Observer Review: The Man Who Walks By Alan Warner Essay, Research Paper

Down the panThe Man Who WalksAlan WarnerJonathan Cape? 10.99, pp279In a four-novel calling, Alan Warner has created two extremely successful and distinguishable voices: more than many gifted novelists manage in a life-time. It is a testament to his energy and scope that he has ditched each of these & # 8211 ; the glassy deadpan of Morvern Callar and the hooched-up babbling of The Sopranos & # 8211 ; to get down again.The Man Who Walks inhabits the same constituency as its predecessors: the West Highlands, revolving the coastal town of Oban ( The Port ) . The duologue is immediately recognizable, as are many of the repeating subjects: poorness, acquiring person on liquor and drugs, pishing, shiteing, boaking, utmost sexual behavior, bodily injury. But the voice is new: & # 8216 ; The Nephew was lain soundless up atop the paper pokes of pony nuts near the roof of the agric supply warehouse, woolgathering about shade bags, when his Mobile diddled & # 8220 ; Rule Britannia, Britannia regulations the Waves & # 8221 ; . & # 8217 ; In this manner, the Nephew ( aka the Macushla ) learns that his insane uncle ( aka The Man Who Walks ) has disappeared once more, with & # 163 ; 27,000 stolen from a saloon in The Port ; a trail of saloon

becued budgerigars and bewildered landlords behind him; a series of soon-to-be-desecrated Bonnie Scotland Heritage sites ahead, like stations of the cross en route to his probable destination, Culloden Field. Where, at the end of the book, our hero seems to find himself, now badly maimed, on a film set: ‘Tears came into the Macushla’s two remaining eyes, beyond mere tears of pain. He clawed himself onwards, through the dummy corpses and towards the ruddy murk of another sunset.’Sandwiched between these two tremendous passages – tough and gaudy, lyrical and funny, transformingly intelligent – is nothing, except promise and talent betrayed and the burnt-out ruins of a few ironic ideas. As an experience, The Man Who Walks is comparable to an afternoon locked in a Portaloo with a wino. It makes Warner’s only misfire to date – the surreal These Demented Lands – look involving and fully realised.This is trash without the conviction or passion of good trash. Warner writes like Irvine Welsh on one of his numerous off-days. Everything Warner has successfully excluded from his better books comes home to roost. Far worse things are published, but from a writer like Warner The Man Who Walks is a shock.