One day in 1981, 16-year-old Alan Warner was in Oban with a friend when they noticed something in an art shop window. "My friend said: 'There's that new book by that guy in Glasgow.' It had beautiful rococo art work on the cover." The book was a hardback copy of Aladsair Gray's novel Lanark, just published by Edinburgh-based Canongate press. "I remember saying to my friend: 'You mean there's someone in Scotland writing books today?' I genuinely thought writing in Scotland had died out like the gas lamp."
Warner concedes that this deluded impression was in part prompted by living in a Highland tourist town and seeing Walter Scotts and Robert Louis Stevensons bound and forbidding in souvenir shops – "an antiquarian feel that had been projected on to Scottish literature." But it wasn't much better in Glasgow. He recalls going to a three-storey bookshop there the same year. "The Scottish literature section consisted of Muriel Spark, John Buchan, Stevenson and Scott. Apart from Spark you'd have nothing published since the 60s. Nothing. Everything was over with."
Worse, literature had been colonised by the posh English. "Every Penguin classic you looked at was 'He studied at Oxford or Cambridge.' That's why I was fascinated by literature – because it was otherworldly. It wasn't something made in and of my community."
It's inconceivable that any sentient Scot could feel today as Warner did in 1981. Scottish literature has flourished so much in the three decades since that disbelieving Oban moment, thanks to Gray, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, AL Kennedy, Andrew O'Hagan, Iain Banks, Ali Smith, Kathleen Jamie, and others too numerous to mention, that the firm of Scott, Stevenson and Spark no longer has a stranglehold on the national literary imagination.
The most notable omission from that list of Scottish literary revivifiers is Warner himself, who, as the author of seven novels from his bravura 1995 debut Morvern Callar to the sophisticated ambition of his latest The Deadman's Pedal, published this month, has been feted as one of Scotland's finest writers. The critics hail you, I tell him, as the true artist of the Scottish novel. "Oh I cringe when you say that. It's just I can't walk around – I should but I can't – thinking 'I am an artist.'" Warner's a big man, but shrinks over his Red Bull and ice as he sits at a table framed by the window of the bar of Edinburgh's Rutland Hotel.
Behind him it rains unstoppingly for the next three and a half hours, reinforcing the melancholy Caledonian mood Warner established when we met, as he pointed out closed-down shops on Princes Street. Scotland's premier boulevard is hushed: there's no traffic thanks to the building of a tramway and few pedestrians because of the rain. There is, though, a tank parked on the street, to woo army recruits. Outside, Edinburgh's unpeopled and militarised; inside, Warner eventually moves from Red Bull to Guinness.
"I've always had to pinch myself," he says, de-hunching himself finally. "Even today I still feel like a reader who happens to write. I know it's not really the truth, I know it's taken over my life, the writing, become a compulsion. And more than a compulsion – a curse."
Long before he became an accursed artist, Warner was bookless in Argyll. "My family didn't really read books. Nor did I." That changed when, aged, 15, he went into John Menzies and came out with three novels – Camus's The Outsider, Gide's The Immoralist and Charles Webb's The Graduate – partly because the covers suggested the books would be about sex.
"I thought books were James Bond and Agatha Christie and then suddenly I read The Immoralist and later Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and half way through them you're devastated by what's going on. It completely changed my world. I never knew literature could move you, change the way you looked at the world."
Seduced by literature, he became a Highland autodidact, trawling in almost continuous literary rapture through Penguin classics from a charity shop. "Twenty five of them in a row – no sensible connection between them. Dostoevsky, Gide, The Lives of the Saints, Henry James. It was a completely pure experience for about a year of my life. Those books twisted me around something remarkable."
Only later did Scottish writing catch up with Warner's reading. The book that revolutionised his sensibility and induced him to write fiction was James Kelman's 1984 novel The Busconductor Hines. "I remember that the effect it had on me – apart from great joy – was 'That's all you have to do. You sort of, eh, have a job and you write about the job and the guy has thoughts.' So out came the pen." He still starts his books in longhand...
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Stuart Jeffries @'The Guardian'
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