The Man Who Walks - Softcover

Warner, Alan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224051091 ISBN 13: 9780224051095

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2002

Synopsis

After the scandalous theft of a pub's World Cup cash kitty, a homeless drifter pursues his eccentric uncle: 'The Man Who Walks', north, up into the Highlands to recover the money - a cool £27,000. The nephew's frantic, stalled progress and other bizarre diversions form Warner's fourth, wickedly hilarious novel.

But who is The Man Who Walks? Is he simply a water-carrying madman with one glass eye and a fondness for whisky and pony nuts, who collects old Christmas trees for money and old newspapers to make his home, and who has a physiological inability to handle slopes? Or is he a savant, touched by the hand of God, wandering the back roads along ancient, ancestral tracks? And as the sinister, unstable nephew gains on The Man Who Walks, and their paths begin to meet, can it be that it will all end in a field and that this field is Culloden Moor?

Since his first novel, Morvern Callar, Warner's fictional world has become a deliciously familiar one: a Scotland at once real and surreal, patrolled by Hollywood productions, ex-British Rail trolley-girls, crazed snowboarders and a sybaritic aristocracy. His writing is savage but learned, shot through with deviant sexuality and demented humour but, at the heart of this fierce and strange world, there is huge human tenderness, moments of extraordinary lyrical beauty and a ranging, breathtaking imagination.

About this title

Review

Alan Warner's new novel The Man Who Walks is his latest attempt to recapture the form and verve of his desperately brilliant, luridly beautiful, pungently lyrical Morvern Caller; his exceptional debut.

The opening sentence promises, and threatens, equally. "The Nephew was lain silent atop the paper sacks of pony nuts near the roof of the agric supply warehouse, dreaming about ghost bags, when his mobile diddled 'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves'". From this arch but poetic introduction Warner spins a strange, eerie, brutish, edgy, kinetic, voluptuous story, set in his usual sodden and hallucinatory Scotland-on-steroids. The characters are a motley crew of misfits, lordlings, computer geeks, scribblers, and Caledonian soaks, with names like Raincheck, Macushla, Jaxter, Hacker, Syrupy Piece, Tracy the Trolley, and Brian. Together and apart these strange creatures wander the lochs and braes of Auld Scotland doing drugs, each other, and occasional disservices to the English language.

What is it about? That's a bit harder to say. The themes are the perennial Warner ones: blurred identity, rustic quirkiness, the intrusion of the surreal. There are many stunning moments of sly, shocking, vivid, Warnerian beauty; there are also a few moments of lazy underwriting, and overheated imagining. Somewhere among all this glory and disorder is probably a serious take on what it means to be a whole human being in late-capitalist Europe. This is deeply, deeply intriguing.--Sean Thomas

Review

"The man's a genius - one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever" (Time Out)

"Nobody takes literary and inventive risks that pay off quite like Warner's do - the book is an immense pleasure" (Guardian)

"Warner is unique and treasurable" (Daily Telegraph)

"A triumph of blackly comic modern gothic - Warner's a brilliant writer and his wild imagination is captured in prose of demented lyricism" (Big Issue)

"The Man Who Walks confirms this Scot as one of the most unusual and provocative writers working this side of the Atlantic" (New Statesman)

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0224051091
• ISBN 13: 9780224051095
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304