter for a, presumably, more expensive brand of cigarette. Oh, the profound symbolism of it!
I'm not even going to start on the plot holes and the implausibility of the whole thing. The best way to characterise this book is, “Two days reading wasted.” Curse you, newspaper book reviewers!
If this book defines the 90s then the 90s are characterised by mindless sex, mindless alcoholism and mindnumbingly stupid people doing mindnumbingly stupid things. They were therefore, based on the evidence of other novels in the same vein, no different from the 60s, 70s or 80s. Now, during the 90s I was the same age as the eponymous character of this book, and let me tell you, I recognised nothing in it. Not a thing. My nineties were defined by pizza parlours, cinemas, protest marches and university lectures. The changes in Europe after the end of the Cold War were widely felt and the influx of refuges from former Yugoslavia presented a challenge to society. My friends and I were interested in postmodernism, interfaith dialogue, feminist linguistics, liberation theology, multiculturalism, cognitive psychology, the fair trade movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the future of socialism etc etc. There was the second Gulf War and the row over university reform. There was a lot going on in our lives, but not once did we wax our bikini lines or paint our toenails. Morvern's life is dominated by beauty routines and binge drinking. This is called by the reviewers a “voice with […] many angles.” It just goes to show that something as comprehensive and complex as a decade in history cannot be “defined” by a single viewpoint, especially not one as provincial and intellectually limited as Morvern's.
The characters in the book are, without exception, dull and one-dimensional. But of course someone had to call Morvern “impossible to forget.” Let me tell you, the only reason I would not forget her is because she bored me so much. Vivid? Tiresome, more like. The plot would fit into fifty pages, and the rest is filled up with long, rambling, tedious descriptions of trivial details. Now, I appreciate good description and good detail but the operative term here is “trivial.” Life is full of trivial stuff, the order in which we put on our clothes or the way we clean out teeth, but why would I want to read about this in a novel? Giving us one description of Morvern doing her pedicure is enough to establish the pertinent character traits; we do not need to hear this again, and again, and again. I skipped whole paragraphs of this rubbish.
The character voice is so contrived it annoyed me pretty much on every page. Usually, highschool drop-out Morvern cannot string a correct sentence together and uses “disappointedness” instead of “disappointment” and “silentness” instead of silence.” But every now and then she goes all lyrical, meticulously puts in those commas she normally doesn’t bother with, and uses complex syntax and words like “luminous,” “pivoted” or “insinuate.” She even speaks of genuflecting and of the Eucharist, and it's not because she's a Catholic (she doesn't know how to genuflect.) Yes, this uneducated ignorama casually identifies saxifrage, mimosas and pomegranate trees in passing, while at the same time all foreign nations to her are simple “a country.” What's going on here? I think the author forgets from time to time what persona he has taken on and becomes all middle-class. For example: Morvern has no problems saying “arse” but all of a sudden she is too refined for “boobs” and instead speaks of her “bosoms,” plural. Innocent little words like “the,” “to,” “as” or “of” are randomly used sometimes and omitted at other times, and similarly without rhyme or reason contractions are sometimes written with apostrophes and sometimes without (there's/theres).
Morvern always refers to McCaig's Tower as the “circular folly.” Who talks like that? She also makes repeated reference to the “Central Belt,” a term I have never heard used outside the traffic news and weather forecast. She says she takes a train to the Central Belt. Again, who talks like that? Anyone I've ever met would say they were taking a train to Glasgow. Likewise, I've never met anyone who refers to their cigarettes by their brand names all the time. The normal thing to say is “I lit a cigarette” or “I lit a fag.” What does Morvern say? “I used the goldish lighter on a Silk Cut.” And not just once, twice, thrice, no, dozens of time we are plagued with this tedious and unnatural statement. All just so that towards the end we can hear that she is now using a new lighter for a, presumably, more expensive brand of cigarette. Oh, the profound symbolism of it!
I'm not even going to start on the plot holes and the implausibility of the whole thing. The best way to characterise this book is, “Two days reading wasted.” Curse you, newspaper book reviewers!
May 30, 2017
The negative reviews of this book are so interesting; particularly about the readers' inability to empathize with Morvern. At the start of the book, the whole bit about stepping around her boyfriend's body and going about her life while he remains on the floor is confusing, to say the least. And there is that plot hole--the unanswered question of what happens when anybody (anybody) discovers that he's been chopped up and buried and hasn't just gone elsewhere, which I assume will happen beyond the story's pages. But the longer the story went on, the more I found myself hating Morvern's friend Lanna, and understanding where the detachment and the need to start over would stem from. And while a male reviewer here mentioned that writing small details about nail polish and female anatomy aren't good substitutes for writing from a female perspective, I found it really refreshing to read about a female character (especially one designed by a male writer) who is complicated and possibly difficult to empathize with and who--for a change--gets away with quite a lot, which doesn't often happen by the average story's conclusion. So many female characters aren't this difficult to figure out, so I loved reading about one who made extremely questionable decisions and acted in self-interest but with good reason, and who needed to act with a constant soundtrack. All this, and I absolutely loved the language and style with which it was written. Could have read another 200 pages, happily. Wishing more novels were this ballsy and am itching to watch the movie, which I've somehow had in the back of my mind for over a decade.
September 12, 2007
Trainspotting, but for girls.
May 7, 2025
Wat te absurd voor mij lol
December 17, 2014
[...]
The story is naturalistic, related in staunch Oban dialect, but studded with moments of a unique kind of magical realism -- explainable human-caused events that lend a fantastical air to the fictional universe. When Morvern was a child she skidded to the floor while crafting Christmas cards, embedding glitter deep in the flesh, leaving her with a translucent "magic" knee that shimmers in the light, an enduring party trick.
Every motion (every song played, every cigarette, every change in bodily sensation) is described in painstaking detail -- though always in detached tones. We travel everywhere with Morven, from the dank double bed of a stranger's Hogmanay party to the perishing heat of Southern Spain, but we never truly get to know her. We know that she feels, we see her cry and laugh and touch herself and others, but it's all trapped behind glass somehow. In the end, each character's motivation remains out of reach.
With its peculiar vernacular, slips into second person, and gossipy refrain of the tales of the village, I don't think it's projection that this book reminded me so much of all-time-fav Sunset Song. Also recommended if you've ever enjoyed gothic heroines, Louise Welsh, the great wave of 90s living for the weekend/minimum wage perspective/Ebeneezer Goode narratives, Lost Gen-esque European wandering holiday narratives.
I used the goldish lighter on the Silk Cut. I says, Would you fancy some tea Granny Phimister?
I infused the two mugs and sat back on the hearth running my hands over the bristles coming on my legs. I used the goldish lighter on another Silk Cut. I was about to show her the glittering knee.
So you're the Callar Girl. Youre very quiet Morvern, for a friend of Allanah's.
Im no really when you get to know me.
The story is naturalistic, related in staunch Oban dialect, but studded with moments of a unique kind of magical realism -- explainable human-caused events that lend a fantastical air to the fictional universe. When Morvern was a child she skidded to the floor while crafting Christmas cards, embedding glitter deep in the flesh, leaving her with a translucent "magic" knee that shimmers in the light, an enduring party trick.
Every motion (every song played, every cigarette, every change in bodily sensation) is described in painstaking detail -- though always in detached tones. We travel everywhere with Morven, from the dank double bed of a stranger's Hogmanay party to the perishing heat of Southern Spain, but we never truly get to know her. We know that she feels, we see her cry and laugh and touch herself and others, but it's all trapped behind glass somehow. In the end, each character's motivation remains out of reach.
With its peculiar vernacular, slips into second person, and gossipy refrain of the tales of the village, I don't think it's projection that this book reminded me so much of all-time-fav Sunset Song. Also recommended if you've ever enjoyed gothic heroines, Louise Welsh, the great wave of 90s living for the weekend/minimum wage perspective/Ebeneezer Goode narratives, Lost Gen-esque European wandering holiday narratives.
I used the goldish lighter on the Silk Cut. I says, Would you fancy some tea Granny Phimister?
I infused the two mugs and sat back on the hearth running my hands over the bristles coming on my legs. I used the goldish lighter on another Silk Cut. I was about to show her the glittering knee.
So you're the Callar Girl. Youre very quiet Morvern, for a friend of Allanah's.
Im no really when you get to know me.
January 15, 2021
Maybe choosing Morvern Callar as my first book to actually write a review for was a mistake. It’s a book like no other, and I’m hugely conflicted in a number of areas.
I found myself having empathy with the protagonist, the desperation of her situation, the banality of her life, and yet I didn’t like her very much and that made it harder to connect. The colloquial style of writing took patience but once I’d acclimatised I felt it added hugely to the message. The key plot seemed annoyingly unlikely though it facilitated the story in such a way that it became unfathomably engaging. It was a book I was really looking forward to reading, then felt disappointment that my expectation wasn’t being met for the first 100 pages or so. Then something changed and I found the remainder gripping: what changed, I’ve not yet worked out. That’s not strictly true. A section of the story featured quite a way through focused on Morvern’s escape to, and realisation of, a life she desired and was enjoying in that moment, undoubtedly with the knowledge that it was there for the now and wouldn’t last. The descriptive prose used to convey the place, person, attitude, contentment, and sheer enjoyment of an experience that she knew was transient was breathtaking and for me made the book a must read if only for that section alone.
Nothing about this book was simple, and I don’t know how many times I’ve yoyoed back and forth with my thoughts. Not the way I normally feel after finishing a much anticipated read.
I found myself having empathy with the protagonist, the desperation of her situation, the banality of her life, and yet I didn’t like her very much and that made it harder to connect. The colloquial style of writing took patience but once I’d acclimatised I felt it added hugely to the message. The key plot seemed annoyingly unlikely though it facilitated the story in such a way that it became unfathomably engaging. It was a book I was really looking forward to reading, then felt disappointment that my expectation wasn’t being met for the first 100 pages or so. Then something changed and I found the remainder gripping: what changed, I’ve not yet worked out. That’s not strictly true. A section of the story featured quite a way through focused on Morvern’s escape to, and realisation of, a life she desired and was enjoying in that moment, undoubtedly with the knowledge that it was there for the now and wouldn’t last. The descriptive prose used to convey the place, person, attitude, contentment, and sheer enjoyment of an experience that she knew was transient was breathtaking and for me made the book a must read if only for that section alone.
Nothing about this book was simple, and I don’t know how many times I’ve yoyoed back and forth with my thoughts. Not the way I normally feel after finishing a much anticipated read.
December 9, 2008
i always ramble about this book, and with good reason: it's, without question, one of the books that made me want to be a writer.
you can put aside the incredibly strong "female empowerment" theme, the unusual but effective stylistic choices, and the incredibly strong voice of Warner and you'll still see a well-crafted, endearing and engaging story. it's meaningful and complicated enough to demand an infinite number of readings. i often find myself returning to it when i wonder whether or not writing is the best path for me to have chosen.
i judge every novel i read in comparison to this book. it's marvelous, and i recommend it to anyone and everyone.
you can put aside the incredibly strong "female empowerment" theme, the unusual but effective stylistic choices, and the incredibly strong voice of Warner and you'll still see a well-crafted, endearing and engaging story. it's meaningful and complicated enough to demand an infinite number of readings. i often find myself returning to it when i wonder whether or not writing is the best path for me to have chosen.
i judge every novel i read in comparison to this book. it's marvelous, and i recommend it to anyone and everyone.
June 30, 2017
After reading the afterward, I really wanted to like this book, but I still very much don't. I hope to reread it someday and perhaps see Morvern as a lonely person rather than a sociopathic robot. This book was about a lot of people living a lifestyle I find claustrophobic and irritating. I never understood Morvern, never agreed with her choices, but I did keep on reading, which is something. One star for now because I didn't get much out of it and it wasn't an enjoyable reading experience.
April 6, 2017
Depressing.
Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing wrong with that.
April 28, 2025
Don’t dream, you’ll only be disappointed. Don’t worry about tomorrow, it may never come.
These are two maxims which may describe the life of 18-year-old Morvern Callar and her western Scottish town. (I can’t pin down exactly where but Beinn Mheadhonach, where part of the story takes place, is on the map.) She wakes up one morning near to Christmas to find that during the night, her boyfriend has committed suicide in a very messy fashion, almost severing his wrist in the process. At first, Morvern thinks she ought to call the authorities but then thinks twice and just heads off to her dead-end job at a super-store after opening her presents from him. It obviously seems very cold and although the whole book is in the first person, Morvern never actually reveals her thought process so the reader is left to wonder what she’s thinking but it reflects the entire nihilistic experience of life there. There’s nothing to life there for her but drinking, drugs, sex and rave music. However, as the book progresses, we can see that Morvern’s foster father – there’s no mention of her biologicals – has it right, Morvern is very clever and her cleverness is wasted there. In a sense, this reminded me of other impoverished environments where there’s no escape because there are no positive models to show other possibilities. So, Morvern tells no one about her boyfriend’s death, only that he’s run off somewhere, a perfectly acceptable explanation there that no one will question.
However, there IS an escape: Morvern already knew that her boyfriend came from a family with money and in fact didn’t need to work but when she takes his bankcard to an automatic cashier, she finds that she now has access to more money than she could imagine one person could have. Without my giving too much away, what follows is a Club Med party-like-it’s-the-end-of-the world vacation in Spain with like-minded wasted youths and now Morvern awakes to the vacuous life she’s been living. She knows what she wants, what she doesn’t want and that there’s a possibility of a different future. Now that she’s no longer impoverished in money, she doesn’t have to be impoverished in her soul. All of this is particularly interesting in the way the novel is written: if you want “show, don’t tell”, you have it here in abundance because Morvern narrates the action without telling why she does or doesn’t do something; it’s left to the reader to note the sea change in her attitude and construct why and how she’s changing.
There are the usual complaints about a man, Alan Warner, writing in a woman’s voice but I don’t think that this necessarily applies here because Morvern’s thoughts are her own and the reader can decide what she might be thinking. Although there is no graphic sex here, it can be shocking nonetheless; at one early part after Morvern and her best friend have shared a pair of lads for the night, she remarks that there’s no sour taste of the milk she drank during the night due to “all the using of my mouth”, and later a memory of a particularly erotic part involving just her and her friend sparks a session of masturbation, although she doesn’t say that’s what she’s doing or what she thought of said event when it happened. The reader can catch the drift here even if nothing is spelled out. But as Morvern evolves, she becomes an inspiration of a young woman saving herself and building a life without ANY help whatsoever from anyone. (The writer, Sophie Mackintosh wrote a long elegy to Morvern in The Guardian.) It’s an upsetting start but uplifting book at the end. We’d probably have to sneak it into US high schools but no doubt many young women living impoverished lives could identify with Morvern as she moves from an empty life to self-sufficiency.
These are two maxims which may describe the life of 18-year-old Morvern Callar and her western Scottish town. (I can’t pin down exactly where but Beinn Mheadhonach, where part of the story takes place, is on the map.) She wakes up one morning near to Christmas to find that during the night, her boyfriend has committed suicide in a very messy fashion, almost severing his wrist in the process. At first, Morvern thinks she ought to call the authorities but then thinks twice and just heads off to her dead-end job at a super-store after opening her presents from him. It obviously seems very cold and although the whole book is in the first person, Morvern never actually reveals her thought process so the reader is left to wonder what she’s thinking but it reflects the entire nihilistic experience of life there. There’s nothing to life there for her but drinking, drugs, sex and rave music. However, as the book progresses, we can see that Morvern’s foster father – there’s no mention of her biologicals – has it right, Morvern is very clever and her cleverness is wasted there. In a sense, this reminded me of other impoverished environments where there’s no escape because there are no positive models to show other possibilities. So, Morvern tells no one about her boyfriend’s death, only that he’s run off somewhere, a perfectly acceptable explanation there that no one will question.
However, there IS an escape: Morvern already knew that her boyfriend came from a family with money and in fact didn’t need to work but when she takes his bankcard to an automatic cashier, she finds that she now has access to more money than she could imagine one person could have. Without my giving too much away, what follows is a Club Med party-like-it’s-the-end-of-the world vacation in Spain with like-minded wasted youths and now Morvern awakes to the vacuous life she’s been living. She knows what she wants, what she doesn’t want and that there’s a possibility of a different future. Now that she’s no longer impoverished in money, she doesn’t have to be impoverished in her soul. All of this is particularly interesting in the way the novel is written: if you want “show, don’t tell”, you have it here in abundance because Morvern narrates the action without telling why she does or doesn’t do something; it’s left to the reader to note the sea change in her attitude and construct why and how she’s changing.
There are the usual complaints about a man, Alan Warner, writing in a woman’s voice but I don’t think that this necessarily applies here because Morvern’s thoughts are her own and the reader can decide what she might be thinking. Although there is no graphic sex here, it can be shocking nonetheless; at one early part after Morvern and her best friend have shared a pair of lads for the night, she remarks that there’s no sour taste of the milk she drank during the night due to “all the using of my mouth”, and later a memory of a particularly erotic part involving just her and her friend sparks a session of masturbation, although she doesn’t say that’s what she’s doing or what she thought of said event when it happened. The reader can catch the drift here even if nothing is spelled out. But as Morvern evolves, she becomes an inspiration of a young woman saving herself and building a life without ANY help whatsoever from anyone. (The writer, Sophie Mackintosh wrote a long elegy to Morvern in The Guardian.) It’s an upsetting start but uplifting book at the end. We’d probably have to sneak it into US high schools but no doubt many young women living impoverished lives could identify with Morvern as she moves from an empty life to self-sufficiency.
January 28, 2010
A young woman, 21, working in a dead end job and living in a small port town on the west coast of Scotland wakes up one morning to find that her 35 year old boyfriend of five years has committed suicide. She ignores the body for a few days and goes about her life as usual which consists of work and partying. She eventually dismembers and buries the body, sells his manuscript as her own, gets an advance and goes off to Spain (I think) to party some more.
If I hadn't seen the film version of this book, I would have said there couldn't be one because not a whole lot really happens and Morvern Callar, whose name means Quieter Silence, doesn't say a whole lot. I saw the film 8 years ago so my memory is fuzzy but my recollection is that it was great looking, a good performance by Samantha Morton, but I didn't connect. Having read the book, I feel I have a bit more understanding of where she is coming from and although I still can't identify with Morvern, I find myself wondering about her and I'll give the story credit for that.
Allan Warner said: "I think Morvern Callar is an existential novel and one that taps into the absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former) domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of death, in that way she’s heroic I think."
I didn't get this feeling. I thought something her foster father says was more telling: "No big pleasures for the likes of us, eh? We who eat from the plate thats largely empty. Here's you, 21, a 40 hour week on slave wages for the rest of your life; even with the fortnight in a resort there no much room for poetry there, eh? The hidden fact of our world is that theres no point in having desire unless you've money. Every desire is transformed into sour dreams. You get told if you work hard you get money but most work hard and end up with nothing."
If I hadn't seen the film version of this book, I would have said there couldn't be one because not a whole lot really happens and Morvern Callar, whose name means Quieter Silence, doesn't say a whole lot. I saw the film 8 years ago so my memory is fuzzy but my recollection is that it was great looking, a good performance by Samantha Morton, but I didn't connect. Having read the book, I feel I have a bit more understanding of where she is coming from and although I still can't identify with Morvern, I find myself wondering about her and I'll give the story credit for that.
Allan Warner said: "I think Morvern Callar is an existential novel and one that taps into the absurd, that whole opening sequence. I think Morvern is outraged at the absurdity of death, the fact she has to jump over the body to get to the sink, the fact that she suddenly needs to take a crap, even though the man she loves is dead there in the midst of their (former) domestic bliss. The whole absurdity of having to get dressed and put on makeup though he’s dead. I think it metaphysically outrages her which is why she reports it so exhaustively and perhaps that’s why she walks past the phonebox. She’s rebelling against the absurdity of death, in that way she’s heroic I think."
I didn't get this feeling. I thought something her foster father says was more telling: "No big pleasures for the likes of us, eh? We who eat from the plate thats largely empty. Here's you, 21, a 40 hour week on slave wages for the rest of your life; even with the fortnight in a resort there no much room for poetry there, eh? The hidden fact of our world is that theres no point in having desire unless you've money. Every desire is transformed into sour dreams. You get told if you work hard you get money but most work hard and end up with nothing."
April 1, 2008
A great and challenging read, both in subject and style. Morvern is an amazing character, and the way that Warner creates her voice with language is even more amazing. The style is interesting, frequently mixing 2nd person with first person. Commas and words are dropped, as are contextual words. The tone is established in the first paragraph, even the first sentence, so that you know you are entering into a unique voice right off, and that you are going to be disturbed. There are similarities with Camus' The Stranger; at least in the way that indifference and disaffection are dealt with. What is interesting is the way that Morvern moves through events that should elicit feelings yet they do not. I particularly liked the beginning of the final chapter as she walks up the train tracks in the snow, with no explanation of how much time has passed or how she got there. Although it is never explained how she has come to the indifference she feels, I was quite fine not knowing, fascinated to follow her disaffected movement. The motif of the Walkman and the techno music worked great; implying a kind of self-hypnosis. The scenes where she is hanging out with the publishers in London is hilarious, the satire and the irony mixes beautifully with Morvern's clueless guile.
July 8, 2008
When Morvern Callar finds that her boyfriend has committed suicide, she hides the body and continues on with her life.
*****************Possible spoilers***************
The writing is good but I didn't really get the point of the story. The main character is totally alienated from society and her emotions. She doesn't really do anything with her life but get trashed on drugs and alcohol. There were a couple plot points that I thought might get interesting (her almost romantic relationship with her best friend and passing her boyfriend's novel off as her own) but they were never developed.
My boyfriend saw the movie version and said that the best part was the music, I have to agree.
*****************Possible spoilers***************
The writing is good but I didn't really get the point of the story. The main character is totally alienated from society and her emotions. She doesn't really do anything with her life but get trashed on drugs and alcohol. There were a couple plot points that I thought might get interesting (her almost romantic relationship with her best friend and passing her boyfriend's novel off as her own) but they were never developed.
My boyfriend saw the movie version and said that the best part was the music, I have to agree.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 26, 2018
Probably more like 3.5 stars, but I did really enjoy this unique, entertaining story following Morvern through the 90s rave scene... and beyond.
July 22, 2022
Jättedålig..
May 15, 2021
This novel put my brain in a very strange place.
The dialect, the people and the small village chat lures that familiarity but completely spins it all on the head.
It also absolutely personifies the instances of the rave scene and the physical holiday hedonism which is practically unseen nowadays.
Morvern is so utterly bizarre and I loved her, also very funny that when I typed her name it corrected to Norbert. However, there were so many instances when you could blatantly tell it was a male author writing her.
All in all this book made my feel physically dirty, confused, disorientated and seen. Therefore, very good.
The dialect, the people and the small village chat lures that familiarity but completely spins it all on the head.
It also absolutely personifies the instances of the rave scene and the physical holiday hedonism which is practically unseen nowadays.
Morvern is so utterly bizarre and I loved her, also very funny that when I typed her name it corrected to Norbert. However, there were so many instances when you could blatantly tell it was a male author writing her.
All in all this book made my feel physically dirty, confused, disorientated and seen. Therefore, very good.
April 12, 2021
One of the weirdest reading experiences I have ever had. This book is so unsettling, horrifying, fantastical, strange, otherworldly, raw, matter-of-fact, sad, funny, whimsical, and just so utterly itself I am not quite sure what to make of it. Definitely one to revisit. This edition also comes with a very nice afterword by the author, Alan Warner, which definitely helps to make a bit more sense of this otherwise very enigmatic novel. It was quite a wild ride, this book, in the company of the ever-elusive Morvern Callar. Interesting and thought-provoking...
August 12, 2017
A compelling story from the first pages, Morvern Callar lives life with her own soundtrack and glaring indifference to just about everything. Dark and morbid at times it is a story of a weird sort of perseverance through a life offering very little chance of change. Is Morvern a likable character? Not really, but it sure is interesting finding out. Pretty amazing that this was a debut novel.
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