The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven
Alan Warner Jonathan Cape, 390pp, £11.99
ISBN 0224071297
Alan Warner's fifth novel draws the macabre poetry of its title from words spoken by his mother on her deathbed. Its protagonist is 40-year-old Manolo Follana, an ailing Spanish playboy who presides over a successful design company and lives in the (nameless) coastal resort where he grew up. At the start of the novel he learns that he has The Condition - we are to infer he is HIV-positive - and needs "to make a few changes in life". Instead of embracing any such spirit of change, Manolo reacts by reflecting on his often outrageous past, sifting the debris of a life at once decadent and plagued by hypochondria.
Manolo assiduously draws up a list of former lovers. After all, he has almost certainly contracted The Condition from one of them. With "shrivelled pride" he surveys the list: he has chosen repeatedly to "hide from the true horror of the world" in the company of women, and has enjoyed some bizarre conquests, such as a woman notable for the "avaricious plummets" of her kisses. What follows is a picaresque of recollection in which we shift between the present, where Manolo wrestles with the implications of his illness, and defining events in his sexual history.
Many of Manolo's memories are amusing. He grew up in a hotel that belonged to his parents, which meant he could treat the objects of his affections to illicit ice creams from its restaurant's freezer, but his power extended well beyond this. He charmingly recalls the time he was given a model airplane by his parents and was tearfully incensed at the prospect of assembling it. His father demanded that one of his waiters, an engineering student, piece it together. The waiter, juggling this task and his more familiar duties, inadvertently sealed an olive within the fuselage, and for years afterwards Manolo could hear its stone rattling inside.
Other memories are tainted by regret. Manolo created a library of great literature, only to compute the time it would take him to read it all and disgustedly abandon it, having realised he could never do it justice. Worse than this, though, is the way a single note of darkness can sustain itself much longer than a whole symphony of pleasures. For instance, Manolo delightedly remembers how, as an eager teen, he blagged his way into the cinema to see Jaws with two cute Vietnamese girls. The episode, one of the novel's best, is critical in the development of his erotic imagination - so it is of more than passing interest that, in the midst of it, Spielberg's shark "suddenly stuck its head out of the water and grinned at us". For Manolo, going in the water would never be quite the same again.
As such incidents suggest, there is a concern throughout the novel with the essential slipperiness of memory. The appearance of some half-forgotten souvenir "flips us backwards in time, to broken promises", yet such Proustian moments can be treacherous. Significantly, Manolo collects antiquated tourist guides - as erroneous as they are beguiling. "In this life," he claims, "objects alone remain faithful, have mercy on us and survive our ruined relationships." But the safety of objects is an illusion.
As he is dredging up his past, Manolo finds himself drawn to a Somali refugee called Ahmed. Initially he is dismissive of Ahmed, regarding him as just another of the feckless losers who now populate his home town. But over time Ahmed becomes his confidant. He, too, has The Condition, yet his is an altogether more traumatic story, and its extremes serve as a corrective to Manolo's self-pity.
Both men's dramas are compelling, but in Warner's oeuvre voice is more important than plot. Here, one of the narrative's quirks, apparent from an early stage, is that Manolo is not English-speaking. He refers to the language as "a complete soup", and his idioms are often mushy. Warner is playing a strange game here, presenting us with what we have to assume is an impromptu translation of Manolo's thoughts. Why not just make Manolo an English-speaker and avoid such a conceptual pitfall?
The answer is that Warner relishes this kind of inventive risk. He is a remarkably tricksy writer - confusing, darkly funny and formally adventurous. The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven represents an ambitious attempt to distance himself from his usual Caledonian territory, and is his most mature and reflective work to date. Yet, like each of his previous novels, it displays above all the pyrotechnic brilliance of his imagination.
Henry Hitchings is the author of Dr Johnson's Dictionary: the extraordinary story of the book that defined the world (John Murray)
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