Alan Warner: The Man Who Walks

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

A Scots noir road novel? A surreal Irving Welsh-tinged odyssey? A foul-mouthed Dickensian quest narrative?

It is handy for reviewers when books submit to shorthand labelling, but it's so much more interesting when they turn out to be pigeonhole-proof. Alan Warner's fourth novel has some major problems, but it's fascinating, readable, and absolutely one of a kind.

We're in the West Highlands of Scotland. A bird-hating madman has just stolen £27,000 from the local pub and taken off cross-country, pausing only to do away with his nephew's cage full of budgies.

His Uncle, the Man Who Walks, hadn't taken too kindly to birds since he found her lemon canary still happily singing over the corpse of his dead mum on the lino, her skin scorched by three days of concentric urine circles round her. His uncle shut that canary up in the attic, close to the lightning during a thunderstorm, and it never sang again.

For the family honour, and because his boss tells him he has to, the Nephew sets off after his Uncle. The Man Who Walks has earned the name partly by his long-standing refusal to use any form of wheeled transport, but also through legendary feats of hobo-ism. It is a fact Man Who Walks once walked across the silty beds of New Loch, 'neath the surface, a huge boulder under one arm holding him down, breathing through a giant hogweed stalk; suffering no such side-effects as the bends or, unfortunately, drowning.

So the pursuit is no simple matter. It gets further complicated by the Nephew's genius for accepting rides from the wrong people. Quixotic wayside episodes abound, of varying degrees of black humour and bleak absurdity. Incongruously, Warner laces these diversions with hints that both Nephew and Uncle are something more than they seem, that the persistent capitalisation of their titles is more than authorial caprice, and that we are in the presence of something quasi-mythological, a duel between archetypes, a modern mystery play.

Ultimately, our bumbling hero and his quarry come face to face in an appalling, powerfully written showdown. The difficulty with the book is the gulf between this charged conclusion and the flippant, fragmentary comedy routine that leads to it.

Some will find Warner's cast of incidental characters too revolting to be funny. For those who warm to them, there's still the problem of accepting them as stepping stones on the road to such a violent resolution.

Whether or not you find the book less than the sum of its parts, its parts are memorable. Warner is a strikingly effective writer. If you judge a novel by the extent of your subsequent desire to hunt down others by the same author, this one counts as a success.

Vintage paperback, $26.95