Mortal on Hooch
William Fiennes
- The Sopranos by Alan Warner
Cape, 336 pp, £9.99, June 1998, ISBN 0 224 05108 3
Morvern Callar, the narrator of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), reacts to the suicide of her boyfriend by lighting a Silk Cut, opening her Christmas presents and shaving her legs in a hot bath. The boyfriend is lying in a pool of blood but Morvern remains emotionally numb: ‘Trying to get in the oven to heat up the pizza. His body caused the usual hassles but I soon had it underway.’ When she buries his body parts in the nearby mountains, Morvern is alert only to the bracken whacking her thighs, the stain of peaty water on her forearms, the heads of moor cotton whipping against her ankles, the beads of dew hanging from the tips of ferns. Her sensibility is as exquisite as her conscience is rudimentary.
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