Alan Warner (2011) The Stars in the Bright Sky.

The librarian said you’re going to love this book. It’s exactly how young girls behave when they go on holiday. She was buzzed about it and even smiled.  And it was longlisted for the Man Brooker Prize in 2010. But any good stories got a BUT, I use them a lot. The laws of diminishing returns apply here.

I did love Morvern Caller, Alan Warner’s debut novel.  The Sopranos was great, six eighteen-year old girls from a Catholic school and a wee town about forty miles from Fort William hitting the big smoke of Edinburgh and giving it hell.

Here we have six twenty-one year old women, five of them from a wee Scottish town…hitting Gatwick airport, where nothing happens twice. Orla from The Sopranos is dead. We learn from Finn her dad was upright at the funeral but cried for three days when his neighbour’s cat died.

Or as Finn puts it when she bursts into tears and goes to hide in a Gatwick toilet, ‘When I come to write the book, Kay, it’ll be called: “Tears in the Toilet Cubicle: Our Social Circle’’.’

A toilet cubicle is where the action is in this and Warner’s previous novels. Gatwick Airport doubles as one big toilet from Friday Evening when the novel begins to Tuesday, when it ends, with bars and daft dancing machines and hotel room and drink. Drink pays a big part in Scottish culture and these young girls rip into it from a young, too young, age. Hey, the books say, you’ve got to love them, I did it too and that’s part of what gives Warner’s books its spark. #Me Too.

You can tell a lot from what a young lady drinks. And Warner like his list of music preferences, clothes and make up, gives the reader lists.

Manda: Pint of Guinness Extra Cold

Ava: Double straight Stolichnaya vodka with Red Bull

Kay: Medium-size glass of red wine.

Chell: Bacardi Breezer.

Finn: Tomato juice with vodka, unworthy of the title Bloody Mary.

Kylah: Red Bull and vodka.

Ava has taken the place of Orla from The Sopranos. She’s rich and very thin and pretty, an outsider, a bit like Kay was in The Sopranos that becomes central to the story.

With the jazz of so many voices clamouring to be heard it’s often difficult to tell who is who. In the Sopranos I often lost the thread of which character was speaking, but the narrative carried the book to its conclusion. This happens for me here too.  

Look at the drink list above and you’ll see Manda Tassy stands out. A bit rougher than the rest, a bit of crude, when crude is the language of rude. She was a minor character in The Sopranos. Here she is central, more so than The Mighty Finn or sophisticated Kay, who falls apart, as they all do in their different ways. That’s part of the fun, falling down and getting up again. Manda is a running gag in the book, a plot point, detested and loved, in an oversized glass measure.  

Laurel and Hardy with pretentions and the narrative often switches to Manda’s point of view. Can she carry the book, in the way that Morvern Caller? Nut. She’s just an annoying cow.