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Just a Big Silver Light

Theo Tait: Alan Warner, 25 May 2006

The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 390 pp., £11.99, May 2006, 0 224 07129 7Show More
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“... It’s not very clear what The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven is really about, or why Alan Warner has written it. It’s not that it’s conspicuously awful or straightforwardly confusing, like some of his other novels. It’s clear enough what’s happening and where; for the most part, it’s gently diverting, sometimes even entertaining ...”

Lager and Pernod

Frank Kermode: Alan Warner, 22 August 2002

The Man Who Walks 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 280 pp., £16.99, May 2002, 0 224 06294 8Show More
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“... admission may sometimes be unavoidable. This is my sentiment as I contemplate the four novels of Alan Warner. He has been highly praised (‘dazzling’, ‘classic’, ‘significant’, ‘vastly gifted’, ‘a genius’, ‘one of the most influential literary mould-breakers ever’), and I’m sure none of these eulogies, understandably preserved ...”

‘Don’t scum me out!’

Scott Hames: Alan Warner, 28 April 2011

The Stars in the Bright Sky 
by Alan Warner.
Vintage, 394 pp., £7.99, May 2011, 978 0 09 946182 1Show More
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“... far as I know, there are no half-timbered terminal buildings or pebble-dashed control towers.’ Alan Warner isn’t a novelist you’d expect to be much interested in the departures hall, being best known for a sort of wild provincial fabulism. Each of his first five books is saturated with ‘place’, using skewed dialect and surreal local legend to ...”

Mortal on Hooch

William Fiennes: Alan Warner, 30 July 1998

The Sopranos 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 336 pp., £9.99, June 1998, 0 224 05108 3Show More
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“... Morvern Callar, the narrator of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), reacts to the suicide of her boyfriend by lighting a Silk Cut, opening her Christmas presents and shaving her legs in a hot bath. The boyfriend is lying in a pool of blood but Morvern remains emotionally numb: ‘Trying to get in the oven to heat up the pizza ...”

Fairy Lights

Jenny Turner, 2 November 1995

Morvern Callar 
by Alan Warner.
Cape, 224 pp., £9.99, February 1995, 0 224 04011 1Show More
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“... mixed arising from the every sight of that capital H for Him. What sort of novel do you suppose Alan Warner imagined himself first writing? A young boy’s life among the mountains he loved and which constrained him? A piece of social realism, about how hard life is for the isolated, economically marginal clumps of working-class people scattered here ...”

Every Young Boy’s Dream

James Meek: Michel Houellebecq, 14 November 2002

Platform 
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Frank Wynne.
Heinemann, 362 pp., £12.99, September 2002, 9780434009893Show More
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“... Against other European male writers who have been exploring the boundaries of sex writing – Alan Warner, say – Houellebecq’s sex writings in Platform seem like placeholders for something he never quite found time or strength to face up to. In Whatever, Houellebecq talks about breaking up with his last girlfriend, and goes on, as if the thought ...”

Short Cuts

Thomas Jones: Is it just me?, 1 December 2005

“... copy of Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? The Encyclopedia of Modern Life by Steve Lowe and Alan McArthur (Time Warner, £9.99). Some of the entries in Is It Just Me . . . ? that have also – or at any rate might well have – appeared on Spoons are: Tony Blair, chick-lit, city breaks, Sofia Coppola, Alain de ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... McKibbin In a thoughtful​ and good-humoured Guardian interview last month, the Scottish novelist Alan Warner said that he loves England and has spent a fair bit of time there but that, like most Scottish writers, he’s ‘a “Yes” man’, one who belongs to the tradition that ‘goes back to the 1920s when writers and poets felt they were through ...”

Is there another place from which the dickhead’s self can speak?

Marina Warner: The body and law, 1 October 1998

Bodies of Law 
by Alan Hyde.
Princeton, 290 pp., £39.50, July 1997, 0 691 01229 6Show More
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“... have been accompanied – and deepened – by a myriad interpretative moves. The originality of Alan Hyde’s Bodies of Law is that he is trying to apply psychoanalytic, structuralist, poststructuralist and feminist theories of the embodied individual to the analysis of American law. His approach depends on the Foucauldian tenet that while bodies exist in ...”

Moguls

J. Hoberman: Did the Jews invent Hollywood?, 7 March 2002

Hollywood and Anti-Semitism: A Cultural History up to World War Two 
by Steven Alan Carr.
Cambridge, 342 pp., £42.50, July 2001, 9780521798549Show More
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“... anti-capitalist, anti-Communist or anti-American. That, at any rate, is the argument of Steven Alan Carr’s Hollywood and Anti-Semitism, an impressively researched and closely reasoned cultural history, which takes up its theme in 1880, 25 years before the appearance of the first nickelodeons, and pursues it through to the US entry into World War ...”

The Eerie One

Bee Wilson: Peter Lorre, 23 March 2006

The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre 
by Stephen Youngkin.
Kentucky, 613 pp., $39.95, September 2005, 0 8131 2360 7Show More
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“... for making the Moto films (though he was markedly underpaid, earning only $10,000 a picture to Warner Oland’s $40,000 as Charlie Chan), but were also the palliative that enabled him to participate in such rubbish. A couple of years after the series ended, while he was making the Warner Bros film All through the ...”

Karel Reisz Remembered

LRB Contributors, 12 December 2002

“... theme. No one matters more to British cinema than Karel Reisz, and no one does it more honour. Alan Sillitoe (writer): He helped me so much with the script of my novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He showed me the documentaries he’d made, and at last I felt I was on the main line. He was in Nottingham making a documentary for the Central Office of ...”

Got to go make that dollar

Alex Abramovich: Otis Redding, 3 January 2019

Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life 
by Jonathan Gould.
Crown, 544 pp., £12.99, May 2018, 978 0 307 45395 2Show More
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“... For Stax, Redding’s death was a staggering loss. While the studio was still in mourning, Warner Brothers bought Atlantic Records, the New York label that Stax had long-standing agreements with. When Jim Stewart went over the paperwork, he found that Atlantic, and now Warner Brothers, owned all of his master ...”

Injury Time

Robert Taubman, 2 July 1981

Gorky Park 
by Martin Cruz Smith.
Collins, 365 pp., £6.95, May 1981, 0 00 222278 7Show More
The Turn-Around 
by Vladimir Volkoff, translated by Alan Sheridan.
Bodley Head, 411 pp., £6.95, April 1981, 0 370 30323 7Show More
Thus was Adonis murdered 
by Sarah Caudwell.
Collins, 246 pp., £5.95, March 1981, 0 00 231854 7Show More
A Splash of Red 
by Antonia Fraser.
Weidenfeld, 229 pp., £5.95, May 1981, 0 297 77937 0Show More
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“... prototypes aside, he essentially belongs in the tradition of the American cop, his true home a Warner Brothers movie. He’s not expected to answer awkward existential questions: but he has something, an integrity of his own, that only a hero empty of everything else seems to possess. The empty heroes of Hemingway and the earlier American crime novelists ...”

John Sturrock

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 21 September 2017

“... the paper’s readers, and elicited the largest number of indignant letters, was written by John. Alan Sokal, a professor of mathematics at UCL and physics at NYU, had gone into battle against the postmodern theorists whom he accused – I’m simplifying but not greatly – of having no understanding of the concepts they borrowed from science, and no respect ...”

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