Grand Guignol grotesquery
Carole Angier
THE WORMS CAN CARRY ME TO HEAVEN by Alan Warner Cape, £11.99, pp. 389, ISBN 0224051105 ✆ £9.59(plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Alan Warner’s first novel, Morvern Callar, was macabre, bizarre and brilliant. This, his fifth, is equally macabre and bizarre, but less brilliant. So I first thought. Then I realised that it doesn’t lack heart, but only hides it. That in itself, I suppose, is rather brilliant.
The first pages hook us in a simple way: Manolo (Lolo) Follana, aged 40, is told by his doctor and best friend that he is HIV positive. For the next fortnight we follow him while his life replays before him, as for a drowning man.
After the opening, however, nothing is simple. Mercifully, Lolo and his friends have names. But his city doesn’t, nor does his country; from the rare references to its history (a long fascist period) and geography (a pair of co-ordinates), you guess it’s southern Spain. But the co-ordinates point inland, while the unnamed city is on the sea; and though we’re in the present, the neighbourhood names suggest a futuristic fantasy (Phases Zone 1, Kilometre 4).
Time and space are pretty weird here in other words, and so is our main guide, language. Italics and exclamation marks run wild; chapter titles are often arch (eg ‘Last Chapter: Titled: Last Chapter’). Odd words and phrases abound — ‘gremial’, ‘benthic’, ‘frownsome’, stopping you in your tracks like the italics. All of this is not fun, at least to me!
And yet there is wonderful writing here too. Warner is particularly good on light, and on weird, macabre images: the trays of departed waiters jammed into the palm tree at a café, borne aloft by the growing tree; a naked, dead old man in his bath, plunging through the ceiling of the Imperial Hotel to crash among the diners. And he can be (macabrely) funny too, e.g. when Follana visits his mad wife in her asylum, and the gardener remarks, ‘He thinks he is just a visitor, and the good-looking bint with the rain umbrella thinks she is his wife.’ So despite the tricksiness, it’s not the writing that’s the problem. It’s the Grand Guignol grotesquery, the obsession with death and violence. There are pages and pages of rape, of corpses in the grave and out; above all, there are pages and pages of sex. Lolo’s life is mostly sex. He prefers two girls at a time, and foreigners who can’t speak his language; when they do speak it, he doesn’t listen. He is a rich, spoiled narcissist, who wants to withdraw from the world with its design flaws into the susurrating silence of a water tank (some extraordinary descriptions here), or the solitude of a scuba-diver. When an old man asks him for a whisky he drinks it himself. He gives job advertisements to beggars. When he wants one of them, the illegal immigrant Ahmed Omar, to come and listen to him, he finds Ahmed’s pathetic makeshift home — a sleeping bag, a camping stove — and kicks it to smithereens. In other words, the problem is Follana.
And yet .... For a start (though this hardly helps to settle the stomach) everyone else is worse. His first wife, Veroña, likes to be screwed at funerals. His father plays tricks on him when he’s a child and curses him on his deathbed. His best friend plays even crueller tricks, then offers him his wife, whom, unexpectedly, Lolo refuses.
And that’s not the only surprise. He doesn’t like cats, but feeds dozens of strays. He cries at deaths in books and when the cats are doomed. Above all, he seems to care for Ahmed Omar, and so does Warner. The other story in the book is Omar’s, and the two turn out to be deeply connected. In the final, surreal event, Follana saves the life of a teenage girl, falling with her — like the old man in his bath — through the burning, imploding Imperial Hotel. When I first read this scene I noticed that the girl was a cipher as usual, and resisted the claim being made for Lolo’s redemption. But then I remembered his friendship — more, his identification — with Ahmed Omar, alone among the careless rich of his (imploding?) European city; and I thought that perhaps Lolo Follana is a kind of secret saint after all.
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