The programmers at Radio 4 should surprise us one Sunday morning with a show called ‘Desert Island Shags’. The format as it stands is insightful enough, but a personal erotic history of the kind offered in Alan Warner’s utterly compelling fifth novel would be in a different league.
A few pages in, Manolo Follana, a twice-divorced Spanish rake narrowly on the wrong side of 40, is served with the devastating news of his HIV infection. Although he’s a known hypochondriac, the information does not give rise to panic or dread, but rather a life recollected in eerie tranquillity. An infectious character in several ways, he finds an ideal companion in Ahmed, a Somali beggar whose harrowing passage to Spain is described in one of the most powerful sections of the novel. Cruelty and lust, love and infidelity, and even a moment of reckless troilism are all woven into this narrative, which is mapped on to the seaside town where ‘Lolo’ lives.
‘Worms…’ is a controlled and wonderfully atmospheric novel in which we detect more than a little Gallic influence – as in this unmistakable nod to Proust: ‘Our emotion is shallow and we have forgotten what we once felt, then some object from the past… is sighted and it all flips us backwards in time.’ Nothing flashy, but you can’t do better than the poignant clarity of ‘flips us backwards’. Camus and Gide are also felt presences, particularly in the way that Lolo comes off as motiveless, guided by circumstance, and thus somehow exculpable. Granted, not everyone will feel sympathetic towards him. But this is an inventive and at times moving work of fiction suggesting sound new directions for Warner’s work.
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