Minutiae and the miniskirt

FIFTEEN years ago, a young Scotswoman found that her writer-boyfriend had slit his own throat after attempting to hack off his hand with a meat-cleaver.

Illustration: Paul Newman

FIFTEEN years ago, a young Scotswoman living in an unnamed Highland port town woke to discover that her writer-boyfriend had slit his own throat with a kitchen knife after attempting to hack off his hand with a meat-cleaver.

Her first response was to light a cigarette; then, later on, to dispose of the corpse, steal the dead man's unfinished manuscript and pass it off as her own.

So began Morvern Callar, Alan Warner's debut fiction and one of the best novels to emerge from Scotland -- or anywhere in the British Isles, for that matter -- during the 1990s. Told from an eerie, affectless first-person perspective and displaying a pitch-perfect ear for working-class dialect, Morvern Callar's adventures marked out a series of preoccupations that have lodged stubbornly in Warner's subsequent work.

Indeed, Warner returned to Morvern's port town for his third novel, The Sopranos, in which a group of teenage girls from the local Catholic high school go on a tear in a city down south during a choir competition.

They booze, swear, shop and flirt their way through a day in the big smoke, aspiring to a hedonism and adult glamour known more through hearsay and pop culture than direct experience.

For these five girls, geography, education and class conspire to alienate them from the urban, middle-class world. But where Morvern Callar took savage revenge on the society that unthinkingly excluded her, these girls are softer, more pliant. While The Sopranos is a scabrous, funny, foul-mouthed book, its final effect is closer to pathos: we want the girls to enjoy themselves, to have a moment of liberation before life beats them back to their proper place.

The Stars in the Bright Sky returns us to the girls after an interval of years. They are now in their 20s and possessed of the adult experience they once longed for. The group holiday they plan to take is an effort to shed the burden of that knowledge, if only for a while, in the fleshpots of southern Spain or gambling dens of Las Vegas, since they have left the destination to chance and flight availability.

As luck has it, a passport is misplaced and flights missed, so much of the novel takes place in Gatwick airport: a vast non-place, severed from history and nation by glass walls and concrete cordons of motorway; a secular limbo, in which the possibility of transcendence is everywhere manifest -- in the consumer paradise of chain stores, theme pubs and hotel lounges; in the sonic cannonade and flashing lights of the endlessly departing planes -- just not for our former choirgirls. With little to do but drink and wait as in some profane, postmodern Waiting for Godot, individuals begin to emerge from the girls' cross-hatch of chatter and cheers, taking on the volume and form of three-dimensional characters.

There is Kay, the dour doctor's daughter, who became part of the gang when their friend Orly (who was receiving treatment for cancer in The Sopranos) succumbed to her illness, and who has since escaped to England to study architecture. And there is Finn, the clever one, who has similarly made her way south to a philosophy degree at a London university. More than the others, she has refashioned herself, dropping her accent and sharing a house with Ava, a posh English girl whose presence here, among the old friends, shifts the group's dynamic in unexpected ways.

Joining them from Scotland are Chell, Kylah and Manda: the three who stayed in town. It is their guileless wonder and raucous misbehaviour that links us to the low comedy of the earlier novel.

Once again, Warner reveals himself to be a subtle and admiring observer of women, their friendships and enmities, their seemingly incompatible capacities for cruelty and loving accord. The reader comes to learn that these girls are richer and more various in their range of emotional response than their male counterparts. Take this tearful airport encounter between Finn and Manda, when the drunken, slovenly and overweight beautician attempts to recall her more sophisticated friend to their long friendship:

Finn had heard this speech before, about how much the two of them had been through together, which really amounted to how many times Manda had slagged Finn off behind her back, been confronted, burst into tears, then lectured Finn on how much they had been through together. Finn was powerless to change anything, racked up on her personal history in a way she wasn't with Ava or her London acquaintances. Finn knew all she had to do for a quiet life was to say it. She held those words in and savoured the pain in her chest for a moment longer. The two of them leaned together there, like blown boxers.

Ignore the banal context, muscular similes and calculated vulgarisms, and you have a paragraph of circumlocution worthy of Henry James. Which makes it all the more curious that the author should have chosen these very ordinary women, this dreary setting and unpromising plot to lavish his talent on.

Truth is, Warner's strengths as a novelist are so bound up with his weaknesses that disentangling them would be fatal. It is not despite the fact he is Britain's finest prose stylist since Martin Amis that Warner makes perverse choices of subject matter but because of it. For an author who feels his way so instinctively -- who begins with character and voice, and only then allows theme and story to assemble beneath his fingers -- eccentricity of design and a tendency to longeurs (both of which are very much apparent in these pages) are the price of admission.

Nonetheless, for those willing to eke out the 400 pages of The Star in the Bright Sky, there are treasures to be had.

Who else could convert the minutia of contemporary life into poetry, as Warner does when he describes the process of shutting down a mobile, holding the off-button in until the trilling phone died like a small bird? Or describes a group of uniformed drivers holding hand-printed names in arrivals as a paparazzi of chauffeurs?

There is a telling moment late in the book, when the girls hire a car for the afternoon and take a picnic on the grounds of Hever Castle in Kent. This small pastoral episode is told as a comedy, a disaster of hailstorms and garden mazes and Guinness drinking contests. But, among the laughter, the point is made that the former home of Anne Boleyn and one of the prettiest castles in southern England is a fake, rebuilt by the fabulously rich American Astor family in recent times.

When even history is ersatz -- a confection of money, power and rearranged old stone abetted by a televisual culture that relentlessly pushes images of gender and class that bear no relation to the lives of ordinary folk -- surely a novel set in the anthropological vacuum of Gatwick, concerned with a few noisy, boozy, miniskirted ladettes, is as true a reflection of our world as any other.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.